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LEADING ARTICLES 
 
 ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS 
 
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, 
 PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY^ STATIONERY OFFICE. 
 

 : h 
 
LEADING /ARTICLES 
 
 ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGH MILLER, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,' KTC. ETC 
 
 EDITED BY HIS SON-IN-LAW, 
 
 THE REV. JOHN DAVIDSON. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 VIRTUE & YORSTON, 
 12, DEY STREET. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 TnE-present volume is issued in compliance with the strong 
 solicitations of many, to whose desire deference was due. 
 In selecting the articles, I have been guided mainly by two 
 considerations, namely, the necessity for reproducing the 
 mature opinion of a great mind, upon great subjects; and 
 for making the selection so varied, as to convey to the 
 reader some idea of the wonderful versatility of the powers 
 which could treat subjects so diverse in their nature with 
 such uniform eloquence and discrimination. I trust that 
 the chapters on Education will prove to be a valuable con- 
 tribution to the speedy settlement of that question at the 
 present crisis. Those on Sutherlandshire are inserted 
 because they possess a permanent value, in connection 
 with the social and economical history of our country. 
 Some of the articles are of a personal character, and 
 are introduced, not, certainly, for the purpose of re- 
 calling old animosities, but solely to illustrate the author's 
 method of using some of the more formidable figures 
 of speech ; while over against these may be set some on 
 purely literary subjects, which show the genial tenderness 
 of his disposition towards those who aspired to serve God 
 and their generation by giving to the world the fruit of 
 their imagination, their labour, and their leisure. 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 I have not determined the selection without securing the 
 counsel and approval of men on whose judgment I could 
 rely. It only remains for me to thank them, and in an 
 especial way to thank Mr. D. O. Hill for the portrait 
 which forms the frontispiece. An impersonal reference to 
 a similar portrait taken at the same time will be found at 
 page 184, in the article on 'The Calotype.' 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON. 
 
 London, March 8, 1870. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION, . . I 
 
 LORD BROUGHAM, . . . . . . .105 
 
 THE SCOTT MONUMENT, . . . . . I I I 
 
 THE LATE MR. KEMP, . . . . . .119 
 
 ANNIE M'DONALD AND THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER, .' 123 
 
 A HIGHLAND CLEARING,' . . . . . .136 
 
 THE POET MONTGOMERY, 146 
 
 CRITICISM INTERNAL EVIDENCE, . . . . 151 
 
 THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER, l6l 
 
 THE LATE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART, . . .I/O 
 
 THE CALOTYPE, . . . . . . .179 
 
 THE TENANT'S TRUE QUARREL, .... . 190 
 
 CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN, . , 199 
 
 PERIODICALISM, 2o6 
 
 ' ANNUS MIRABILIS,' . . . . . . .215 
 
 EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION ON COLONIZATION, . 223 
 
 FINE-BODYISM, 232 
 
 ORGANSHIP, 240 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BAILLIE'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS, .... 249 
 
 FIRST PRINCIPLES, 262 
 
 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH, ...... 269 
 
 DISRUPTION PRINCIPLES, . . . . . . 280 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR, . . . 293 
 
 THE POETS OF THE CHURCH, 302 
 
 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, . . . . 315 
 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD, . . . . .327 
 
 THE TWO MR. CLARKS, 337 
 
 PULPIT DUTIES NOT SECONDARY, . . . . 358 
 
 DUGALD STEWART, 369 
 
 OUR TOWN COUNCILS, 378 
 
 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS j OR, HOW A COUNTRY 
 
 MAY BE RUINED, 388 
 
California- 
 
 *MSESS* 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 TO 
 
 THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL 
 QUESTION. 
 
 THE following chapters on the Educational Question first 
 appeared as a series of articles in the Witness newspaper. 
 They present, in consequence, a certain amount of digres- 
 sion, and occasional re-statement and explanation, which, 
 had they been published simultaneously, as parts of a whole, 
 they would not have exhibited. The controversy was vital 
 and active at every stage of their appearance. Statements 
 made and principles laid down in the earlier articles had, 
 from the circumstance that their truth had been questioned 
 or their soundness challenged, to be re-asserted and main- 
 tained in those which followed ; and hence some little 
 derangement in the management of the question, for which, 
 however, the interest which must always attach to a real 
 conflict may be found to compensate. That portion of the 
 controversy, however, which arose out of one of the articles 
 of the series, and which some have deemed personal, has 
 been struck out of the published edition of the pamphlet, 
 and retained in but an inconsiderable number of copies, 
 placed in the hands of a few friends. In omitting it where 
 it has been omitted, the writer has acted on the advice of 
 a gentleman for whose judgment he entertains the most 
 
 A 
 
2 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 thorough respect, and from a desire that the general argu- 
 ment should not be prejudiced by a matter naturally, but 
 not necessarily, connected with it. And in retaining it 
 where it has been retained, he has done so in the full ex- 
 pectation of a time not very distant, when it will be decided 
 that he has neither outraged the ordinary courtesies of con- 
 troversy, nor taken up a false line of inference or statement ; 
 and when the importance of the subject discussed will be 
 regarded as quite considerable enough to make any one 
 earnest, without the necessity of supposing that he had been 
 previously angry. 
 
 It is all -important, that on the general question of 
 National Education, the Free Church should take up her 
 position wisely. Majorities in her courts, however over- 
 whelming, will little avail her, if their findings fail to recom- 
 mend themselves to the good sense of her people, or are 
 palpably unsuited to the emergencies of the time. A 
 powerful writer of the present age employs, in one of his 
 illustrations, the bold figure of a ship's crew, that, with the 
 difficulties of Cape Horn full before them, content them- 
 selves with instituting aboard their vessel a constitutional 
 system of voting, and who find delight in contemplating the 
 unanimity which prevails on matters in general, both above 
 decks and below. ' But your ship,' says Carlyle, ' cannot 
 double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting : the 
 ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions 
 already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour, by the 
 ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how 
 you vote. If you can by voting, or without voting, ascer- 
 tain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you 
 will get round the Cape : if you cannot, the ruffian Winds 
 will blow you ever back again ; the inexorable Icebergs, 
 dumb privy councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with 
 most chaotic admonition ; you will be flung half-frozen on 
 the Patagonian cliffs, or jostled into shivers by your iceberg 
 
INTRODUCTOR Y NOTE. 3 
 
 councillors, and will never get round Cape Horn at all.' 
 Now there is much meaning couched in this quaint figure, 
 and meaning which the Free Church would do well to 
 ponder. There are many questions on which she could 
 perhaps secure a majority, which yet that majority would 
 utterly fail to carry. On the question of College Extension, 
 for instance, she might be able to vote, if she but selected 
 her elders with some little care, that there should be full 
 staffs of theological professors at Glasgow and Aberdeen. 
 But what would her votes succeed in achieving? Not, 
 assuredly, the doubling of the Cape ; but the certainty of 
 shivering her all-important Educational Institute on three 
 inexorable icebergs. In the first place, her magnificent 
 metropolitan College, like that huge long boat, famous in 
 story, which Robinson Crusoe was able to build, but wholly 
 unable to launch, would change from being what it now is 
 a trophy of her liberality and wisdom into a magnificent 
 monument of her folly. In the second place, she would 
 have to break faith with her existing professors, and to 
 argue, mayhap, when they were becoming thin and seedy, 
 and getting into debt, that she was not morally bound to 
 them for their salaries. And, in the third and last place, 
 she would infallibly secure that, some twenty years hence 
 at furthest, every theological professor of the Free Church 
 should be a pluralist, and able to give to his lectures merely 
 those fag-ends of his time which he could snatch from the 
 duties of the pulpit and the care of his flock. And such, 
 in doubling the Cape Horn of the College question, is all 
 that unanimity of voting could secure to the Church; 
 unless, indeed, according to Carlyle, she voted in accord- 
 ance with the * set of conditions already voted for and fixed 
 by the adamantine powers.' 
 
 Nor does the question of Denominational Education, 
 now that there is a national scheme in the field, furnish a 
 more, but, on the contrary, a much less, hopeful subject for 
 
4 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 mere voting in our church courts, than the question of 
 College Extension. It is not to be carried by ecclesiastical 
 majorities. Some of the most important facts in the c Ten 
 Years' Conflict ' have perhaps still to be recorded ; and it is 
 one of these, that long after the Non-Intrusion party pos- 
 sessed majorities in the General Assembly, the laity looked 
 on with exceedingly little interest, much possessed by the 
 suspicion that the clergy were battling, not on the popular 
 behalf, but on their own. Even in 1839, after the Auch- 
 terarder case had been decided in the House of Lords, the 
 apathy seemed little disturbed ; and the writer of these 
 chapters, when engaged in doing his little all to dissipate it, 
 could address a friend in Edinburgh, to whom he forwarded 
 the MS. of a pamphlet thrown into the form of a letter to 
 Lord Brougham, in the following terms : ' The question 
 which at present agitates the Church is a vital one ; and 
 unless the people can be roused to take part in it (and they 
 seem strangely uninformed and wofully indifferent as yet), 
 the worst cause must inevitably prevail. They may per- 
 haps listen to one of their own body, who combines the 
 principles of the old with the opinions of the modern Whig, 
 and who, though he feels strongly on the question, has no 
 secular interest involved in it.' It was about this time that 
 Dr. George Cook said and, we have no doubt, said truly 
 that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without 
 finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of 
 the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the 
 church courts. For the opponents of the party were all 
 active and awake at the time, and its incipient friends still 
 indifferent or mistrustful. The history of Church petitions 
 in Edinburgh during the ten eventful years of the war brings 
 out this fact very significantly in the statistical form. From 
 1833, the year of the Veto Act, to 1839, the year of the 
 Auchterarder decision, petitions to Parliament from Edin- 
 burgh on behalf of the struggling Church were usually 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. 5 
 
 signed by not more than from four to five thousand persons. 
 In 1839 the number rose to six thousand. The people 
 began gradually to awaken, and to trust. Speeches in 
 church courts were found to have comparatively little 
 influence in creating opinion, or ecclesiastical votes in 
 securing confidence ; and so there were other means of 
 appealing to the public mind resorted to, mayhap not 
 wholly without effect : for in 1840 the annual Church peti- 
 tion from Edinburgh bore attached to it thirteen thousand 
 signatures; and to that of the following year (1841) the 
 very extraordinary number of twenty-five thousand was ap- 
 pended. And, save for the result, general over Scotland, 
 which we find thus indicated by the Church petitions of 
 Edinburgh, the Disruption, and especially the origination 
 of a Free Church, would have been impossible events. 
 How, we ask, was that result produced ? Not, certainly, 
 by the votes of ecclesiastical courts, for mere votes 
 would never have doubled the Cape Horn of the Church 
 question; but simply through the conviction at length 
 effectually wrought in the public mind, that our ministers 
 were struggling and suffering, not for clerical privileges, but 
 for popular rights, not for themselves, but for others. 
 And that conviction once firmly entertained, the movement 
 waxed formidable; for elsewhere, as in the metropolis, 
 popular support increased at least fivefold ; and the ques- 
 tion, previously narrow of base, and very much restricted to 
 one order of men, became broad as the Scottish nation, and 
 deep as the feelings of the Scottish people. But as certainly 
 as the component strands of a cable that have been twisted 
 into strength and coherency by one series of workings, 
 may be untwisted into loose and feeble threads by another, 
 so certainly may the majorities of our church courts, by 
 a reversal of the charm which won for them the element 
 of popular strength, render themselves of small account 
 in the nation. They became strong by advocating, in the 
 
6 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 Patronage question, popular rights, in opposition to clerical 
 interests : they may and will become weak, if in the Educa- 
 tional one they reverse the process, and advocate clerical 
 interests in opposition to popular rights. 
 
 Their country is perishing for lack of a knowledge which 
 they cannot supply. Every seven years the brief term 
 during which, if a generation fail to be educated, the oppor- 
 tunity of education for ever passes away there are from a 
 hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand of the youth of 
 Scotland added to the adult community in an untaught, 
 uninformed condition. Nor need we say in how frightful a 
 ratio their numbers must increase. The ignorant children 
 of the present will become the improvident and careless 
 parents of the future ; and how improvident and careless 
 the corresponding class which already exists among us 
 always approves itself to be, let our prisons and workhouses 
 tell. Our country, with all its churches, must inevitably 
 founder among the nations, like a water-logged vessel in a 
 tempest, if this state of matters be permitted to continue. 
 And why permit it to continue ? Be it remembered that 
 it is the national schools those schools which are the 
 people's own, and are yet withheld from them and not the 
 schools of the Free Church, which it is the object of the 
 Educational movement to open up and extend. Nor is it 
 proposed to open them up on a new principle. It is an 
 unchallenged fact, that there exists no statutory provision 
 for the teaching of religion in them. All that is really 
 wanted is, to transfer them on their present statutory basis 
 from the few to the many, from Moderate ministers and 
 Episcopalian heritors, to a people essentially sound in the 
 faith Presbyterian in the proportion of at least six to one, 
 and Evangelical in the proportion of at least two to one. 
 And at no distant day this transference must and will take 
 place, if the ministers of the Free Church do not virtually 
 join their forces to their brethren of the Establishment in 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. 7 
 
 behalf of an alleged ecclesiastical privilege nowhere sanc- 
 tioned in the word of God. 1 
 
 There is another important item in this question, over 
 which, as already determined by inevitable laws, ecclesias- 
 tical votes, however unanimous, can exert no influence or 
 control. They cannot ordain that inadequately paid school- 
 masters can be other than inferior educators. If the re- 
 muneration be low, it is impossible by any mere force of 
 majorities to render the teaching high. There is a law 
 already 'voted for' in the case, which majorities can no 
 more repeal than they can the law of gravitation. And 
 here we must take the opportunity of stating for there 
 has been misrepresentation on the point what our inte- 
 rest in the teachers of Scotland and of the Free Church 
 really is. Certainly not indifferent to their comfort as men, 
 
 1 Some of the reasonings of both the Established and Free Church 
 courts on this matter would be amusing were they not so sad. ' Feed 
 my lambs,' said our Saviour, after His resurrection, to Peter ; and again 
 twice over, 'Feed my sheep.' Now, let us suppose some zealous 
 clergyman setting himself, on the strength of the latter injunction here, 
 to institute a new order of preachers. As barbers frequently amuse 
 their employers with gossip, when divesting them of their beards or 
 trimming their heads, and have opportunities of addressing their fellow- 
 men which are not possessed by the other mechanical professions, the 
 zealous clergyman determines on converting them into preachers, and 
 sets up a Normal School, in order that they may be taught the art of 
 composing short sennons, which they are to deliver when shaving their 
 customers, and longer ones, which they are to address to them when 
 cutting their hair. And in course of time the expounding barbers are 
 sent abroad to operate on the minds and chins of the community. 
 ' There is no mention made of any such order of prelectors, ' says a 
 stubborn layman, ' in my New Testament ; ' ' Nor yet in mine, ' says 
 another. 'Sheer Atheism, Deism at the very least !' exclaims the 
 zealous clergyman. ' Until Christianity was fairly established in the 
 world, there was no such thing as shaving at all ; the Jews don't shave 
 yet : besides, does not every decent Church member shave before going 
 to church? And as for the authority, how read you the text, "Feed 
 my sheep?'" 'Weighty argument that about the shaving,' say the 
 
8 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 or to the welfare of their profession, as one of the most 
 important and yet worst remunerated in the community, 
 we frankly confess that we look to something greatly higher 
 than either their comfort or the professional welfare in 
 general. They and their profession are but means ; and it 
 is to the end that we mainly look, that end being the right 
 education of the Scottish people, and their consequent 
 elevation in the scale, moral and intellectual. We would 
 deal by the teachers of the country in this matter as we 
 would by the stone-cutters of Edinburgh, were we entrusted 
 with the erection of some such exquisite piece of masonry 
 as the Scott Monument, or that fine building recently com- 
 pleted in St. Andrew Square. Instead of pitching our 
 scale of remuneration at the rate of labourers' wages, we 
 would at once pitch it at the highest rate assigned to the 
 
 laymen ; ' but really the text seems to be stretched just a little too far. 
 The commission is given to Peter ; but it confers on Peter no authority 
 whatever to commission the barbers. Nay, our grand objection to the 
 pseudo-successors of Peter is, that they corrupted the Church after this 
 very manner, by commissioning the non-commissioned, until they 
 filled the groaning land with cardinals, bishops, and abbots, monks and 
 nuns, 
 
 " Eremites and friars, 
 White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery."' 
 
 Now, be it remembered that we are far from placing the Church- 
 employed schoolmaster on the level of the parson-employed barber of 
 our illustration. Rationally considered, they are very different orders 
 indeed ; but so far as direct Scripture is concerned, they stand, we con- 
 tend, on exactly the same ground. The laity would do well in this 
 controversy to arm themselves with the New Testament, and, if their 
 opponents be very intolerant, to hand them the volume, and request 
 them to turn up their authority. And, of course, if the intolerance be 
 very great, the authority must be very direct. Mere arguings on the 
 subject would but serve to show that it has no actual existence. When 
 the commission of a captain or lieutenant is legitimately demanded, it 
 is at once produced ; but were one to demand the commission of a 
 sergeant or boatswain's mate, the man could at best only reason 
 about it. 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. 9 
 
 skilled mechanic ; and this not in order, primarily at least, 
 that the masons engaged should be comfortable, but in 
 order that they should be masters of their profession, and 
 that their work should be of the completest and most 
 finished kind. For labourers' wages would secure the 
 services of only bungling workmen, and lead to the pro- 
 duction of only inferior masonry. And such is the principle 
 on which we would befriend our poor schoolmasters, not 
 so much for their own sakes, as for the sake of their work. 
 Further, however, it is surely of importance that, when 
 engaged in teaching religion, they themselves should be 
 enabled, in conformity with one of its injunctions, to 'pro- 
 vide things honest in the sight of all men.' Nay, of nothing 
 are we more certain, than that the Church has only to 
 exert herself to the extent of the liabilities already incurred 
 to her teachers, in order to be convinced of the absolute 
 necessity which exists for a broad national scheme. Any 
 doubts which she may at present entertain regarding the 
 question of the necessity, are, in part at least, effects of her 
 lax views respecting the question of the liability, and of her 
 consequent belief that anything well divided is sufficient to 
 discharge it. At the same time, however, it would be 
 perhaps well that at least our better-paid schoolmasters 
 should be made to reflect that the circumstances of their 
 position are very peculiar; and that should they take a 
 zealous part against what a preponderating majority of the 
 laity of their Church must of necessity come to regard as 
 the cause of their country, their opposition, though utterly 
 uninfluential in the general struggle, may prove thoroughly 
 effectual in injuring themselves. For virtually in the Free 
 Church, as in the British Constitution, it is the * Commons' 
 who grant the supplies. 
 
 We subjoin the paper on the Educational Question, 
 addressed by Dr. Chalmers to the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule, 
 as it first appeared in the Witness. The reader will see 
 
io THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 that there is direct reference made to it in the following 
 pages, and will find it better suited to repay careful study 
 and frequent perusal than perhaps any other document on 
 the subject ever written : 
 
 ' It were the best state of things, that we had a Parlia- 
 ment sufficiently theological to discriminate between the 
 right and the wrong in religion, and to encourage or endow 
 accordingly. But failing this, it seems to us the next best 
 thing, that in any public measure for helping on the educa- 
 tion of the people, Government were to abstain from intro- 
 ducing the element of religion at all into their part of the 
 scheme ; and this not because they held the matter to be 
 insignificant, the contrary might be strongly expressed in 
 the preamble of their Act, but on the ground that, in the 
 present divided state of the Christian- world, they would 
 take no cognizance of, just because they would attempt no 
 control over, the religion of applicants for aid, leaving 
 this matter entire to the parties who had to do with the 
 erection and management of the schools which they had 
 been called upon to assist. A grant by the State upon this 
 footing might be regarded as being appropriately and ex- 
 clusively the expression of their value for a good secular 
 education. 
 
 ' The confinement for the time being of any Government 
 measure for schools to this object we hold to be an impu- 
 tation, not so much on the present state of our Legislature, 
 as on the present state of the Christian world, now broken 
 up into sects and parties innumerable, and seemingly inca- 
 pable of any effort for so healing these wretched divisions 
 as to present the rulers of our country with aught like such 
 a clear and unequivocal majority in favour of what is good 
 and true, as might at once determine them to fix upon and 
 to espouse it. 
 
 ' It is this which has encompassed the Government with 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. 1 1 
 
 difficulties, from which we can see no other method of ex- 
 trication than the one which we have ventured to suggest. 
 And as there seems no reason why, because of these unre- 
 solved differences, a public measure for the health of all 
 for the recreation of all for the economic advancement 
 O f a ii should be held in abeyance, there seems as little 
 reason why, because of these differences, a public measure 
 for raising the general intelligence of all should be held in 
 abeyance. Let the men therefore of all Churches and all 
 denominations alike hail such a measure, whether as carried 
 into effect by a good education in letters or in any of the 
 sciences ; and, meanwhile, in these very seminaries let that 
 education in religion which the Legislature abstains from 
 providing for, be provided for as freely and as amply as they 
 will by those who have undertaken the charge of them. 
 
 ' We should hope, as the result of such a scheme, for a 
 most wholesome rivalship on the part of many in the great 
 aim of rearing on the basis of the-ir respective systems a 
 moral and Christian population, well taught in the principles 
 and doctrines of the gospel, along with being well taught in 
 the lessons of ordinary scholarship. Although no attempt 
 should be made to regulate or to enforce the lessons of 
 religion in the inner hall of legislation, this will not prevent, 
 but rather stimulate, to a greater earnestness in the contest 
 between truth and falsehood between light and darkness 
 in the outer field of society ; nor will the result of such 
 a contest in favour of what is right and good be at all the 
 more unlikely, that the families of the land have been raised 
 by the helping hand of the State to a higher platform than 
 before, whether as respects their health, or their physical 
 "comfort, or their economic condition, or, last of all, their 
 place in the scale of intelligence and learning. 
 
 * Religion would, under such a system, be the immediate 
 product, not of legislation, but of the Christian philan- 
 thropic zeal which obtained throughout society at large. 
 
12 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTJON. 
 
 But it is well when what legislation does for the fulfilment 
 of its object tends not to the impediment, but rather, we 
 apprehend, to the furtherance, of those greater and higher 
 objects which are in the contemplation of those whose 
 desires are chiefly set on the immortal wellbeing of man. 
 
 ' On the basis of these general views, I have two remarks 
 to offer regarding the Government scheme of education. 
 
 ' i. I should not require a certificate of satisfaction with 
 the religious progress of the scholars from the managers of 
 the schools, in order to their receiving the Government 
 lid. Such a certificate from Unitarians or Catholics im- 
 plies the direct sanction or countenance by Government to 
 their respective creeds, and the responsibility, not of allow- 
 ing, but, more than this, of requiring, that these shall be 
 taught to the children who attend. A bare allowance is 
 but a general toleration ; but a requirement involves in it 
 all the mischief, and, I would add, the guilt, of an indis- 
 criminate endowment for truth and error. 
 . ' 2. I would suffer parents or natural guardians to select 
 what parts of the education they wanted for their children. 
 I would not force arithmetic upon them, if all they wanted 
 was reading and writing ; and as little would I force the 
 Catechism, or any part of the religious instruction that was 
 given in the school, if all they wanted was a secular educa- 
 tion. That the managers of the Church of England schools 
 shall have the power to impose their own Catechism upon 
 the children of Dissenters, and, still more, to compel their 
 attendance on church, I regard as among the worst parts 
 of the scheme. 
 
 ' The above observations, it will be seen, meet any ques- 
 tions which might be put in regard to the applicability of 
 the scheme to Scotland, or in regard to the use of the 
 Douay version in Roman Catholic schools. 
 
 'I cannot conclude without expressing my despair of 
 any great or general good being effected in the way of 
 
INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. 13 
 
 Christianizing our population, but through the medium of 
 a Government themselves Christian, and endowing the true 
 religion, which I hold to be their imperative duty, not 
 because it is the religion of the many, but because it is 
 true. 
 
 'The scheme on which I have now ventured to offer 
 these few observations I should like to be adopted, not 
 because it is absolutely the best, but only the best in exist- 
 ing circumstances. 
 
 'The endowment of the Catholic religion by the State I 
 should deprecate, as being ruinous to the country in all its 
 interests. Still I do not look for the general Christianity of 
 the people, but through the medium of the Christianity of 
 their rulers. This is a lesson taught historically in Scrip- 
 ture, by what we read there of the influence which the 
 personal character of the Jewish monarchs had on the moral 
 and religious state of their subjects; it is taught experi- 
 mentally, by the impotence, now fully established, of the 
 Voluntary principle ; and last, and most decisive of all, it 
 is taught prophetically in the book of Revelation, when 
 told that then will the kingdoms of the earth (Basiieiai, 
 or governing powers) become the kingdoms of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, or the Governments of the earth become 
 Christian Governments. 
 
 (Signed) ' THOMAS CHALMERS.' 
 
THOUGHTS 
 
 ON 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION, 
 
 CHAPTER FIRST. 
 
 Disputes regarding the meaning embodied by Chalmers in his Educational Docu- 
 ment Narrative suited to throw some light on the subject Consideration of the 
 Document itself Testimony respecting it of the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule. 
 
 ONE of the most important controversies which has arisen 
 within the pale of the Romish Church that between the 
 Jansenists and Jesuits was made to hinge for many years 
 on a case of disputed meaning in the writings of a certain 
 deceased author. There were five doctrines of a well-de- 
 fined character which, the Jesuits said, were to be found 
 in the works of Cornelius Jansenius, umquhile Bishop of 
 Ypres, but which, the Jansenists asserted, were not to be 
 found in anything Jansenius had ever written. And in the 
 attempt to decide this simple question of fact, as Pascal 
 calls it, the School of the Sorbonne and the Court of the 
 Inquisition were completely baffled; and zealous Roman 
 Catholics heard without conviction the verdict of councils, 
 and failed to acquiesce in the judgment of even the Pope. 
 
 We have been reminded often er than once of this sin- 
 gular controversy, by the late discussions which have arisen 
 in our church courts regarding the meaning embodied by 
 Chalmers in that posthumous document on the Educational 
 question, which is destined, we hold, to settle the whole 
 
 14 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 15 
 
 controversy. At first we regarded it as matter of wonder 
 that such discussions should have arisen ; for we had held 
 that there was really little room for difference respecting 
 the meaning of Chalmers, a man whose nature it was to 
 deal with broad truths, not with little distinctions ; and 
 who had always the will, and certainly did not lack the 
 ability, of making himself thoroughly understood. We 
 have since thought, however, that as there is nothing 
 which has once occurred that may not occur again, what 
 happened to the writings of Jansenius might well happen 
 to one of the writings of Chalmers ; and further, that from 
 certain conversations which we had held with the illustrious 
 deceased a few months before his death, on the subject of 
 his paper, and from certain facts in our possession regarding 
 his views, we had spectacles through which to look at the 
 document in question, and a key to his meaning, which 
 most of the disputants wanted. The time has at length 
 come when these helps to the right understanding of so 
 great an authority should be no longer withheld from the 
 public. We shall betray no confidence ; and should we be 
 compelled to speak somewhat more in the first person, 
 and of ourselves, than may seem quite accordant with good 
 taste, our readers will, we trust, suffer us to remind them 
 that we do not commit the fault very often, or very offen- 
 sively, and that the present employment of the personal 
 pronoun, just a little modified by the editorial we, seems 
 inevitably incident to the special line of statement on which 
 we propose to enter. 
 
 During the greater part of the years 1845 and 1846, the 
 Editor of the Witness was set aside from his professional 
 labours by a protracted illness, in part at least an effect of 
 the perhaps too assiduous prosecution of these labours at 
 a previous period. He had to cease per force even from 
 taking a very fixed view of what the Church was doing or 
 purposing; and when, early in January 1847, ^ e returned, 
 
J6 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 after a long and dreary period of rustication, in improved 
 health to Edinburgh, he at least possessed the advantage 
 much prized by artists and authors in their respective walks 
 of being able to look over the length and breadth of his 
 subject with afresh eye. And, in doing so, there was one 
 special circumstance in the survey suited to excite some 
 alarm. We found that in all the various schemes of the 
 Free Church, with but one exception, its extensively spread 
 membership and its more active leaders were thoroughly at 
 one ; but that in that exceptional scheme they were not at 
 all at one. They were at one in their views respecting 
 the ecclesiastical character of ministers, elders, and church 
 courts, and of the absolute necessity which exists that these, 
 and these only, should possess the spiritual key. Further, 
 they were wholly at one in recognising the command of our 
 adorable Saviour to preach the gospel to all nations, as of 
 perpetual obligation on the Churches. But regarding what 
 we shall term, without taking an undue liberty with the lan- 
 guage, the pedagogical teaching of religion, they differed 
 in toto. Practically, and to all intents and purposes, the 
 schoolmaster, in the eye of the membership of our Church, 
 and of the other Scottish Churches, was simply a layman, 
 the proper business of whose profession was the communi- 
 cation of secular learning. And as in choosing their tailors 
 and shoemakers the people selected for themselves the crafts- 
 men who made the best and handsomest shoes and clothes, 
 so, in selecting a schoolmaster for their children, they were 
 sure always to select the teacher who was found to turn out 
 the best scholars. 1 All other things equal, they would have 
 preferred a serious, devout schoolmaster to one who was 
 
 1 This passage has been referred to in several Free Church presby- 
 teries, as if the writer had affirmed that the schoolmaster stands on no 
 higher level than the shoemaker or tailor. We need scarce say, how- 
 ever, that the passage conveys no such meaning. By affirming that 
 in matters of chimney-sweeping men choose for themselves the best 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 17 
 
 not serious nor devout, just as, cceteris paribus, they would 
 have preferred a serious shoemaker or tailor to a non-reli- 
 gious maker of shoes or clothes j but religious character 
 was not permitted to stand as a compensatory item for pro- 
 fessional skill nay, men who might be almost content to 
 put up with a botched coat or a botched pair of shoes for 
 the sake of the good man who spoiled them, were particu- 
 larly careful not to botch, on any account whatever, the 
 education of their children. In a country in which there 
 was more importance attached than in perhaps any other in 
 the world to the religious teaching of the minister, there 
 was so little importance attached to the religious teaching 
 of the schoolmaster, that, when weighed against even a 
 slight modicum of secular qualification, it was found to 
 have no sensible weight. And with this great practical fact 
 some of our leading men seemed to be so little acquainted, 
 that they were going on with the machinery of their educa- 
 tional scheme, on a scale at least co-extensive with the Free 
 Church, as if, like that Church all-potent in her spiritual 
 character it had a moving power in the affections of the 
 people competent to speed it on. And it was the great dis- 
 crepancy with regard to this scheme which existed between 
 the feelings of the people and the anticipations of some of 
 our leading men, clerical and lay, that excited our alarm. 
 Unless that discrepancy be removed, we said unless the 
 anticipations of the men engaged in the laying down of this 
 scheme be sobered to the level of the feelings of the lay 
 membership of our Church, or, vice versa, the feelings of the 
 lay membership of our Church be raised to the level of the 
 anticipations of our leaders bankruptcy will be the in- 
 
 chimney-sweeps, and in matters of indisposition or disease the best 
 physicians, we do not at all level the physician with the chimney-sweep : 
 we merely intimate that there is a best in both professions, and that men 
 select that best, as preferable to what is inferior or worse, on every 
 occasion they can. 
 
1 8 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 fallible result. From the contributions of our laymen can 
 the scheme alone derive its support ; and if our leaders lay 
 it down on a large scale, and our laymen contribute on a 
 small one, alas for its solvency! Such were our views, 
 and such our inferences, on this occasion ; and to Thomas 
 Chalmers, at once our wisest and our humblest man 
 patient to hear, and sagacious to see we determined on 
 communicating them. 
 
 He had kindly visited the writer, to congratulate him in his 
 dwelling on his return to comparative health and strength ; 
 and after a long and serious conversation, in which he urged 
 the importance of maintaining the Witness in honest in- 
 dependency, uninfluenced by cliques and parties, whether 
 secular or ecclesiastical, the prospects of the Free Church 
 educational scheme were briefly discussed. He was evi- 
 dently struck by the view which we communicated, and 
 received it in far other than that parliamentary style which 
 can politely set aside, with some soothing half-compliment, 
 the suggestions that run counter to a favourite course of 
 policy already lined out and determined upon. In the dis- 
 crepancy which we pointed out to him he recognised a fact 
 of the practical kind, which rarely fail to influence the affairs 
 upon which they bear; and in accordance with his*cha- 
 racter for no man could be more thoroughly convinced 
 that free discussion never hurts a good cause, and that 
 second thoughts are always wiser than first ones he ex- 
 pressed a wish to see the educational question brought at 
 once to the columns of the Witness, and probed to its 
 bottom. We could not, however, see at that time how the 
 thing was to be introduced in a practical form, and pre- 
 ferred waiting on for an opportunity, which in the course 
 of events soon occurred. The Government came forward 
 with its proposal of educational grants, and the question 
 was raised certainly not by the writer of these chapters 
 whether or no the Free Church could conscientiously avail 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 19 
 
 herself of these. It was promptly decided by some few of 
 our leading men, clerical and lay, that she could not ; and 
 we saw in the decision, unless carried by appeal to our 
 country ministers and the people, and by them reversed, 
 the introduction of a further element of certain dissolution 
 in our educational scheme. 
 
 The status of the schoolmaster had been made so ex- 
 ceedingly ecclesiastical, and his profession so very spiritual, 
 that the money of that Government of the country whose 
 right and duty it is to educate its people, was regarded as 
 too vile and base a thing to be applied to his support. 
 There were even rumours afloat that our schoolmasters 
 were on the eve of being ordained. We trust, however, 
 that the report was a false one, or, at worst, that the men 
 who employed the word had made a slip in their English, 
 and for the time at least had forgot its meaning. Ordina- 
 tion means that special act which gives status and standing 
 within the ecclesiastical province. It implies the enjoined 
 use of that spiritual key which is entrusted by Christ to His 
 Church, that it may be employed just as He directs, and in 
 no other way. The Presbyterian Church has as much right 
 to institute prelates as to ordain pedagogues. c Remember,' 
 said an ancient Scottish worthy, in * lifting up his protesta- 
 tion' in troublous times, 'that the Lord has fashioned His 
 Kirk by the uncounterfeited work of His own new crea- 
 tion ; or, as the prophet speaketh, " hath made us, and not 
 we ourselves ; " and that we must not presume to fashion a 
 new portraiture of a Kirk, and a new form of divine service, 
 which God in His word hath not before allowed ; seeing that, 
 were we to extend our authority further than the calling 
 we have of God doth permit as, namely, if we should (as 
 God forbid !) authorize the authority of bishops we should 
 bring into the Kirk of God the ordinance of man.' If 
 men are to depart from the 'law and the testimony,' we 
 hold that the especial mode of their departure may be very 
 
20 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 much a matter of taste, and would, for our own part, prefer 
 bishops and cardinals to poor dominies of the gospel, some- 
 what out at the elbows. 1 The fine linen and the purple, 
 the cope and the stole, would at least have the effect of 
 giving that sort of pleasant relief to the widespread sable 
 of our Assemblies which they possessed of yore, ere they 
 for ever lost the gay uniform of the Lord High Commis- 
 sioner, the gold lace of his dragoon officers, and the glitter 
 of his pages in silver and scarlet. * We are two of the 
 humblest servants of Mother Church,' said the Prior and his 
 companion to Wamba, the jester of Rotherwood. ' Two of 
 the humblest servants of Mother Church !' repeated Wamba; 
 ' I should rather like to see her seneschals, her chief butlers, 
 and her other principal domestics.' 
 
 We again saw Chalmers, and, in a corner apart from a 
 social party, of which his kind and genial heart formed the 
 attractive centre, we found he thoroughly agreed with us in 
 holding that the time for the discussion of the educational 
 question had fully come. It was a question, he said, on 
 which he had not yet fully made up his mind : there was, 
 however, one point on which he seemed clear though, at 
 this distance of time, we cannot definitively say whether 
 the remark regarding it came spontaneously from himself, 
 or \vas suggested by any query of ours and that was the 
 right and duty of a Government to instruct, and conse- 
 quently of the governed to receive the instruction thus com- 
 municated, if in itself good. We remarked in turn, that 
 there were various points on which we also had to ' grope 
 our way' (a phrase to which the reader will find him refer- 
 ring in his note, which we subjoin) ; but that regarding the 
 
 1 We have learned that what was actually intended at this time was, 
 not to ordain, but only to induct our schoolmasters. And their induc- 
 tion would have made, we doubt not, what Foigard in the play calls a 
 ' very pretty sheremony.' But no mere ceremony, however imposing, 
 can communicate to a secular profession a spiritual status or character. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 21 
 
 inherently secular character of the schoolmaster, and the 
 right and duty of the Government to employ him in behalf 
 of its people, we had no doubt whatever. And so, parting 
 for the time, we commenced that series of articles which, 
 as they were not wholly without influence in communicating 
 juster views of the place and status of the schoolmaster 
 than had formerly obtained in the Free Church, and as 
 they had some little effect in leading the Church to take 
 at least one step in averting the otherwise inevitable ruin 
 which brooded over her educational scheme, the readers of 
 the Witness may perhaps remember. We were met in con- 
 troversy on the question by a man, the honesty of whose 
 purpose in this, as in every other matter, and the warmth 
 of whose zeal for the Church which he loved, and for which 
 he laboured, no one has ever questioned, and no one ever 
 will. And if, though possessed of solid, though perhaps 
 not brilliant talent, he failed on this occasion ' in finding 
 his hands,' we are to seek an explanation of his failure 
 simply in the circumstance that truths of principle such 
 as those which establish the right and duty of every Go- 
 vernment to educate its people, or which demonstrate the 
 schoolmaster to possess a purely secular, not an ecclesias- 
 tical standing or yet truths of fact, such as that for many 
 years the national teaching of Scotland has not been reli- 
 gious, or that the better Scottish people will on no account 
 or consideration sacrifice the secular education of their chil- 
 dren to the dream of a spiritual pedagogy, are truths which 
 can neither be controverted nor set aside. He did on one 
 occasion, during the course what he no doubt afterwards re- 
 gretted raise against us the cry of infidelity, a cry which, 
 when employed respecting matters on which Christ or His 
 apostles have not spoken, really means no more than that 
 he who employs it, if truly a good man, is bilious, or has 
 a bad stomach, or has lost the thread of his argument or 
 the equanimity of his temper. Feeling somewhat annoyed, 
 
22 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 however, we wished to see Chalmers once more ; but the 
 matter had not escaped his quick eye, and his kind heart 
 suggested the remedy. In the course of the day in which 
 our views and reasonings were posted as infidel, we received 
 the following note from Morningside : 
 
 MORNINGSIDE, March 13, 1847. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR, You are getting nobly on on education ; 
 not only groping your way, but making way, and that by a 
 very sensible step in advance this day. 
 
 On my own mind the truth evolves itself very gradually ; 
 and I am yet a far way from the landing-place. Kindest 
 respects to Mrs. Miller ; and with earnest prayer for the 
 comfort and happiness of both, I ever am, my dear Sir, 
 yours very truly, THOMAS CHALMERS. 
 
 Hugh Miller, Esq. 
 
 In short, Thomas Chalmers, by his sympathy and his 
 connivance, had become as great an infidel as ourselves ; 
 and we have submitted to our readers the evidence of the 
 fact, fully certified under his own hand. 1 There is a sort 
 of perfection in everything ; and perfection once reached, 
 deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the 
 phrases infidel and infidelity like the feathered missiles 
 in the game of battledore and shuttlecock they fell upon 
 Chalmers, we think there was a droll felicity in the acci- 
 dent, which constitutes for it an irresistible claim of being 
 the terminal one in the series. The climax reached its 
 point of extremest elevation j for even should our infidel- 
 dubbers do their best or worst now, it is not at all likely 
 they will find out a second Chalmers to hit. 
 
 We concluded our course of educational articles ; and 
 though we afterwards saw the distinguished man to whom 
 
 1 A fac-simile of this letter was reproduced in the columns of the 
 Witness. ED. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 23 
 
 our eye so frequently turned, as, under God, the wise pilot of 
 the Free Church, and were honoured by a communication 
 from him, dictated to his secretary, we did not again touch 
 on the subject of education. We were, however, gratified 
 to learn, from men much in his confidence and company 
 we hope we do not betray trust in referring to the Rev. Mr. 
 Tasker of the West Port as one of these that he regarded 
 our entire course with a feeling of general approval akin 
 to that to which he had given expression in his note. It 
 further gratifies us to reflect that our course had the effect 
 of setting his eminently practical mind a-working on the 
 whole subject, and led to the production of the inestimably 
 valuable document, long and carefully pondered, which will 
 do more to settle the question of national education in Scot- 
 land than all the many volumes which have been written 
 regarding it. As in a well-known instance in Scottish story, 
 it is the ' dead Douglas' who is to ' win the field.' 
 
 But we lag in our narrative. That melancholy event 
 took place which cast a shade of sadness over Christen- 
 dom ; and in a few weeks after, the posthumous document, 
 kindly communicated to us by the family of the deceased, 
 appeared in the columns of the Witness. We perused it 
 with intense interest ; and what we saw in the first perusal 
 was, that Chalmers had gone far beyond us; and in the 
 second, that, in laying down his first principles, he had 
 looked at the subject, as was his nature, in a broader and 
 more general aspect, and had unlocked the difficulty which 
 it presented in a more practical and statesmanlike manner. 
 We had, indeed, considered in the abstract the right and 
 duty of the civil magistrate to educate his people ; but our 
 main object being to ward off otherwise inevitable bank- 
 ruptcy from a scheme of our Church, and having to deal 
 with a sort of vicious Cameronianism, that would not ac- 
 cept of the magistrate's money, even though he gave the 
 Bible and the Shorter Catechism along with it, we had 
 
24 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 merely contended that money given in connection with the 
 Bible and Shorter Catechism is a very excellent thing, and 
 especially so to men who cannot fulfil their obligations or pay 
 their debts without it. But Chalmers had looked beyond 
 the difficulties of a scheme, to the emergencies of a nation. 
 At the request of many of our readers, we have reprinted 
 his document in full, as it originally appeared. 1 First, let 
 it be remarked that, after briefly stating what he deemed 
 the optimity of the question, he passes on to what he con- 
 sidered the only mode of settling it practically, in the pre- 
 sent divided state of the Church and country. And in 
 doing so he lays down, as a preliminary step, the absolute 
 right and duty of the Government to educate, altogether 
 independently of the theological differences or divisions 
 which may obtain among the people or in the Churches. 
 ' As there seems no reason,' he says, ' why, because of these 
 unresolved differences, a public measure for the health of 
 all, for the recreation of all, for the economic advancement 
 of all, should be held in abeyance, there seems as little 
 reason why, because of these differences, a public measure 
 for raising the general intelligence of all should be held in 
 abeyance.' Such is the principle which he enunciates re- 
 garding the party possessing the right to educate. Let the 
 reader next mark in what terms he speaks of the party to be 
 educated, or under whose immediate superintendence the 
 education is to be conducted. Those who most widely mis- 
 understand the Doctor's meaning from the circumstance, 
 perhaps, that their views are most essentially at variance 
 with those which he entertained seem to hold that this 
 absolute right on the part of Government is somehow 
 conditional on the parties to be educated, or to superintend 
 the education, coming forward to them in the character of 
 Churches. They deem it necessary to the integrity of his 
 meaning, that Presbyterians should come forward as Pres- 
 1 See Introduction. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 25 
 
 byterians, Puseyites as Puseyites, Papists as Papists, and 
 Socinians as Socinians ; in which case, of course, all could 
 be set right so far as the Free Church conscience was con- 
 cerned in the matter, by taking the State's grant with the 
 one hand, and holding out an indignant protest against its 
 extension to the erroneous sects in the other. But that 
 Chalmers could have contemplated anything so monstrous 
 as that Scotchmen should think of coming forward simply as 
 Scotchmen, they cannot believe. He must have regarded 
 the State's unconditional right to educate as conditional after 
 all, and dependent on the form assumed by the party on 
 which or through which it was to be exercised. Let the 
 reader examine for himself, and see whether there exists in 
 the document a single expression suited to favour such a 
 view. Nothing can be plainer than the words ' Parliament,' 
 ' Government,' * State,' ' Legislature,' employed to designate 
 the educating party on the one hand ; and surely nothing 
 plainer than the words ' people,' * men of all Churches and 
 denominations,' ' families of the land,' and ' society at large,' 
 made use of in designating the party to be educated, or 
 entrusted with the educational means or machinery, on the 
 other. There is a well-grounded confidence expressed in 
 the Christian and philanthropic zeal which obtain through- 
 out society; but the only bodies ecclesiastical which we 
 find specially named if, indeed, one of these can be re- 
 garded as at all ecclesiastical are the ' Unitarians and the 
 Catholics.' It was with the broad question of national edu- 
 cation in its relation to two great parties placed in happy 
 opposition, as the ' inner hall of legislation' and the ' outer 
 field of society,' that we find Dr. Chalmers mainly dealing. 
 And yet the document does contain palpable reference to 
 the Government scheme. There is one clause in which it 
 urges the propriety of ' leaving [the matter of religion] to 
 the parties who had to do with the erection and manage- 
 ment of the schools which [the rulers of the country] had 
 
26 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 been called on to assist.' But the greater includes the less, 
 and the much that is general in the paper is in no degree 
 neutralized by the little in it that is particular. The Hon. 
 Mr. Fox Maule could perhaps throw some additional light 
 on this matter. It was at his special desire, and in conse- 
 quence of a conversation on the subject which he held with 
 Chalmers, that the document was drawn up. The nature 
 ot the request could not, of course, alter whatever is ab- 
 solutely present in what it was the means of producing ; but 
 it would be something to know whether what the statesman 
 asked was a decision on a special educational scheme, or 
 what any statesman might well desire to possess the judg- 
 ment of so wise and great a man on the all-important sub- 
 ject of national education. 
 
 It will be found that the following valuable letters from 
 Dr. Guthrie and the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule determine the 
 meaning of Dr. Chalmers on his own authority : 
 
 2, LAURISTON LANE, March 5, 1850. 
 
 MY DEAR MR. MILLER, When such conflicting state- 
 ments were advanced as to the bearing of Dr. Chalmers' 
 celebrated paper on education, although I had no doubt in 
 my own mind that the view you had taken of that valuable 
 document was the correct one, and had that view confirmed 
 by a conversation I had with his son-in-law, Mr. M'Kenzie, 
 who heard Dr Chalmers discuss the matter in London, and 
 acted, indeed, as his amanuensis in writing that paper ; yet 
 I thought it were well also to see whether Mr. Maule could 
 throw any light on the subject. I wrote him with that 
 object in view; and while we must regret that we are called 
 to differ from some most eminent and excellent friends on 
 this important question, it both comforts and confirms us 
 to find another most important testimony in the letter 
 which I now send to you, in favour of our opinion, that 
 Dr. Chalmers, had God spared him to this day, would have 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 27 
 
 lifted up his mighty voice to advocate the views in which 
 we are agreed. 
 
 Into the fermenting mind of the public it is the duty of 
 every one to cast in whatever may, by God's blessing, lead 
 to a happy termination of this great question ; and with 
 this view I send you the letter which I have had the honour 
 to receive from Mr. Maule. Believe me, yours ever, 
 
 THOMAS GUTHRIE. 
 
 GROSVENOR STREET, March 4, 1850. 
 
 MY DEAR DR. GUTHRIE, When you wrote me some 
 time since upon the subject of the communication made to 
 me by the late Dr. Chalmers upon the all-important ques- 
 tion of education, I could not take upon myself to say 
 positively (though I had very little doubt in my mind) 
 whether that document took its origin in a desire expressed 
 by me to have Dr. Chalmers' opinion on the general 
 question of education, or merely upon the scheme laid 
 down and pursued by the Committee of Privy Council. 
 My impression has always been, that Dr. Chalmers ad- 
 dressed himself to the question as a whole ; and on looking 
 over my papers a few days since, I find that impression 
 quite confirmed by the following sentence, in a note in Dr. 
 Chalmers' handwriting, bearing date 2ist May 1847: 'I 
 hope that by to-morrow night I shall have prepared a few 
 brief sentences on the subject of education? 
 
 None of us thought how inestimable these brief sentences 
 were to become, forming, as they do, the last written evi- 
 dence of the tone of his great mind on this subject. 
 
 Should you address yourself to this question, you are, in 
 my opinion, fully justified in dealing with the memorandum 
 as referring to general and national arrangements, and not 
 to those which are essentially of a temporary and varying 
 character. Believe me, with great esteem, yours sincerely, 
 
 F. MAULE. 
 
28 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 CHAPTER SECOND. 
 
 Right and Duty of the Civil Magistrate to educate the People Founded on two 
 distinct Principles, the one economic, the other judicial Right and Duty of 
 the Parent Natural, not Ecclesiastical Examination of the purely Ecclesias- 
 tical Claim The real Rights in the case those of the State, the Parent, and the 
 Ratepayer The terms Parent and Ratepayer convertible into the one term 
 Householder. 
 
 WHEREVER mind is employed, thought will be evolved ; 
 and in all questions of a practical character, truth, when 
 honestly sought, is ultimately found. And so we deem it 
 a happy circumstance, that there should be more minds 
 honestly engaged at the present time on the educational 
 problem than at perhaps any former period. To the 
 upright light will arise. The question cannot be too pro- 
 foundly pondered, nor too carefully discussed ; and at the 
 urgent request of not a few of our better readers, we pur- 
 pose examining it anew in a course of occasional articles, 
 convinced that its crisis has at length come, just as the 
 crisis of the Church question had in reality come when the 
 late Dr. M'Crie published his extraordinary pamphlet ; l 
 and that it must depend on the part now taken by the Free 
 Church in this matter, whether some ten years hence she 
 is to posses any share, even the slightest, in the education 
 of the country. We ask our readers severely to test all our 
 statements, whether of principle or of fact, and to suffer 
 nothing in the least to influence them which is not rational, 
 or which is not true. 
 
 In the first place, then, we hold with Chalmers, that it is 
 unquestionably the right and duty of the civil magistrate to 
 educate his people, altogether independently of the religion 
 
 i What ought the General Assembly to do at the present Crisis ? 
 (1833-) 
 
THE ED UCA TIONAL Q UESTION. 2 9 
 
 which he himself holds, or of the religious differences which 
 may unhappily obtain among them. Even should there be 
 as many sects in a country as there are families or indivi- 
 duals, the right and duty still remain. Religion, in such 
 circumstances, can palpably form no part of a Government 
 scheme of tuition ; but there is nothing in the element of 
 religious difference to furnish even a pretext for excluding 
 those important secular branches which bear reference to 
 the principles of trade, the qualities of matter, the relations 
 of numbers, the properties of figured space, the philosophy 
 of grammar, or the form and body which in various coun- 
 tries and ages literature and the belles lettres have assumed. 
 And this right and duty of a Government to instruct, rest, 
 we hold, on two distinct principles, the one economic, the 
 other judicial. Education adds immensely to the economic 
 value of the subjects of a State. The professional and 
 mercantile men who in this country live by their own exer- 
 tions, and pay the income tax, and all the other direct 
 taxes, are educated men ; whereas its uneducated men do 
 not pay the direct taxes, and, save in the article of intoxi- 
 cating drink, very little of the indirect ones ; and a large 
 proportion of their number, so far from contributing to the 
 national wealth, are positive burdens on the community. 
 And on the class of facts to which this important fact 
 belongs rests the economic right and duty of the civil magis- 
 trate to educate. 
 
 His judicial right and duty are founded on the circum- 
 stance, that the laws which he promulgates are written laws, 
 and that what he writes for the guidance of the people, the 
 people ought to be enabled to read ; seeing that to punish 
 for the breach of a law, of the existence of which he who 
 breaks it has been left in ignorance, is not man-law, but 
 what Jeremy Bentham well designates dog-law, and alto- 
 gether unjust. We are, of course, far from supposing that 
 every British subject who can read is to peruse the vast 
 
3 o THOUGHTS ON 
 
 library which the British Acts of themselves compose ; but 
 we hold that education forms the only direct means through 
 which written law, as a regulator of conduct, can be known, 
 and that, in consequence, in its practical breadth and 
 average aspect, it is only educated men who know it, and 
 only uneducated men who are ignorant of it. And hence 
 the derivation of the magistrate's judicial right and duty. 
 But on this part of our subject, with Free Churchmen for 
 our readers, we need not surely insist. Our Church has 
 homologated at least the general principle of the civil 
 magistrate's right and duty, by becoming the recipient of 
 his educational grant. If he has no right to give, she can 
 have no right to receive. If he, instead of performing a 
 duty, has perpetrated a wrong, she, to all intents and pur- 
 poses, being guilty of receipt, is a participator in the crime. 
 Nay, further, let it be remarked that, as indicated by the 
 speeches of some of our abler and more influential men, 
 there seems to exist a decided wish on the part of the Free 
 Church, that the State, in its educational grants, should 
 assume a purely secular character, and dispense with the 
 certificate of religious training which it at present demands, 
 a certificate which, though anomalously required of sects 
 of the most opposite tenets, constitutes notwithstanding, in 
 this business of grants, the sole recognition of religion on 
 the part of the Government. Now this, if a fact at all, is 
 essentially a noticeable and pregnant one, and shows how 
 much opposite parties are in reality at one on a principle 
 regarding which they at least seem to dispute. 
 
 The right and duty of the civil magistrate thus established, 
 let us next consider another main element in the question, 
 the right and duty of the parent. It is, we assert, im- 
 perative on every parent in Scotland and elsewhere to edu- 
 cate his children ; and on the principle that he is a joint 
 contributor with the Government to the support of every 
 national teacher the Government giving salary, and the 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION, 31 
 
 parent fees we assert further, that should the Government 
 give its salary ' exclusively as the expression of its value for 
 a good secular education/ he may, notwithstanding, demand 
 that his fees should be received as the representative of his 
 value for a good religious education. Whether his prin- 
 ciples be those of the Voluntary or of the Establishment- 
 man, the same schoolmaster who is a secular teacher in 
 relation to the Government, may be a religious teacher in 
 relation to him. For unless the State positively forbid its 
 schoolmaster to communicate religious instruction, he exists 
 to the parent, in virtue of the fees given and received, in 
 exactly the circumstances of the teacher of any adventure 
 school. 
 
 Let us further remark, that the rights of the parent in the 
 matter of education are not ecclesiastical , but natural rights. 
 The writer of this article is one of the parents of Scotland ; 
 and, simply as such, he claims for himself the right of 
 choosing his children's teacher on his own responsibility, 
 and of determining what his children are to be taught. 
 The Rev. Dr. Thomas Guthrie is his minister ; and he also 
 is one of the parents of Scotland, and enjoys, as such, a 
 right identical in all respects with that of his parishioner 
 and hearer. But it is only an identical and co-equal right. 
 Should the writer send his boy to a Socialist or Popish 
 school, to be taught either gross superstition or gross infi- 
 delity, the minister would have a right to interfere, and, if 
 entreaty and remonstrance failed, to bring him to discipline 
 for so palpable a breach of his baptismal engagement. If, 
 on the other hand, it was the minister who had sent his boy 
 to the Socialist or Popish school, the parishioner would 
 have a right to interfere, and, were entreaty and remon- 
 strance disregarded, to bring him to discipline. Minister 
 and parishioner stand, we repeat, in this matter, on exactly 
 the same level. Nor have ten, twenty, a hundred, a thou- 
 sand, twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand lay parents, 
 
32 THOUGHTS OA T 
 
 or yet ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand clerical parents, 
 whether existing as a congregation or hundreds of congre- 
 gations on the one hand, or as a Presbytery, Synod, or 
 General Assembly on the other, rights in this matter that in 
 the least differ in their nature from the rights possessed by 
 the single clergyman, Dr. Guthrie, or by the single layman, 
 the Editor of the Witness. The sole right which exists in 
 the case that of the parent is a natural right, not an 
 ecclesiastical one; and the sole modification which it can 
 receive from the superadded element of Church member- 
 ship is simply that modification to which we refer as founded 
 on the religious duty of both member and minister, in its 
 relation to ecclesiastical law and the baptismal vow. 
 
 Nor, be it observed, does this our recognition, in our 
 character as a Church member, of ecclesiastical rule and 
 authority, give our minister any true grounds for urging that 
 it is our bounden duty, in virtue of our parental engage- 
 ments, and from the existence of such general texts as the 
 often quoted one, ' Train up a child,' etc., to send our chil- 
 dren to some school in which religion is expressly taught. 
 Far less does it give him a right to demand any such thing. 
 We are Free Church in our principles ; and the grand dis- 
 tinctive principle for which, during the protracted Church 
 controversy, we never ceased to contend, was simply the 
 right of choosing our own religious teacher, on the strength 
 of our own convictions, and on our own exclusive respon- 
 sibility. We laughed to scorn the idea that the three items 
 of Dr. George Cook's ceaseless iterations life, literature, 
 and doctrine formed the full tale of ministerial qualifica- 
 tion : there was yet a fourth item, infinitely more important 
 than all the others put together, viz. godliness, or religion 
 proper, or, in yet other words, the regeneration of the 
 whole man by the Spirit of God. And on this last item 
 we held that it was the right and duty of the people who 
 chose for themselves, and for their children, a religious 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 33 
 
 teacher, and of none others, clerical or lay, solemnly to 
 decide. And while we still hold by this sacred principle 
 on the one hand, we see clearly, on the other, that the sole 
 qualifications of our Free Church teachers, as prepared in our 
 Normal Schools, correspond to but Dr. Cook's three items ; 
 nay, that instead of exceeding, they fall greatly short of 
 these. The certificate of character which the young candi- 
 dates bring to the institution answers but lamely to the 
 item 'life;" 1 the amount of secular instruction imparted to 
 them within its walls answers but inadequately to the item 
 * literature ;* while the modicum of theological training re- 
 ceived, most certainly not equal to a four years' course 
 of theology at a Divinity Hall, answers but indifferently 
 to the crowning item of the three ' doctrine? That para- 
 mount item, conversion on the part of the teacher to God, 
 is still unaccounted for ; and we contend that, respecting 
 that item, the parent, and the parent only, has a right to 
 decide, all difficult and doubtful as the decision may be : 
 for be it remembered, that there exist no such data on 
 which to arrive at a judgment in cases of this nature, as 
 exist in the choosing of a minister. And though we would 
 deem it eminently right and proper that our child should 
 read his daily Scripture lesson to some respectable school- 
 master, a believer in the divine authority of revelation, and 
 should repeat to him his weekly tale of questions from the 
 National Catechism, yet to the extempore religious teaching 
 of no merely respectable schoolmaster would we subject 
 our child's heart and conscience. For we hold that the 
 religious lessons of the unregenerate lack regenerating life ; 
 and that whatever in this all-important department does 
 not intenerate and soften, rarely fails to harden and to sear. 
 Religious preachments from a secular heart are the drop- 
 pings of a petrifying spring, which convert all that they fall 
 upon into stone. Further, we hold that a mistake regard- 
 ing the character of a schoolmaster authorized to teach 
 
 c 
 
34 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 religion extempore might be greatly more serious, and might 
 involve an immensely deeper responsibility, than a similar 
 mistake regarding a minister. The minister preaches to 
 grown men a large proportion of them members of the 
 Church not a few of them office-bearers in its service, 
 and competent, in consequence, to judge respecting both 
 the doctrine which he exhibits and the mode of its exhibi- 
 tion ; but it is children, immature of judgment, and ex- 
 tremely limited in their knowledge, whom the religion- 
 teaching schoolmaster has to address. Nay, more : in 
 choosing a minister, we may mistake the character of the 
 man; but there can be no mistake made regarding the 
 character of the office, seeing that it is an office appointed 
 by God Himself; whereas in choosing a religion-teaching 
 schoolmaster, we may mistake the character of both the 
 man and the office too. We are responsible in the one 
 case for only the man ; we are responsible in the other for 
 both the man and the office. 
 
 We have yet another objection to any authoritative inter- 
 ference on the part of ecclesiastical courts with the natural 
 rights and enjoined duties of the parent in the matter of 
 education. Even though we fully recognised some con- 
 scientious teacher as himself in possession of the divine 
 life, we might regard him as very unfitted, from some 
 natural harshness of temper, or some coldness of heart, or 
 some infirmity of judgment, for being a missionary of re- 
 ligion to the children under his care. At one period early 
 in life we spent many a leisure hour in drawing up a 
 gossiping little history of our native town, and found, in 
 tracing out the memorabilia of its parish school, that the 
 Rev. John Russell, afterwards of Kilmarnock and Stirling, 
 and somewhat famous in Scottish literature as one of the 
 clerical antagonists of Burns, had taught in it for twelve 
 years, and that several of his pupils (now long since de- 
 parted) still lived. We sought them out one by one, and 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 35 
 
 succeeded in rescuing several curious passages in his his- 
 tory, and in rinding that, though not one among them 
 doubted the sincerity of his religion, nor yet his conscien- 
 tiousness as a schoolmaster, they all equally regarded him 
 as a harsh-tempered, irascible man, who succeeded in in- 
 spiring all his pupils with fear, but not one of them with 
 love. Now, to no such type of schoolmaster, however 
 strong our conviction of his personal piety, would we 
 entrust the religious teaching of our child. If necessitated 
 to place our boy under his pedagogical rule and superin- 
 tendence, we would address him thus : Lacking time, and 
 mayhap ability, ourselves to instruct our son, we entrust 
 him to you, and this simply on the same division of labour 
 principle on which we give the making of our shoes to a 
 shoemaker, and the making of our clothes to a tailor. And 
 in order that you may not lack the power necessary to the 
 accomplishment of your task for we hold that * folly is 
 bound up in the heart of a child' we make over to you 
 our authority to admonish and correct. But though we 
 can put into your hands the parental rod with an advice, 
 however, to use it discreetly and with temper there are 
 things which we cannot communicate to you. We cannot 
 make over to you our child's affection for us, nor yet our 
 affection for our child: with these joys 'a stranger in ter- 
 ra eddleth not.' And as religious teaching without love, 
 and conducted under the exclusive influence of fear, may 
 and must be barren nay, worse than barren we ask you 
 to leave this part of our duty as a parent entirely to our- 
 selves. Our duty it is, and to you we delegate no part of 
 it ; and this, not because we deem it unimportant, but 
 because we deem it important in the highest degree, 
 and are solicitous that no unkindly element should mar it 
 in its effects. Now where, we ask, is the ecclesiastical 
 office-bearer who, in his official character, or in any cha- 
 racter or capacity whatever, has a right authoritatively to 
 
36 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 challenge our rejection, on our own parental responsibility, . 
 of the religious teaching of even a converted schoolmaster, 
 on purely reasonable grounds such as these ? Or where is 
 the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has an authoritative right 
 to challenge our yet weightier Free Church objection to the 
 religious teaching of a schoolmaster whom we cannot avoid 
 regarding as an unregenerate man, or whom we at least do 
 not know to be a regenerate one ? Or yet further, where 
 is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has a right authori- 
 tatively to bear down or set aside our purely Protestant 
 caveat against a teacher of religion who, in his professional 
 capacity, has no place or standing in the word of God? 
 The right and duty of the civil magistrate in all circum- 
 stances to educate his people, and of parents to choose 
 their children's teacher, and to determine what they are to 
 be taught, we are compelled to recognise ; and there seems 
 to be a harmony between the two rights the parental and 
 the magisterial, with the salary of the one and the fees of 
 the other suited, we think, to unlock many a difficulty ; 
 but the authoritative standing, in this question, of the 
 ecclesiastic as such, we have hitherto failed to see. The 
 parent, as a Church member or minister, is amenable to 
 discipline ; but his natural rights in the matter are simply 
 those of the parent, and his political rights simply those of 
 the subject and the ratepayer. 
 
 And in this educational question certain political rights 
 are involved. In the present state of things, the parish 
 schoolmasters of the kingdom are chosen by the parish 
 ministers and parish heritors : the two elements involved 
 are the ecclesiastical and the political. But while we see 
 the parish minister as but the mere idle image of a state 
 of things passed away for ever, and possessed in his mini- 
 sterial capacity of merely a statutory right, which, though it 
 exists to-day, may be justly swept away to-morrow, we re- 
 cognise the heritor as possessed of a real right ; and what 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 37 
 
 xve challenge is merely its engrossing extent, not its nature. 
 We regard it as just in kind, but exorbitant in degree ; 
 and on the simple principle that the money of the State is 
 the money of the people, and that the people have a right 
 to determine that it be not misapplied or misdirected, we 
 would, with certain limitations, extend to the ratepayers as 
 a body the privileges, in this educational department, now 
 exclusively exercised by the heritors. In that educational 
 franchise which we would fain see extended to the Scottish 
 people, we recognise two great elements, and but two only, 
 the natural, or that of the parent ; and the political, or 
 that of the ratepayer. These form the two opposite sides 
 of the pyramid ; and, though diverse in their nature, let 
 the reader mark how nicely for all practical purposes they 
 converge into the point, householder. The householders of 
 Scotland include all the ratepayers of Scotland. The house - 
 holders of Scotland include also all the parents of Scotland. 
 We would therefore fix on the householders of a parish as 
 the class in whom the right of nominating the parish school- 
 master should be vested. But on the same principle of 
 high expediency on which we exclude householders of a 
 certain standing from exercising the political franchise in 
 the election of a member of Parliament, would we exclude 
 certain other householders, of, however, a much lower stand- 
 ing, from voting in the election of a parish schoolmaster. 
 We are not prepared to be Chartists in either department, 
 the educational or the political ; and this simply on the 
 ground that Chartism in either would be prejudicial to the 
 general good. On this part of the subject, however, we 
 shall enter at full length in our next. 
 
 Meanwhile we again urge our readers carefully to examine 
 for themselves all our statements and propositions, to take 
 nothing on trust, to set no store by any man's ipse dixit, 
 be he editor or elder, minister or layman. In this question, 
 as in a thousand others, ' truth lies at the bottom of the 
 
38 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 well ;' and if she be not now found and consulted, to the 
 exclusion of every prejudice, and the disregard of every 
 petty little interest and sinister motive, it will be ill ten 
 years hence with the Free Church of Scotland in her 
 character as an educator. Her safety rests, in the present 
 crisis, in the just and the true, and in the just and the true 
 only. 
 
THE ED UCA TIONAL Q UESTION. 39 
 
 CHAPTER THIRD. 
 
 Parties to whom the Educational Franchise might be safely extended House Pro- 
 prietors, House Tenants of a certain standing, Farmers, Crofters Scheme of an 
 Educational Faculty Effects ot the desired Extension It would restore the 
 National Schools to the People of the Nation. 
 
 IT is the right and duty of every Government to educate 
 its people, whatever the kinds or varieties of religion which 
 may obtain among them ; it is the right and duty of every 
 parent to select, on his own responsibility, his children's 
 teacher, and to determine what his children are to be 
 taught ; it is the right and duty of every member of the 
 commonwealth to see that the commonwealth's money, 
 devoted to educational purposes, be not squandered on 
 incompetent men, and, in virtue of his contributions as a 
 ratepayer, to possess a voice with the parents of a country 
 in the selection of its salaried schoolmasters. There exist, 
 on the one hand, the right and duty of the State ; there 
 exist, on the other, the rights and duties of the parents and 
 ratepayers ; and we find both parents and ratepayers pre- 
 senting themselves in the aggregate, and for all practical 
 purposes in this matter, as a single class, viz. the house- 
 holders of the kingdom. But as, in dealing with these in 
 purely political questions, we exclude a certain portion of 
 them from the exercise of the political franchise, and that 
 simply because, as classes, they are uninformed or dange- 
 rous, and might employ power, if they possessed it, to the 
 public prejudice, so would we exclude a certain proportion 
 of them, on similar grounds, from the educational franchise. 
 In selecting, however, the safe classes of householders, we 
 would employ tests somewhat dissimilar in their character 
 from those to which the Reform Act extends its exclusive 
 
40 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 sanction, and establish a somewhat different order of quali- 
 fications from those which it erects. 
 
 In the first place, we would fain extend the educational 
 franchise to all those householders of Scotland who inhabit 
 houses of their own, however humble in kind, or however 
 low the valuation of their rental. We know not a safer or 
 more solid, or, in the main, more intelligent class, than 
 those working men of the country who, with the savings of 
 half a lifetime, build or purchase a dwelling for themselves, 
 and then sit down rent-free for the rest of their lives, each 
 'the monarch of a shed.' With these men we are intimately 
 acquainted, for we have lived and laboured among them ; 
 and very rarely have we failed to find the thatched domicile, 
 oi mayhap two little rooms and a closet, with a patch of 
 garden-ground behind, of which some hard-handed country 
 mechanic or labourer had, through his own exertions, be- 
 come the proud possessor, forming a higher certificate of 
 character than masters the most conscientious and discern- 
 ing could bestow upon their employes, or even Churches 
 themselves upon their members. Nor is this house-owning 
 qualification much less valuable when it has been derived 
 by inheritance not wrought for; seeing that the man 
 who retains his little patrimony unsquandered must be at 
 least a steady, industrious man, the slave of no expensive 
 or disreputable vice. Let us remark, however, that we 
 would not attach the educational franchise to property as 
 such : the proprietor of the house, whether a small house 
 or a large one, would require to be the bona fide inhabitant 
 of the dwelling which he occupied, for at least a consider- 
 able portion of every year. The second class to which we 
 would fain see the educational franchise extended are all 
 those householders of the kingdom who tenant houses of 
 five pounds annual rent and upwards, who settle with their 
 landlords not oftener than twice every twelvemonth, and 
 who are at least a year entered on possession. By fixing 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 41 
 
 the qualification thus high, and rejecting the monthly or 
 weekly rent-payer, the country would get rid of at least 
 nineteen-twentieths of the dangerous classes, the agricul- 
 tural labourers, who wander about from parish to parish, 
 some six or eight months in one locality, and some ten or 
 twelve in another; the ignorant immigrant Irish, who 
 tenant the poorer hovels of so many of our western coast 
 parishes ; and last, not least, all the migratory population of 
 our larger towns, who rarely reside half a year in the same 
 dwelling, and who, though they may in some instances pay 
 at more than the rate of the yearly five pounds, pay it 
 weekly, or by the fortnight or month. We regret, how- 
 ever, that there is a really worthy class which such a quali- 
 fication would exclude, ploughmen, labourers, and country 
 mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the 
 property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their 
 course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are 
 God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, 
 in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent 
 voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to see 
 any principle which a British statesman would recognise 
 as legitimate, on which this class could be included in the 
 educational franchise, and their dangerous neighbours of 
 the same political status kept out. There is yet a third 
 very important class whom we would fain see in possession 
 of the educational franchise, those householders of Scot- 
 land who till the soil as tenants, whether with or without 
 leases, or whether the annual rent which they pay amounts 
 to three or to three thousand pounds. The tillers of the soil 
 are a fixed class, greatly more permanent, even where there 
 exists no lease, than the mere tenant householders ; and 
 they include, especially in the Highlands of Scotland, and 
 the poorer districts of the low country, a large proportion 
 of the country's parentage. They are in the main, too, an 
 eminently safe class, and not less so where the farms are 
 
42 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 small and the dwellings upon them mere cottages to 
 which, save for the surrounding croft or farm, no franchise 
 could attach than where they live in elegant houses, and 
 are the lessees of hundreds of acres. And such are the 
 three great classes to which, as composing the solid body 
 of the Scottish nation to the exclusion of little more than 
 the mere rags that hang loosely on its vestments would 
 we extend, did we possess the power, the educational 
 franchise. 
 
 In order, however, to render a franchise thus liberally 
 restricted more safe and salutary still, we would demand 
 not only certain qualifications on the part of the parents 
 and ratepayers of the country, without which they could 
 not be permitted to vote, but also certain other qualifications 
 on the part of the country's schoolmasters, without which 
 they could not be voted for. We would thus impart to the 
 scheme such a twofold aspect of security as that for which 
 in a purely ecclesiastical matter we contended, when we 
 urged that none but Church members should be permitted 
 to choose their own ministers; and that none but ministers 
 pronounced duly qualified in life, literature, and doctrine, 
 by a competent ecclesiastical court, should they be per- 
 mitted to choose. There ought to exist a teaching Faculty 
 as certainly as there exists a medical or legal Faculty, or as 
 there exists in the Church what is essentially a preacher- 
 licensing Faculty. The membership of a Church are un- 
 fitted in their aggregate character to judge respecting at 
 least the literature of the young licentiate whom, in their 
 own and their children's behalf, they call to the pastoral 
 charge; the people of a district, however shrewd and 
 solid, are equally unqualified to determine whether the 
 young practitioner of medicine or of law who settles 
 among them is competently acquainted with his profession, 
 and so a fit person to be entrusted with the care of their 
 health or the protection of their property. And hence the 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 43 
 
 necessity which exists in all these cases for testing, licens- 
 ing, diploma-giving courts or boards, composed of men 
 qualified to decide regarding those special points of ability 
 or acquirement which the people, as such, cannot try for 
 themselves. In no case, however, are courts of this nature 
 more imperatively required than in the case of the school- 
 master. Neither the amount of literature which he pos- 
 sesses, nor yet his mastery over the most approved modes 
 of communicating it, can be tested by the people, who, 
 as parents and ratepayers, possess the exclusive right to 
 make choice of him for th^eir parish or district school ; and 
 hence the necessity that what they cannot do for them- 
 selves should be previously done for them by some compe- 
 tent court or board, and that no teacher who did not pos- 
 sess a licence or diploma should be eligible to at least an 
 endowed seminary supported by the public money. With, 
 of course, the qualifications of the mere adventure-teacher, 
 whether supported by Churches or individuals, we would 
 permit no board to interfere. As to the composition of 
 the board itself, that, we hold, might be determined on 
 very simple principles. Let the College-bred teachers of 
 Scotland, associated with its University professors, select 
 for themselves, out of their own number, a dean or chair- 
 man, and a court or committee, legally qualified by Act of 
 Parliament stringently to try all teachers who may present 
 themselves before them, in order to be rendered eligible for 
 a national school, and to grant them licences or diplomas, 
 legally representative of professional qualification. Whether 
 a teacher, on his election by the people, might not be a 
 second time tried, especially on behalf of the State and 
 the ratepayers, by a Government inspectorship, and thus a 
 check on the board be instituted, we are not at present 
 called on to determine ; but on this we are clear, that the 
 certificate of no Normal School, in behalf of its own pupils, 
 ought to be received otherwise than as a mere makeweight 
 
44 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 in the general item of professional character ; seeing that 
 any such document would be as much a certificate of the 
 Normal School's own ability in rearing efficient teachers, 
 as of the pedagogical skill of the teachers which it reared. 
 The vitiating element of self-interest would scarce fail to 
 induce, ultimately at least, a suspicious habit of self-recom- 
 mendation. 
 
 Such, then, in this matter, is our full tale of qualification, 
 pedagogical and popular, of the educators of the country 
 on the one hand, and of the educational franchise-holders 
 of the country on the other. And now we request the 
 reader to mark one mighty result of the arrangement, which 
 no other yet set in opposition to it could possibly produce. 
 There are in Scotland about one thousand one hundred 
 national schools, supported by national resources ; and, of 
 consequence, though fallen into the hands of a mere sect, 
 which in some localities does not include a tithe of the 
 population, they of right belong to the Scottish people. 
 And these schools of the people that extension of the 
 educational franchise which we desiderate would not fail 
 to restore to the people. It would put them once more in 
 possession of what was their own property de facto at the 
 Revolution (for at that period, when, with a few inconsider- 
 able exceptions, they were all of one creed, the ministry of 
 the Established Church virtually represented them), and of 
 what has been de jure their property ever since. But by 
 the ministry of no one Church can the people be repre- 
 sented now. The long rule of Moderatism, the conse- 
 quent formation of the Secession and Relief Churches, 
 the growth of Independency and Episcopacy, and last, 
 but not least in the series, the Disruption, and the instan- 
 taneous creation of the Free Church, have put an end to 
 that state of things for ever. The time has in the course 
 of Providence fairly come, when the people must be per- 
 mitted in this matter to represent themselves ; and there is 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 45 
 
 one thing sure, the struggle may be protracted, but the 
 issue is certain. Important, however, as are our parish 
 schools, and rich in associations so intimately linked to the 
 intellectual glory of the nation, that, were they but mere 
 relics of the past, the custodiership of them might well be 
 most desirable to the Scottish people, they represent but a 
 small part of the stake involved in the present all-engrossing 
 movement. It seeks also to provide from the coffers of 
 the State on a broad basis of popular representation, and 
 with the reservation of a right on the part of the people 
 to supplement whatever instruction the State may not or 
 cannot supply that fearful educational destitution of the 
 nation which is sinking its tens and hundreds of thousands 
 into abject pauperism and barbarous ignorance, and which 
 neither Churches nor Societies can of themselves supply. 
 It is the first hopeful movement of the age ; for our own 
 Free Church educational movement, though perhaps second 
 in point of importance, only serves irrefragably to demon- 
 strate its necessity. 
 
 It is, we repeat, to the people of Scotland, and not to 
 any one of the Churches of Scotland, that our scheme of 
 a widely-based and truly popular franchise would restore 
 the Scottish schools. Mr. George Combe is, however, 
 quite in the right in holding that religion is too intimately 
 associated with the educational question, and too decidedly 
 a force in the country, to be excluded from the national 
 seminaries, 'unless, indeed, Government do something 
 more than merely omit the religious element.' l All is lost, 
 Mr. Combe justly infers, on the non-religious side of the 
 
 1 ' The sixth resolution [of the Educational Manifesto], in which the 
 opinion of Dr. Chalmers is quoted, that Government [should] abstain 
 from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the 
 scheme, must, as here introduced, be presumed to mean, that in the 
 Act of the Legislature which shall carry the views of the resolutionists 
 into practical effect, nothing shall be said about religious instruction ; 
 but that power shall be given to the heads of families to manage the 
 
46 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 question, if the introduction of the Bible and Shorter Cate- 
 chism be not prohibited by Act of Parliament ; for, if not 
 stringently prohibited, what Parliament merely omits doing, 
 a Bible and Catechism loving people will to a certainty do ; 
 and the conscience of the phrenologist and his followers will 
 not fail to be outraged by the spectacle of Bible classes in 
 the national schools, and of State schoolmasters instilling 
 into the youthful mind, by means of the Shorter Catechism, 
 the doctrine of original sin and the work of the Spirit. 
 Nay, more ; as it is not in the power of mere Acts of the 
 Legislature to eradicate from the hearts of a people those 
 feelings of partiality, based on deep religious conviction 
 and the associations of ages, with which it is natural to 
 regard a co-religionist, more especially in the case of the 
 teacher to whom one's children are to read their daily 
 chapter and repeat their weekly tale of questions, deno- 
 mination must and will continue to exert its powerful in- 
 fluence in the election of national schoolmasters popularly 
 chosen. And as there are certain extensive districts in 
 Scotland in which some one Church is the stronger, and 
 other certain districts in which some other Church is the 
 stronger, there are whole shires and provinces in which, 
 if selected on the popular scheme, the national teachers 
 would be found well-nigh all of one religious denomination. 
 From John O'Groat's to Beauly, for instance, they would 
 be all, or almost all, Free Churchmen ; for in that extensive 
 district almost all the people are Free Church. In the 
 Scottish Highlands generally, nearly the same result would 
 be produced, from, of course, the existence of a similar 
 
 schools, and prescribe the subjects to be taught, according to their own 
 convictions of what is sound in religious and useful in secular instruc- 
 tion. But this would leave the religious rights of the minority com- 
 pletely unprotected. Government must do something more than omit 
 the religious element : it must limit the power of the majority to in- 
 troduce this element into their schools to the injury of the minority.' 
 Letter of Mr. George Combe on the Educational Movement. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 47 
 
 constituency. In Inverness, and onwards along the sea- 
 coast to Aberdeen, Montrose, St. Andrews, and the Frith 
 of Forth, the element of old dissent would be influentially 
 felt : the great parties among the people would be three 
 Establishment, Free Church, and Voluntary ; and which- 
 ever two of them united, would succeed in defeating the 
 third. And such unions, no doubt, frequently would take 
 place. The Voluntaries and Free Churchmen would often 
 unite for the carrying of a man; and occasionally, no doubt, 
 the Free Church and the Establishment, for the carrying of 
 & principle, that principle of religious teaching on which, 
 in the coming struggle, the State Church will be neces- 
 sitated to take her stand. To the south of the Frith of 
 Forth on to Berwick, and along the western coast from 
 Dumbarton to the Sol way, there would be localities par- 
 celled out into large farms, in which the Establishment 
 would prevail ; and of course, wherever it can reckon up 
 a majority of the more solid people, it is but right and 
 proper that the Establishment should prevail ; but who can 
 doubt that even in these districts the national teaching 
 would be immensely heightened by a scheme which gave 
 to parents and ratepayers the selection of their teachers, 
 and restricted their choice to intelligent and qualified men? 
 Wherever there is liberty, there will be discussion and dif- 
 ference ; and the election of a schoolmaster would not be 
 managed quite as quietly under the anticipated state of 
 things, with the whole people of a parish for his constitu- 
 ency, as in the present, by a minister and factor over a 
 social glass. But the objection taken by anticipation to 
 popular heats and con tend ings in such cases is as old as 
 the first stirrings of a free spirit among the people, and the 
 first struggles of despotism to bind them down. We our- 
 selves have heard it twice urged on the unpopular side, 
 once when the rotten burghs were nodding to their fall, 
 and once when an unrestricted patronage was imperilled by 
 
48 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 the encroachments of the Veto. There will, and must be, 
 difference ; and difference too, Scotland being what it is, 
 in which the religious element will not fail to mingle; but 
 not the less completely on that account will the scheme 
 restore the Scottish schools to the Scottish people, as repre- 
 sented by the majority, and to the membership of the Free 
 Church, in the de facto statistical sense and proportion in 
 which the Free Church is national. It will not restore 
 them to us in the theoretic sense ; but then there are at 
 least three other true original Churches of Scotland, which 
 in that respect will be greatly worse off than ourselves, 
 the true national Cameronian Church, the true national 
 Episcopalian Church, and a true compact little Church of 
 the whole nation, that, in the form of one very excellent 
 minister, labours in the east. 
 
 Meanwhile, we would fain say to our country folk and 
 readers of the north of Scotland : You, of all the Free 
 Churchmen of the kingdom, have an especial stake in this 
 matter. Examine for yourselves, trust to your own good 
 sense, exercise as Protestants your right of private judg- 
 ment, and see whether, as Christian men and good 
 Scotchmen, you may not fairly employ the political in- 
 fluence given you by God and your country, in possessing 
 yourselves of the parish schools. There will be deep points 
 mooted in this controversy, which neither you nor we will 
 ever be in the least able to understand. You will no doubt 
 be told of a theocratic theory of the British Government, 
 perfectly compatible, somehow, with the receipt of educa- 
 tional grants from which all recognition of the religious 
 element on the part of the State is, at the express request 
 of the Church, to be thoroughly discharged, but not at all 
 compatible with the receipt of an educational endowment 
 of exactly the same character, from which the same State 
 recognition of the same religious element is to be dis- 
 charged in the same degree. You will, we say, not be able 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION*. 49 
 
 to understand this. The late Dr. Thomas Chalmers and 
 the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty could not under- 
 stand it ; we question much whether Dr. William Cunning- 
 ham understands it ; and we are quite sure that Dr. Guthrie 
 and Dr. Begg do not. And you, who are poor simple 
 laymen, will never be able to understand it at all. But you 
 are all able to understand that the parish schools of your 
 respective districts, now lying empty and useless, belong of 
 right to you ; and that it would be a very excellent thing 
 to have that right restored to you, both on your own behalf 
 and on that of your children. 
 
5 o THOUGHTS ON 
 
 CHAPTER FOURTH. 
 
 Objections urged by the Free Church Presbytery of Glasgow against the Educational 
 Movement Equally suited to bear against the Scheme of Educational Grants- 
 Great superiority of Territorial over Denominational Endowment The Scottish 
 People sound as a whole, but some of the Scottish Sects very unsound State of 
 the Free Church Educational Scheme. 
 
 'WHEREAS attempts are now being made to reform the 
 parish schools of Scotland, on the principle of altogether 
 excluding religion from national recognition as an element 
 in the national system of education, and leaving it solely to 
 private parties to determine in each locality whether any 
 or what religious instruction will be introduced into the 
 parochial schools, it is humbly overtured to the Venerable 
 the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, to 
 declare that this Church can be no party to any plan of 
 education based on the negation of religion in the general, 
 or of the national faith in particular,' etc. 
 
 Such is the gist of that ' Overture on Education ' which 
 was carried some three weeks ago by a majority of the Free 
 Church Presbytery of Glasgow. It has the merit of being 
 a clear enunciation of meaning ; of being also at least as 
 well fitted to express the views of the Established as of the 
 Free Church courts in Glasgow and elsewhere, and a great 
 deal better suited to serve as a cloak to their policy ; and, 
 further, by a very slight adaptation, it could be made to 
 bear as directly against State grants given for educational 
 purposes, if dissociated from the religious certificate, as 
 against State endowments given for the same purpose, when 
 dissociated from statutory religious requirement. It is the 
 religious certificate most anomalously demanded of de- 
 nominations diametrically opposed to each other in their 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 51 
 
 beliefs, and subversive of each other in their teachings 
 that constitutes in the affair of educational grants the re- 
 cognition of religion on the part of the State. Educa- 
 tional grants dissociated from the religious certificate are 
 educational grants dissociated from the State recognition of 
 religion. The fact that the certificates demanded should 
 be of so anomalous a character, is simply a reflection of the 
 all-important fact that the British people are broken up into 
 antagonistic Churches and hostile denominations, and that 
 the British Government is representative. And that men 
 such as those members and ofiice-bearers of our Church 
 who hold the middle position between that occupied by 
 Mr. Gibson of Glasgow on the one hand, and Dr. Begg of 
 Edinburgh on the other, should see no other way of avail- 
 ing themselves of the educational grants, with a good con- 
 science, than by getting rid of the religious recognition, 
 only serves to show that they are quite as sensible as their 
 opponents in the liberal section of the enormous difficulty 
 of the case, and can bethink themselves of no better mode 
 of unlocking it. For it will not be contended, that if in 
 the matter of grants there is to be no recognition of religion 
 on the part of the State, the want of it could be more 
 adequately supplied by sects, as such, denominationally 
 divided, than by the people of Scotland, as such, terri- 
 torially divided ; seeing that sects, as such, include Papists, 
 Puseyites, Socinians, and Seceders, Muggletonians, Juggle- 
 tonians, New Jerusalemites, and United Presbyterians, 
 Free-thinking Christians, Free-Willers, and Free Church- 
 men. Nor can we see either the wisdom or the advantage 
 of any scheme of Government inquiry into the educational 
 destitution of a locality, that, instead of supplying the want 
 which it found, would merely placard the place by a sort of 
 feuing ticket destined, we are afraid, in many instances 
 to be sadly weather-bleached which would intimate to the 
 sects in general, that were any one of them to come for- 
 
52 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 ward and enact the part of school-builder and pedagogue, 
 the State would undertake for a portion of the expenses. 
 We suppose the advertisement on the ticket would run 
 somewhat as follows : ' WANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT, A 
 CHURCH TO ERECT A SCHOOL. TERMS LIBERAL, AND NO 
 CERTIFICATE OF RELIGIOUS TEACHING DEMANDED. N. B. 
 
 PAPISTS, PUSEYITES, AND SOCINIANS PERFECTLY ELIGIBLE.' 1 
 
 Leaving, however, to profounder intellects than our own 
 the adjustment of the nice principles involved in this matter, 
 let us advert to what we deem the practical advantages of 
 a territorial scheme of educational endowments over a de- 
 
 1 The following portion of a motion on the educational question, 
 announced in the Edinburgh Presbytery of the Free Church on the 6th 
 of February last, is specially referred to in this paragraph : 
 
 * That the successful working of the present Government plan would 
 be greatly promoted by the following amendments : 
 
 ' 1st, The entire omission in all cases (except, perhaps, the case of 
 the Established Church) of the certificate regarding religious instruc- 
 tion, and the recognition of all bodies, whether Churches or private 
 parties and associations, as equally entitled to receive aid. 
 
 ' 2d, The adoption of a rule in proportioning Government grants to 
 local efforts more flexible, and admitting of far more liberal aid in desti- 
 tute localities, as compared with those which are in a better condition. 
 
 * 3</, The institution, on the part of Government, of an inquiry into 
 the destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbour- 
 hoods, and remote districts, with a view of marking out places where 
 elementary schools are particularly needed ; and the holding out of 
 special encouragement to whatever parties may come forward as willing 
 to plant such schools. 
 
 1 That the preceding suggestions, if adopted, would go far to render 
 the present Government plan unobjectionable in principle, and also to 
 fit it in practice for ascertaining the educational wants of the country ; 
 but that a much more liberal expenditure of the public money would 
 seem to be indispensable, as well as a less stringent application, upon 
 adequate cause shown, of the rules by which the expenditure is 
 regulated.' 
 
 In bringing the motion forward in the following meeting of Presby- 
 tery, the clause recommending the ' entire omission in all cases of the 
 certificate regarding religious instruction ' was suffered to drop. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 53 
 
 nominational scheme of educational grants. At present, all 
 or any of the sects may come forward as such, whatever 
 their character or teaching, and, on fulfilling certain con- 
 ditions, receive assistance from the Government in the form 
 of an educational grant ; whereas, by the scheme which we 
 would fain see set in its place, it would be only the more 
 solid people of districts let us suppose parishes that 
 would be qualified to come forward to choose for them- 
 selves their parochial State-endowed teachers. And at least 
 one of the advantages of this scheme over the other must be 
 surely obvious and plain. Denominationally ', there is much 
 unsoundness in Scotland; territorially, there is very little. 
 There exist, unhappily, differences among our Scottish 
 Presbyterians ; but not the less on that account has Pres- 
 byterianism, in its three great divisions Voluntary, Estab- 
 lishment, and Free Church possessed itself of the land in 
 all its length and breadth. The only other form of religion 
 that has a territorial existence in Scotland at all is Popery, 
 and Popery holds merely a few darkened districts of the 
 outer Hebrides and of the Highlands. It would fail, out of 
 the one thousand one hundred parish schools of the country, 
 to carry half-a-dozen ; and no other form of religious error 
 would succeed in carrying so much as one parish school. 
 There is no Socinian district in Scotland ; old Scotch 
 Episcopacy has not its single parish ; and high Puseyism 
 has not its half, or quarter, or even tithe of a parish. That 
 Church of Scotland which Knox founded, with its off- 
 shoots the Secession and Relief bodies, has not laboured in 
 vain ; and through the blessing of God on these labours, 
 Scotland, as represented by its territorial majorities, is by 
 far the soundest and most orthodox country in the world. 
 A wise and patriotic man at once a good Scot and a 
 judicious Churchman would, we think, hesitate long ere 
 he flung away so solid an advantage, won to us by the 
 labours, the contendings, the sufferings of reformers, con- 
 
54 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 fessors, martyrs, and ministers of the truth, from the days 
 of Melville and of Henderson, down to those of the 
 Erskines and of Chalmers. He would at least not fail to 
 ask himself whether that to which what was so unequi- 
 vocally substance was to be sacrificed, was in itself substance 
 or shadow. 
 
 Let us next remark, that the Scottish national schools, 
 while they thus could not fail to be essentially sound on 
 the territorial scheme just because Scotland is itself essen- 
 tially sound as a nation might, and would in very many 
 instances, be essentially unsound on a denominational one. 
 There is no form of religious error, which may not, in the 
 present state of things, have, as we have said, its schools 
 supported in part by a Government grant, and which may 
 not have its pupil-teachers trained up to disseminate deadly 
 error at the public expense among the youthhead of the 
 future. Edinburgh, for instance, has its one Popish street 
 the Cowgate ; but it has no Popish parish : it has got 
 very little Popery in George Square and its neighbourhood, 
 very little at the Bristo Port, very little in Broughton 
 Street ; and yet in all these localities, territorially Pro- 
 testant, Papists have got their religion-teaching schools, in 
 which pupil-teachers, paid by the State, are in the course 
 of being duly qualified for carrying on the work of perver- 
 sion and proselytism. St. Patrick's school, in which, as 
 our readers were so lately shown, boys may spend four 
 years without acquiring even the simple accomplishment of 
 reading, has no fewer than five of these embryo perverters 
 supported by the Government. Puseyism has, in the same 
 way, no territorial standing on the northern shores of the 
 Frith of Forth ; and yet at least one Free Church minister, 
 located in one of the towns which stud that coast, could 
 tell of a well-equipped Puseyite school in his immediate 
 neighbourhood, supported in part by the Government grant, 
 that, by the superiority of the secular education which it 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 55 
 
 supplies, is drawing away Presbyterian, nay, even Free 
 Church children, from the other schools of the locality. 
 On the territorial principle, we repeat, schools such as 
 these, which rest on the denominational basis alone, could 
 not possibly receive the support and countenance of the 
 Legislature. And let the reader remark, that should the 
 Free Church succeed in getting rid of the anomalous reli- 
 gious certificate, and yet continue to hold by the denomina- 
 tional basis, something worse than mere denomination would 
 scarce fail to step in. The Combeite might then freely 
 come forward to teach at the public expense, that no other 
 soul of man has yet been ascertained to exist than the 
 human brain, and no other superintending Providence than 
 the blind laws of insensate matter. Nay, even Socialism, 
 just a little disguised, might begin to build and teach for 
 the benefit of the young, secure of being backed and assisted 
 in its work by the civil magistrate. Further, should the 
 grant scheme be rendered more flexible, i.e. extended to a 
 lower grade of qualification, and thus the public purse be 
 applied to the maintenance and perpetuation of a hedge- 
 school system of education, or should it be rendered more 
 liberal, i.e. should the Government be induced to do pro- 
 portionally more, and the school-builders be required to do 
 proportionally less, superstition and infidelity would, in 
 the carrying out of their schemes of perversion, have, in 
 consequence, just all the less to sacrifice and to acquire. 
 According to the present arrangement, a schoolmaster must 
 realize, from salary and fees united, the sum of forty-five 
 annual pounds, and be, besides, furnished with a free 
 house, ere he can receive from the Government a grant on 
 its lowest scale, viz. fifteen pounds; 1 and whatever judg- 
 
 1 Such are the proportions laid down in the official document for 
 Scotland of the Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council on Educa- 
 tion. We understand, however, that the Government inspectors 
 possess certain modifying powers, through which the Government 
 
5 6 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 ment may be formed of the proportion in which the State 
 contributes, there can be no question that the general 
 arrangement is a wise one. Sermonizing dominies could 
 be had, no doubt, at any price ; and there can be as little 
 doubt that, at any price, would the great bulk of them turn 
 out to be * doons hard bargains / but it is wholly impossible 
 that a country should have respectable and efficient teachers 
 under from sixty to eighty pounds a year. The thing, we 
 repeat, is wholly impossible ; and the State, in acting, as in 
 this arrangement, on the conviction, does but its duty to 
 its people. The some sixty or seventy pounds, however, 
 would be as certainly realized as under the present arrange- 
 ment, were it Government that contributed the forty-five 
 pounds, and the denomination or society the fifteen and 
 the free house; and this, of course, would be eminently 
 liberal. But what would be the effects of so happy a 
 change ? It might in some degree relieve the Free Church 
 Scheme from financial difficulty ; but would it do nothing 
 more ? There are Puseyite ladies in Scotland, high in rank 
 and influence, and possessed of much wealth and great 
 zeal, who are already building their schools, in the hope of 
 unprotestantizing their poor lapsed country, spiritually ruined 
 by the Reformation. The liberality that might in part 
 enable the Free Church Education Committee to discharge 
 its obligations at the rate of twenty shillings per pound, 
 would be a wonderful godsend to them ; seeing that they 
 would have little else to do, under a scheme so liberal, than 
 simply to erect schoolhouses on the widespread domains 
 of their husbands or fathers, and immediately commence 
 perverting the children of the nation at the national cost. 
 It would be no less advantageous to the Society of the 
 Propaganda, and would enable it to spare its own purse, 
 
 grant is occasionally extended to deserving teachers whose salary and 
 fees united fall considerably short of the specified sum of forty-five 
 pounds. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 57 
 
 by opening to it that of the people. The Socinian, the 
 Combeite, the semi-Socialist none of them very much dis- 
 posed to liberality themselves would all share in that of 
 the Government ; and their zeal, no longer tied down to 
 inactivity by the dread of pecuniary sacrifice or obligation, 
 would find wings and come abroad. Surely, with such 
 consequences in prospect, our Free Church readers would 
 do well to ponder the nature and demands of the crisis at 
 which they have now arrived. Our country and our Church 
 have in reality but one set of interests ; and a man cannot 
 be a bad Scot without being a bad Free Churchman too. 
 Let them decide in this matter, not under the guidance of 
 an oblique eye, squinted on little temporary difficulties or 
 hypothetical denominational advantages, but influenced by 
 considerations of the permanent welfare of their country, 
 and of their abiding obligations to their God. 
 
 But why, it may be asked of the writer, if you be thus 
 sensible of the immense superiority of a territorial scheme 
 of educational endowments over a denominational scheme 
 of educational grants, why did you yourself urge, some 
 three years ago, that the Free Church should avail herself 
 of these very grants? Our reply is sufficiently simple. 
 The denominational scheme of grants was the only scheme 
 before us at the time ; these grants were, we saw, in danger 
 of being rejected by the Free Church on what we deemed 
 an unsound and perilous principle, which was in itself in no 
 degree Free Church ; and last, not least, we saw further, that 
 if the Church did not avail herself of these grants, there 
 awaited on her Educational Scheme ominously devoid 
 of that direct divine mandate which all her other schemes 
 possessed inevitable and disastrous bankruptcy. But 
 circumstances have greatly changed. The Free Church is 
 no longer in any danger from the principle which would 
 have rejected Government assistance. There is now a 
 territorial scheme brought full before the view of the 
 
58 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 country; and, further, the Government grants have wholly 
 failed to preserve our Educational Scheme from the state 
 of extreme pecuniary embarrassment which we too surely 
 anticipated. Salaries of ^"15 and 20 per annum are 
 greatly less than adequate for the support and remuneration 
 of even the lower order of teachers, especially in thinly- 
 peopled districts of country, where pupils are few and the 
 fees inconsiderable. But at these low rates it was deter- 
 mined, in the programme of the Free Church Educational 
 Scheme, that about three-fourths of the Church's teachers 
 should be paid ; and there are. scores and hundreds among 
 them who regulated their expenditure on the arrangement. 
 For at least the last two years, however, the Education 
 Committee has been paying its 1$ salaries at the reduced 
 rate of ^10, and its ,20 salaries at the rate of ,13, 135. 
 4d. ; and those embarrassments, of which the reduction 
 was a consequence, have borne with distressful effect on 
 the Committee's employes. However orthodox their creed, 
 their circumstances have in many instances become Anti- 
 nomian; nor, while teaching religion to others, have they 
 been able in every instance to conform to one of its simplest 
 demands ' O\ve no man anything.' 
 
 There were several important items, let us remark, in 
 which we over-estimated the amount of assistance which 
 the Scheme was to receive from the Government ; and 
 this mainly from our looking at the matter in the gross, as 
 a question of proportion so much granted for so much 
 raised without taking into account certain conditions de- 
 manded by the Minutes of Council on the one hand, and a 
 certain course of management adopted on the part of our 
 Education Committee on the other. The grant is given in 
 proportion to salary of one to two (we at present set aside 
 the element of fees) : a salary of thirty pounds is supple- 
 mented by a grant of fifteen pounds, a salary of forty 
 pounds by a grant of twenty, a salary of fifty by a grant 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 59 
 
 of twenty-five, and so on ; and we were sanguine enough 
 to calculate, that an aggregate sum of some ten or twelve 
 thousand pounds raised by the Church for salaries, would 
 be supplemented by an aggregation of grants from the 
 Government to the amount of some five or six thousand 
 pounds more. The minimum sum regarded as essentially 
 necessary for carrying on the Free Church Educational 
 Scheme had been estimated at twenty thousand pounds. 
 If the Free Church raise but twelve thousand of these, we 
 said, Government will give her six thousand additional in 
 the form of grants, and some two thousand additional, or 
 so, for the training of her pupil-teachers ; and the Church 
 will thus be enabled to realize her minimum estimate. We 
 did not take the fact into account, that of our Free Church 
 teachers a preponderating majority should fail successfully 
 to compete for the Government money; nor yet that the 
 educational funds should be so broken up into driblet 
 salaries, attached to schools in which the fees were poor 
 and the pupils few, that the schoolmaster, even though 
 possessed of the necessary literary qualification, would in 
 many cases be some twenty, or even thirty, pounds short of 
 the necessary money qualification, i.e. the essential forty-five 
 annual pounds. We did not, we say, take these circum- 
 stances into account, indeed, it was scarce possible that 
 we could have done so ; and so we immensely over-esti- 
 mated the efficacy of the State grant in maintaining the 
 solvency of our Educational Scheme. We learn from Dr. 
 Reid's recent Report to our metropolitan church court, 
 that of the forty-two Free Church teachers connected with 
 the Presbytery of Edinburgh, and in receipt of salaries from 
 the Education Committee, only thirteen have been success- 
 ful in obtaining Government certificates of merit. And 
 even this is a rather high average, compared with that of 
 the other districts ; for we have ascertained, that of the six 
 hundred and eighty-nine teachers of the Free Church scat- 
 
60 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 tered over the kingdom, not more than a hundred and 
 twenty-nine have received the Government grant. There 
 are, however, among the others, teachers who have failed 
 to attain to it, not from any want of the literary qualifi- 
 cation for some of them actually possess the parchment 
 certificate bearing the signature of Lansdowne but simply 
 because they are unfortunate enough to lack the pecuniary 
 one. 
 
 That which we so much dreaded has come, we repeat, 
 upon our Educational Scheme. The subject is a painfully 
 delicate one, and we have long kept aloof from it ; but 
 truth, and truth only, can now enable the Free Church 
 and her people to act, in this emergency, as becomes the 
 character which they bear, and the circumstances in which 
 they are placed. Let us not fall into the delusion of deem- 
 ing the mere array of our Free Church schools and teachers 
 their numbers and formidable length of line any matter 
 of congratulation; nor forget, in our future calculations, 
 that if the Free Church now realizes from ; 10,000 to 
 ;i 2,000 yearly for educational purposes, she would require 
 to realize some ^"5000 or ^6000 more in order to qualify 
 her to meet her existing liabilities, estimated at the very 
 moderate rates laid down in the programme. The ^"5000 
 or ;6ooo additional, instead of enabling her to erect a 
 single additional school, would only enable her to pay in 
 full her teachers' salaries. And so it is obviously a delusion 
 to hold that our Free Church Educational Scheme supplies 
 in reality two-thirds of our congregations with teachers, 
 seeing that these teachers are only two-thirds paid. We 
 are still some .5000 or ;6ooo short of supplying the two- 
 thirds, and some ^6000 or ^7000 more of supplying the 
 whole. And even were the whole of our own membership 
 to be supplied, the grand query, How is our country to be 
 educated, our parish schools to be restored to usefulness 
 and the Scotch people, and Scotland herself to resume 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 61 
 
 and maintain her old place among the nations ? would 
 come back upon us as emphatically as now. Judging from 
 what has been already done, and this after every nerve has 
 been strained in the Sisyphisian work of rolling up-hill an 
 ever-returning stone, it seems wholly impossible that we 
 should ever succeed in educating the young of even our 
 own congregations ; and how, then, save on some great 
 national scheme, is a sinking nation to be educated ? 
 
62 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 CHAPTER FIFTH. 
 
 Unskilled Labourers remunerated at a higher rate than many of our Free Church 
 Teachers The Teaching must be inferior it the Remuneration be low Effect 
 of inferior Teaching on the parties taught Statutory Security ; where are the 
 parties to contend for it ? Necessity of a Government Inquiry ' O for an hour 
 of Knox!' 
 
 THAT higher order of farm-servants which are known techni- 
 cally in Mid-Lothian as ' sowers and stackers,' receive, as 
 their yearly wages, in the immediate neighbourhood of the 
 house of the writer, eighteen pounds in money, four bolls 
 oatmeal, two cart-loads of potatoes, and about from twenty 
 to thirty shillings worth of milk. The money value of the 
 whole amounts, at the present time, to something between 
 twenty-three and twenty-four pounds sterling. We are in- 
 formed by a Fifeshire proprietor, that in his part of the 
 country, a superior farm-servant, neither grieve nor foreman, 
 receives eight pounds in money, six and a half bolls meal, 
 three cart-loads of potatoes, and the use of a cow, generally 
 estimated as worth from ten to twelve pounds annually. 
 His aggregate wages, therefore, average from about twenty- 
 four to twenty-six pounds ten shillings a year. And we are 
 told by another proprietor of the south of Scotland, that 
 each of the better hinds in his employment costs him every 
 year about thirty pounds. In fine, to the south of the 
 Grampians, the emoluments of our more efficient class of 
 farm-servants range from twenty -three to thirty pounds 
 yearly. We need not refer to the wages of railway navvies, 
 nor yet to those of the superior classes of mechanics, such 
 as printers, masons, jewellers, typefounders, etc. There is 
 not a printer in the Witness office who would be permitted 
 by the rules of his profession, to make an arrangement 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 63 
 
 with his employers, were he to exchange piece-work for 
 wages, that did not secure to him twenty-five shillings per 
 week. To expect that a country or Church can possibly 
 have efficient schoolmasters at a lower rate of emolument 
 than not only skilled mechanics, but than even unskilled 
 railway labourers, or the c stackers and sowers ' of our large 
 farms, is so palpably a delusion, that simply to name it is to 
 expose it. And yet of our Free Church schoolmasters, 
 especially in thinly-peopled rural districts and the High- 
 lands, there are scores remunerated at a lower rate than 
 labourers and farm-servants, and hundreds at a rate at least 
 as low; and if we except the fortunate hundred and twenty- 
 nine who receive the Government grant, few indeed of the 
 others rise to the level of the skilled mechanic. Greatly 
 more than two-thirds of our teachers were placed originally 
 on the ;i5 and 20 scale of salaries: these are now paid 
 with ;io and 1$, 135. 4d. respectively. There are many 
 localities in which these pittances are not more than doubled 
 by the fees, and some localities in which they are even less 
 than doubled ; and so a preponderating majority of the 
 schoolmasters of the Free Church are miserably poor men : 
 for what might be a competency to a labourer or hind, must 
 be utter poverty to them. And not a few of their number 
 are distressfully embarrassed and in debt. 
 
 Now this will never do. The Church may make herself 
 very sure, that for her 10 or ^13 she will receive ulti- 
 mately only the worth of ;io or ^13. She may get wind- 
 falls of single teachers for a few months or years : superior 
 young men may occasionally make a brief stay in her 
 schools, in the course of their progress to something better, 
 as Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hol- 
 lowed in the side of the Hill Difficulty; but only very 
 mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind 
 to make good masons or carpenters, will stick last in them. 
 We have learned that, in one northern locality, no fewer 
 
64 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last 
 either tendered their resignations, or are on the eve of 
 doing so. These, it will be found, are superior men, who 
 rationally aspire to something better than mere ploughman's 
 wages ; but there will of course be no resignations tendered 
 by the class who, in even the lowest depths of the Scheme, 
 have found but their proper level. These, as the more 
 active spirits fly off, will flow in and fill up their places, till, 
 wherever the ;io and 1$ salaries prevail, and in what 
 rural district do they not prevail ? the general pedagogical 
 acquirements of our teachers will present a surface as flat, 
 dull, and unprofitable as ditch-water. For what, we again 
 ask, can be expected for ^10 or ^13 ? And let the 
 reader but mark the effect of such teaching. We have seen 
 placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English 
 school, in which what are deemed the branches suitable for 
 mechanics and their children, such as reading, writing, and 
 arithmetic, were energetically taught, and a grammar school 
 in which a university-bred schoolmaster laboured, with 
 really not much energy, especially in those lower depart- 
 ments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted to 
 prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical 
 enthusiasm. And it struck us as a significant and instruc- 
 tive fact, that while the good English school, though it 
 turned out smart readers and clever arithmeticians, failed to 
 elevate a single man from the lower to the middle or higher 
 walks of life, the grammar school was successful in elevating 
 a great many. The principle on which such a difference of 
 result should have been obtained is so obvious, that it can 
 scarce be necessary to point it out. The teaching of the 
 one school was a narrow lane, trim, 'tis true, and well kept, 
 but which led to only workshops, brick-kilns, and quarries ; 
 whereas that of the other was a broad, partially-neglected 
 avenue, which opened into the great professional highways, 
 that lead everywhere. And if the difference was one which 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 65 
 
 could not be obviated by all the energy of a superior and 
 well-paid English teacher, how, we ask, is it to be obviated 
 by our Free Church 10 and ^13 teachers? Surely our 
 Church would do well to ponder whether it can be either 
 her interest or her duty to urge on any scheme, in opposi- 
 tion to a national one, which would have all too palpably 
 the effect of degrading her poorer membership, so far as 
 they availed themselves of it, into the Gibeonites of the 
 community its hewers of wood and drawers of water. 
 Never will Scotland possess an educational scheme truly 
 national, and either worthy of her ancient fame or adequate 
 to the demands and emergencies of an age like the present, 
 until at least every parish shall possess among its other 
 teachers its one university-bred schoolmaster, popularly 
 chosen, and well paid, and suited to assist in transplanting 
 to the higher places of society those select and vigorous 
 scions that from time to time spring up from the stock of 
 the commonalty. The waking dream of running down the 
 ignorance and misery of a sinking country by an array of 
 starveling teachers in the train of any one denomination 
 itself, mayhap, sufficiently attenuated by the demands of 
 purely ecclesiastical objects must be likened to that other 
 waking dream of the belated German peasant, who sees 
 from some deep glade of his native forests a spectral hunt 
 sweep through the clouds, skeleton stags pursued by 
 skeleton huntsmen, mounted on skeleton horses, and sur- 
 rounded by skeleton beagles ; and who hears, as the wild 
 pageant recedes into the darkness, the hollow tantivy and 
 the spectral horns echoing loud and wildly through the 
 angry heavens. 
 
 It is of paramount importance that the Free Church 
 should in the present crisis take up her position wisely. 
 We have heard of invaders of desperate courage, who, on 
 landing upon some shore on which they had determined 
 either to conquer or to perish, set fire to their ships, and 
 
 E 
 
66 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 thus shut out the possibility of retreat. Now the Free 
 Church whether she land herself into an agitation for a 
 scheme of Government grants rendered more liberal and 
 flexible than now, and dissociated from the religious certi- 
 ficate, or whether she plant her foot on a scheme of national 
 education based on a statutory recognition of the peda- 
 gogical teaching of religion is certainly in no condition to 
 burn her ships. Let her not rashly commit herself against 
 a third scheme, essentially one in principle with that which 
 the sagacious Chalmers could regard, after long and pro- 
 found reflection, as the only one truly eligible in the cir- 
 cumstances of the country, and which she herself, some two 
 or three years hence, may be compelled to regard in a 
 similar light. The educational agitation is not to be settled 
 in the course of a few brief months ; nor yet by the votes 
 of Presbyteries, Synods, or General Assemblies, whether 
 they belong to the Free or to the Established Churches. 
 It rises direct out of the great social question of the time. 
 Scotland as such forms one of its battle-fields, and Scotch- 
 men as such are the parties who are to be engaged in 
 the fight ; and the issue, though ultimately secure, will long 
 seem doubtful. And so the Free Church may have quite 
 time enough to fight her own battle, or rather her own two 
 battles in succession, and, when both are over, find that 
 the great general contest still remains undecided. 
 
 For what we must deem by much the better and more 
 important battle of the two that for a statutory demand 
 on the part of the State that the Bible and Shorter Cate- 
 chism should be taught in the national schools we are 
 afraid the time is past; but most happy would we be to 
 find ourselves mistaken. The Church of Scotland, as re- 
 presented by that majority which is now the Free Church, 
 might have succeeded in carrying some such measure ten 
 years ago, when the parish schools were yet in her custody ; 
 just as she might have succeeded seven years earlier in 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. . 67 
 
 obviating the dire necessity which led to the Disruption, 
 by acting upon the advice of the wise and far-seeing M'Crie. 1 
 But she was not less prepared at the one date to agitate for 
 the total abolition of patronage, than at the other to throw 
 open the parish schools on the basis of a statutory security 
 for the teaching of religion. In both cases, the golden 
 opportunity was suffered to pass by; and Old Time pre- 
 sents to her now but the bald retreating occiput, which her 
 eager hand may in vain attempt to grasp. Where, we ask, 
 are we to look for the forces that are to assist us in righting 
 this battle of statutory security? Has the Establishment 
 become more liberal, or more disposed to open the parish 
 schools, than we ourselves were when we composed the 
 majority of that very Establishment? Alas! in order to 
 satisfy ourselves on that head, we have but to look at the 
 decisions of her various ecclesiastical courts. Or is it the 
 old Scottish Dissenters that are to change their entire 
 front, and to make common cause with us, in disregard, 
 'and even in defiance, of their own principles, as they them- 
 selves understand them ? Or are we to look to that evan- 
 gelical portion of the Episcopacy of England, with whom 
 Establishment means Church, and the * good of the Estab- 
 lishment ' a synonyme for the * good of the Church/ and 
 who, to a certainty, will move no hand against the sister 
 Establishment in Scotland ? Or are we to be aided by that 
 portion of English Independency that has so very strangely 
 taken its stand equally against educational grants and edu- 
 cational endowments, on the ground that there is a sort of 
 religion homoeopathically diffused in all education espe- 
 cially, we suppose, in Lindley Murray's readings from the 
 Spectator and Dr. Blair and that, as the State must not 
 provide religious teaching for its people, it cannot, and 
 
 1 To demand of that Parliament which carried the Reform Bill the 
 repeal of the Patronage Act, instead of enacting, on her own authority, 
 the Veto Law. 
 
63 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 must not, provide for them teaching of any kind ? Scientific 
 Jews are they, of the straitest sect, who, wiser than their 
 fathers, have ascertained by the microscope, that all meat, 
 however nicely washed, continues to retain its molecules of 
 blood, and that flesh therefore must on no account be 
 eaten. We cannot, we say, discern, within the wide hori- 
 zon of existing realities, the troops with which this battle 
 is to be fought. They seem to be mere shadows of the 
 past. But if the Free Church see otherwise, let her by all 
 means summon them up, and fight it. Regarded simply as 
 a matter of policy, we are afraid the contest would be at 
 least imprudent. ' It were well,' said a Scotch officer to 
 Wolfe, when Chatham first called out the Highlanders of 
 Scotland to fight in the wars of Britain, * It were well, 
 General, that you should know the character of these High- 
 land troops. Do not attempt manoeuvring with them; 
 Scotch Highlanders don't understand manoeuvre. If you 
 make a feint of charging, they will throw themselves sword 
 in hand into the thick of the enemy, and you will in vain 
 attempt calling them back ; or if you make a show of re- 
 treating, they will run away in right earnest, and you will 
 never see them more. So do not employ them in feints 
 and stratagems, but keep them for the hard, serious busi- 
 ness of the fight, and you will find them the best troops 
 in the world/ Now, nearly the same character applies to 
 the Free Church. To set her a-fighting as a matter of 
 policy, would be very bad policy indeed. She would find 
 out reasons, semi-theological at least, for all her positions, 
 however hopeless, and would continue fixed in these long 
 after the battle had been fought and lost, and when she 
 ought to be engaged in retrieving her disasters on other 
 ground, and in a fresh and more promising quarrel. But 
 if the Free Church does enter into this battle, let her in 
 the meantime not forget, that after it has been fought, 
 and at least possibly lost, another battle may have still to 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 69 
 
 be begun; nor let her attempt damaging, by doubtful 
 theology, the position which a preponderating majority of 
 her own office-bearers and members may have yet to take 
 up. For, ultimately at least, the damage would be all her 
 own. Let her remark further, that should her people set 
 their hearts pretty strongly on those national seminaries, 
 which in many parts of the country would become, if 
 opened up, wholly their own de facto, and which are already 
 their own dejure, they might not be quite able to feel the 
 cogency of the argument that, while it left Socinians and 
 Papists in the enjoyment of at once very liberal and very 
 flexible Government grants, challenged their right to choose, 
 on their own responsibility, State-paid teachers for their 
 children ; and which virtually assured them, that if they did 
 not contribute largely to the educational scheme of their own 
 Church, she would be wholly unable to maintain it as a 
 sort of mid-impediment between them and their just rights, 
 the parish schools. They would be exceedingly apt, too, 
 to translate any very determined and general preference 
 manifested by our church courts for the scheme of educa- 
 tional grants, into some such enunciation as the following : 
 ' Give us to ourselves but a moiety of one-third of the 
 Scottish young, and we will frankly give up the other two- 
 thirds, the one-half of them to be destroyed by gross 
 ignorance, and the other half by deadly error.' l 
 
 There is at least one point on which we think all Free 
 
 1 ' I see,' said Knox, when the Privy Council, in dividing the eccle- 
 siastical revenues of the kingdom into three parts, determined on giving 
 two of these to the nobility, and on dividing the remaining part be- 
 tween the Protestant ministry and the Court, ' I see two-thirds freely 
 given to the devil, and the other third divided between God and the 
 devil : if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me !' Our 
 church courts, if they declare for the system of denominational grants, 
 in opposition to the territorial endowments of a scheme truly national, 
 will be securing virtually a similar division of the people, with but this 
 difference, that God's share of the reserved moiety may be a very small 
 
7 o THOUGHTS ON 
 
 Churchmen ought to agree. It is necessary that the truth 
 should be known respecting the educational condition and 
 resources of Scotland. It will, we understand, be moved 
 to-day [February 27th], in the Free Church Presbytery of 
 Edinburgh, as a thing good and desirable, that Government 
 should ' institute an inquiry into the educational destitution 
 confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbour- 
 hoods, and remote districts, with a view to the marking out 
 of places where elementary schools are particularly needed,' 
 etc. Would it not be more satisfactory to move instead, 
 the desirableness of a Government Commission of Inquiry, 
 ist, into the educational condition of all the youth of 
 Scotland between the years of six and fifteen, on the 
 scheme of that inquiry recently conducted by a Free Church 
 Educational Association in the Tron parish of Glasgow ; 
 2</, into the condition, character, and teaching of all the 
 
 share indeed. And can it possibly be held that the shame and guilt 
 of such an arrangement can be obviated by the votes of Synods or 
 Assemblies ? or that, with an intelligent laity to judge in the matter, 
 the ' end of this order ' can be other than unhappy ? The schools of 
 the Free Church have already, it is said, done much good. We would, 
 we reply, be without excuse, in taking up our present position a posi- 
 tion in which we have painfully to differ from so many of the friends 
 in whose behalf for the last ten years we deemed it at once a privilege 
 and an honour to contend did we believe that more than six hundred 
 Protestant schools could exist in Scotland without doing much good. 
 Of nothing, however, are we more convinced, than that the good which 
 they have done has been accomplished by them in their character as 
 schools, not in their character as denomination aL We know a little 
 regarding this matter ; for in our journeyings of many thousand miles 
 over Scotland, especially in the Highlands and the northern counties, 
 we have made some use of both our eyes and ears. We have seen, 
 and sickened to see, hordes of schoolboys of ten and twelve years 
 bandying as nicknames, with boys whose parents belonged to the 
 Establishment, the terms of polemic controversy. 'Moderate' has 
 become in juvenile mouths as much a term of hatred and reproach in 
 extensive districts of our country, as we remember * Frenchman' used 
 to be during the great revolutionary war. Our children bid fair to 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 71 
 
 various schools of the country, whether parochial, Free 
 Church, or adventure schools, with the actual amount of 
 pupils in attendance at each ; and 3^, into the general 
 standing, acquirements, and emoluments of all the teachers? 
 Not only would the report of such a Commission be of 
 much solid value in itself, from the amount of fact which 
 it would furnish for the direction of educational exertion 
 on the part of both the people and the State ; but it might 
 also have the effect of preventing good men from taking up, 
 in the coming contest, untenable and suspicious ground. 
 It would lay open the true state of our parish schools, 
 and not only show how utterly useless these institutions 
 have become, from at least the shores of the Beauly to 
 those of the Pentland Frith, and throughout the Highlands 
 generally, but also expose the gross exaggeration of the 
 estimate furnished by Mr. Macrae, and adopted by Dr. 
 
 get, in their state of denominational separatism, at least religion enough 
 heartily to hate their neighbours ; and, we are afraid, not much more. 
 Now, it may be thought that the Editor of the Witness, himself long 
 engaged in semi-theological warfare, ought to be silent in a matter of 
 this kind. Be it remembered, we reply, that it was men, not children, 
 whom the Editor of the Witness made it his business to address ; and 
 that when, in what he deemed a good cause, he appealed to the under- 
 standings of his adult country-folk, he besought them in every instance 
 to test and examine ere they judged and decided. He did not contem- 
 plate a phase of the controversy in which unthinking children should 
 come from their schools to contend with other children, in the spirit of 
 those little ones of Bethel who ' came forth out of their city' to mock 
 and to jeer ; or that immature, unreasoning minds should be torn by 
 the she-bears of uncharitable feeling, at an age when the points really 
 at issue in the case can be received only as prejudices, and expressed 
 only by the mere calling of names. And seeing and knowing what he 
 has seen and knows, he has become sincerely desirous that controversy 
 should be left to at least the adult population of the country, and that 
 its children of all the communions should be sent to mingle together in 
 their games and their tasks, and to form their unselfish attachments, 
 under a wise system of national tuition, as thoroughly Christian as may 
 be, but at the same time as little as possible polemical or sectarian. 
 
72 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 Mnir. 1 Further, it would have the effect of preventing any 
 member of either the Free Church or the Establishment from 
 resorting to the detestable policy of those Dissenters of 
 England, who, in order to secure certain petty advantages 
 to their own miserable sects, set themselves to represent 
 their poor country perishing at the time for lack of know- 
 ledge as comparatively little in need of educational assist- 
 ance. But we trust this at least is an enormity, at once 
 criminal and mean, of which no Scotchman, whatever his 
 Church, could possibly be guilty ; and so we shall not do 
 our country the injustice of holding that, though it pro- 
 duced its 'fause Sir Johns' in the past, it contains in the 
 present one such traitor, until we at least see the man. 
 Further, a State Report of the kind would lay open to us, 
 in the severe statistical form, the actual emoluments of our 
 own Free Church teachers. We trust, then, that this 
 scheme of a searching Government inquiry may be re- 
 garded as a first great step towards the important work of 
 educating the Scottish people, in which all ought to agree, 
 however thoroughly at variance in matters of principle or 
 on points of detail. 
 
 It is of mighty importance that men should look at things 
 as they really are. Let us remember that it is not for the 
 emergencies of yesterday that we are now called on to pro- 
 vide, but for the necessities of to-day, not for Scotland in 
 the year 1592, nor yet in the year 1700, but for Scotland in 
 the year 1850. What might be the best possible course in 
 these bygone ages, may be, and is, wholly an impracticable 
 course now. Church at both these earlier dates meant not 
 only an orthodox communion, but also that preponderating 
 majority of the nation which reckoned up as its own the 
 great bulk of both the rulers and the ruled, and at once 
 owned the best and longest swords, and wore the strongest 
 
 1 To the effect that there are a hundred thousand children in attend- 
 ance at the parish schools of Scotland. 
 
THE ED UCA TIONAL Q UESTION. 7 3 
 
 armour ; whereas it now means, legally at least, merely two 
 Erastianized Establishments, and politically, all the Chris- 
 tian denominations that possess votes and return members 
 to Parliament. The prism seizes on a single white ray, and 
 decomposes it into a definitely proportioned spectrum, 
 gorgeous with the primary colours. The representative 
 principle of a Government such as ours takes up, as if by a 
 reverse process, those diverse hues of the denominational 
 spectrum that vary the face of society, and compounds 
 them in the Legislature into a blank. Save for the exist- 
 ence of the two Establishments strong on other than 
 religious grounds and the peculiar tinge which they cast 
 on the institutions of the country, the blank would be still 
 more perfect than it is ; and this fact a direct result of 
 the strongly marked hues of the denominational spectrum, 
 operated upon by the representative principle we can no 
 more change than we can the optical law. Let there be 
 but the colour of one religion in the national spectrum, 
 and the Legislature will wear but one religious colour : let 
 it consist of half-a-dozen colours, and the Legislature will 
 be of none. ' O for an hour of Knox ! ' it has been said by 
 a good and able man, from whom, however, in this ques- 
 tion we greatly differ, * O for an hour of Knox to defend 
 the national religious education which he was raised up to 
 institute !' Knox, be it remembered, was wise, prudent, 
 sagacious, in accordance with the demands of his time. A 
 Knox of the exact fashion of the sixteenth century, raised 
 up in the middle of the nineteenth, would be but a slim, 
 long-bearded effigy of a Knox, grotesquely attired in a 
 Geneva cloak and cap, and with the straw and hay that 
 stuffed him sticking out in tufts from his waistband. ' O for 
 an hour of Knox ! ' The Scottish Church of the present 
 age has already had its Knox. ' Elias hath already come.' 
 The large-minded, wise-hearted Knox of the nineteenth 
 century died at Morningside three years ago ; and he has 
 
74 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 bequeathed, as a precious legacy to the' Church, his judg- 
 ment on this very question. 'It were the best state of 
 things,' he said, ' that we had a Parliament sufficiently theo- 
 logical to discriminate between the right and the wrong in 
 religion, and to endow accordingly. But failing this, it 
 seems to us the next best thing, that in any public measure 
 for helping on the education of the people, Government 
 were to abstain from introducing the element of religion at 
 all into their part of the scheme ; and this not because they 
 held the matter to be insignificant, the contrary might be 
 strongly expressed in the preamble of their Act, 1 but on 
 the ground that, in the present divided state of the Chris- 
 tian world, they would take no cognizance of, just because 
 they would attempt no control over, the religion of appli- 
 cants for aid, leaving this matter entire to the parties who 
 had to do with the erection and management of the schools 
 which they had been called upon to assist. A grant by the 
 State on this footing might be regarded as being appropri- 
 ately and exclusively the expression of their value for a 
 good secular education.' 
 
 1 ' We are aware,' says a respected antagonist, ' that Mr. Miller is no 
 Deist ; his argument, nevertheless, rests on a deistical position, a 
 charge to which Dr. Chalmers' letter is not liable to be exposed, in 
 consequence of its first sentence, and of what it recommends in a 
 Government preamble. ' If there be such virtue in a preamble, say we, 
 let us by all means have a preamble ten preambles if necessary 
 rather than a deistic principle. We would fain imitate in this matter 
 the tolerance of Luther. ' A complaint comes that such and such a 
 reformed preacher will not preach without a cassock. "Well," 
 answers Luther, "what harm will a cassock do the man? Let him 
 have a cassock to preach in ; let him have three cassocks, if he find 
 benefit in them."' 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 75 
 
 CHAPTER SIXTH. 
 
 Our previous Statement regarding the actual Condition of the Free Church Educa- 
 tional Scheme absolutely necessary Voluntary Objections to a National Scheme, 
 as stated by the Opponents of the Voluntaries ; not particularly solid Examina- 
 tion of the matter. 
 
 OUR episode regarding the Free Church Educational Scheme 
 now fairly completed, let us return to the general question. 
 The reader may, however, do well to note the inevitable 
 necessity which existed on our part, that our wholesome, 
 though mayhap unpalatable, statements respecting it should 
 have been submitted to the Church and the country. The 
 grand question which in the course of Providence had at 
 length arisen was, ' How is our sinking country to be 
 educated ? ' We had taken our stand, as a Scotchman, in 
 behalf of the Scottish people ; and as the belief seemed 
 widely to exist that our own Free Church scheme was 
 adequate, or at least nearly so, to the education of the chil- 
 dren of our own membership, and that our duty as Scotch- 
 men could be fulfilled, somehow, by concentrating all our 
 exertions upon it, it had become essentially necessary that 
 the delusion should be dispelled. And so we have showed, 
 that while our scheme, in order fully to supply the educa- 
 tional wants of even our own people, would require to 
 exist in the proportion of nine, it exists nominally in but the 
 proportion of six, and in reality in but the proportion of 
 four, seeing that the six, i.e. our existing staff of teachers, 
 amounting to but two-thirds of the number required, are 
 but two-thirds paid ; in short, that our educational specu- 
 lation is exactly in the circumstances of a railway company 
 who, having engaged to cut a line ninety miles in length, have 
 succeeded in cutting forty miles of it at their own proper 
 
76 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 expense, and then having cut twenty miles more on prefer- 
 ence shares, find their further progress arrested by a lack 
 of funds. And so it became necessary to show that the 
 existence and circumstances of our Free Church schools, 
 instead of furnishing, as had been urged in several of our 
 presbyteries, any argument against the agitation of the 
 general question, furnished, on the contrary, the best pos- 
 sible of all arguments/?/- its agitation ; and to show further, 
 that the policy which brought a denominational scheme, 
 that did not look beyond ourselves, into a great national 
 engagement, in the character of a privateer virtually on 
 the side of the enemy, was a most perilous policy, that 
 exposed it to damaging broadsides, and telling shot right 
 between wind and water. 
 
 Let us now pass on to the consideration of a matter on 
 which we but touched before, the perfect compatibility of 
 a consistent Voluntaryism with religious teaching in a school 
 endowed by the State, on the principle of Dr. Chalmers. 
 The Witness is as little Voluntary now as it ever was. It 
 seems but fair, however, that a principle should be saddled 
 with only the consequences that legitimately arise from it ; 
 and that Voluntaryism should not be exposed, in this con- 
 test, to a species of witchcraft, that first caricatures it in 
 an ill-modelled image, and then sticks the ugly thing over 
 with pins. 
 
 The revenues of the State-endowed schools of this 
 country and, we suppose, of every other are derived 
 from two distinct sources : from Government, who fur- 
 nishes the schoolmaster's salary, and erects the building in 
 which he teaches ; and from the parents or guardians, who 
 remunerate him according to certain graduated rates for 
 the kind of instruction which he communicates to their 
 children or wards. And the rationale of this State assist- 
 ance seems very obvious. It is of importance to the State, 
 both on economic and judicial grounds, that all its people 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 77 
 
 should be taught; but, on the adventure-school principle, 
 it is impossible that they should all be taught, seeing that 
 adventure schools can thrive in only densely peopled 
 localities, or where supported by wealthy families, that pay 
 largely for their children's education. And so, in order 
 that education may be brought down to the humblest of 
 the people, the State supplements, in its own and its 
 people's behalf, the schoolmaster's income, and builds him 
 a school. Such seems to be the principle of educational 
 endowments. Now, if the State, in endowing national 
 schoolmasters, were to signify that it endowed them in 
 order that, among other things, they should teach religion, we 
 can well see how a Voluntary who conscientiously holds, as 
 such, that religion ought not to be State-endowed, might be 
 unable to avail himself, on his children's behalf, of the State- 
 enjoined religious teaching of any such functionaries; just 
 as we can also see, that if the State forbade its schoolmasters 
 on any account to teach religion, a conscientious holder of 
 the Establishment principle might be perhaps equally un- 
 able to avail himself of services so restricted. We can at 
 least see how each, in turn, might lodge an alternate pro- 
 test, the one against the positive exclusion of religion by 
 the State, the other against its positive introduction. But 
 if, according to Chalmers, the State, aware of the difficulty, 
 tenders its endowment and builds its schools ' simply as an 
 expression of its value for a good secular education,' and 
 avowedly leaves the religious part of the school training to 
 be determined by the parties who furnish that moiety of the 
 schoolmaster's support derived from fees i.e. the parents 
 or guardians we find in the arrangement ground on which 
 the Voluntary and the Establishment man can meet and 
 agree. For the State virtually wills by such a settlement 
 and both by what it demands, and by what it does not 
 demand, but permits that its salaried functionary should 
 stand to his employers, the people, simply in the relation of 
 
78 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 an adventure schoolmaster. The State says virtually to its 
 teacher in such circumstances : * I, as the general guardian 
 of your pupils, do not pay you for their religious education ; 
 but their particular and special guardians, the parents, are 
 quite at liberty to make with you on that head whatever 
 bargain they please. Fully aware of the vast importance of 
 religious teaching, and yet wholly unable, from the denomi- 
 national differences of the time, at once to provide for it in 
 the national seminaries, and to render these equal to the 
 wants of the country, I throw the whole responsibility in 
 this matter on the divided people, whom I cannot unite in 
 their religion, but whose general education I am not on 
 that account at liberty to neglect.' On grounds such as 
 these, we repeat, Voluntaryism and the Establishment prin- 
 ciple may meet and agree. 
 
 There can be little doubt, however, that there are men 
 on both sides sparingly gifted with common sense : for 
 never yet was there a great question widely and popularly 
 agitated, that did not divide not only the wise men, but 
 also the fools of the community; and we have heard it 
 urged by some of the representatives of the weaker class, 
 that a Voluntary could not permit his children to be taught 
 religion under a roof provided by the State. Really, with 
 all respect for the cap and bells, this is driving the matter a 
 little too far. We have been told by a relative, now de- 
 ceased, who served on shipboard during the first revolution- 
 ary war, and saw some hard fighting, that at the close of a 
 hot engagement, in which victory remained with the British, 
 the captain of the vessel in which he sailed a devout and 
 brave man called his crew together upon the quarter- 
 deck, and offered up thanks to God in an impressive 
 prayer. The noble ship in which he sailed was the pro- 
 perty of the State, and he himself a State-paid official ; but 
 was there anything in either circumstance to justify a pro- 
 test from even the most rabid Voluntary against the part 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 79 
 
 which he acted on this interesting occasion, simply as a 
 Christian hero? Nay, had he sought to employ and pay 
 out of his private purse in behalf of his crew an evangelical 
 missionary, as decidedly Voluntary in his views as John 
 Foster or Robert Hall, would the man have once thought 
 of objecting to the work because it was to be prosecuted 
 under the shelter of beams and planks, every one of which 
 belonged to the Government ? Would a, pious Voluntary 
 soldier keep aloof from a prayer-meeting on no other 
 ground than that it was held in a barrack ? or did the first 
 Voluntaries of Great Britain, the high-toned Independents 
 that fought under Cromwell, abstain from their preachings 
 and their prayers when cooped up by the enemy in a 
 garrison ? Where is the religious Voluntary who would not 
 exhort in a prison, or offer up an unbought prayer on a 
 public, State-provided scaffold, for some wretched criminal 
 shivering on the verge of the grave ? 
 
 Now the schoolmaster, in the circumstances laid down 
 by Chalmers, we hold to be in at least as favourable a 
 position with respect to the State and the State- erected 
 edifice in which he teaches, as the ship-captain or the non- 
 commissioned missionary the devout Voluntary soldier, 
 or the pious Independents of Cromwell's Ironsides. He is, 
 in his secular character, a State-paid official, sheltered by an 
 erection the property of the State; but the State permits 
 him to bear in that erection another character, in relation 
 to another certain employer, whom it recognises as quite as 
 legitimately in the field as itself, and permits him also 
 though it does not enjoin to perform his duties there as a 
 Christian man. Though, however, the objection to religious 
 teaching under the State-erected roof may be suffered to 
 drop, there may be an objection raised and there has 
 been an objection raised against the teaching of religion 
 in certain periods of time during the day, for which it is 
 somehow taken for granted the State pays. Hence the 
 
8o THOUGHTS ON 
 
 argument for teaching religion in certain other periods of 
 time not paid for by the State or in other words, during 
 separate hours. Now the entire difference here seems to 
 originate in a vicious begging of the question. It is not 
 the State that specifies the hours during each day in which 
 State-endowed and State-erected schools are taught ; on the 
 contrary, varying as these hours do, and must, in various 
 parts of the town and country for a thinly-peopled district 
 demands one set of hours, and a densely-peopled locality 
 another they are fixed, as mere matters of mutual arrange- 
 ment, to suit the convenience of the teachers and the taught. 
 It is enough that the State satisfy itself, through its inspec- 
 tors, that the secular instruction for which it pays is effec- 
 tually imparted to its people : it neither does nor will lay 
 claim to any one hour of the day as its own, whether before 
 noon or after it. It will leave to the English Establishment 
 its canonical hours, sacred to organ music and the Liturgy ; 
 but it will set apart by enactment no pedagogical hours, 
 sacred to arithmetic or algebra, the construing of verbs, or 
 the drawing of figures. If separate hours merely mean that 
 the master is not to have all his classes up at once here 
 gabbling Latin or Greek, there discussing the primer or 
 reciting from Scott's Collection, yonder repeating the multi- 
 plication table or running over the rules of Lindley Murray 
 we at once say religion must have its separate hour, just 
 as English, the dead tongues, figuring, writing, and the 
 mathematics, have their separate hours ; but if it be meant 
 that the religious teaching of the school must be restricted 
 to some hour not paid for by the State, then we reply witli 
 equal readiness that we know of no hour specially paid for 
 by the State, and so utterly fail to recognise any principle 
 in the proposed arrangement, or rather in the objection 
 that would suggest it. 
 
 As to the question of a separate fee for religious tuition, 
 let us consider how it is usually solved in the adventure 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 81 
 
 schools of the country. The day is, in most cases, opened 
 by the master with prayer, and then there is a portion of 
 Scripture read by the pupils. And neither the Scripture 
 read nor the prayer offered up fall, we are disposed to 
 think, under the head of religious tuition, but under a 
 greatly better head that of religion itself. It is a proper 
 devotional beginning of the business of the day. The com- 
 mittal of the Shorter Catechism which with most children 
 is altogether an exercise of memory, but which, accom- 
 plished in youth, while the intellect yet sleeps, produces 
 effects in after years almost always beneficial to the under- 
 standing, and not tmfrequently ameliorative of the heart 
 we place in a different category. It is not religion, but the 
 teaching of religion ; not food for the present, but store 
 laid up for the future. With the committal to memory of 
 the Catechism we class that species of Scripture dissection 
 now so common in schools, which so often mangles what 
 it carves. 1 And religion taught in this way is and ought to 
 be represented in the fee paid to the teacher, and is and 
 ought to be taught in a class as separate from all the others 
 as the geography or the grammar class. Such is, we under- 
 
 1 It is not uninstructive to remark how invariably in this matter an 
 important point has been taken for granted which has not yet been 
 proven ; and how the most serious charges have been preferred against 
 men's principles, on the assumption that there exists in the question a 
 certain divine truth, which may be neither divine nor yet a truth at all. 
 Wisdom and goodness may be exhibited in both the negative and posi- 
 tive form both by avoiding what is wicked and foolish, and by doing 
 what is good and wise. And while no Christian doubts that the ador- 
 able Head of the Church manifested His character, when on earth, in 
 both ways, at least no Presbyterian doubts that He manifested it not 
 only by instituting certain orders in His Church, but also by omitting 
 to institute in it certain other orders. He instituted, for instance, an 
 order of preachers of the gospel ; He did not institute an order of popes 
 and cardinals. Neither, however, did He institute an order of 're- 
 ligion-teaching ' schoolmasters ; and the question not yet settled, and 
 of which, without compromising a single article in our standards, 
 
 F 
 
82 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 stand, a common arrangement in Scottish adventure schools ; 
 nor does there exist a single good reason for preventing it 
 from also obtaining in the Scottish national schools. If the 
 parentage of Scotland, whether Voluntary or Establishment, 
 were to be vested with the power of determining that it 
 should be so, and of selecting their schoolmasters, the 
 schools would open with prayer and the reading of the 
 Word not because they were State-endowed, but because, 
 the State leaving the point entirely open, they were the schools 
 
 either side may be espoused, is, whether our Saviour manifested His 
 wisdom in not making use of the schoolmaster, or whether, without 
 indicating His mind on the subject, He left the schoolmaster to be 
 legitimately employed in an after-development of the Church. 
 
 Indeed, so entirely in this matter is the Free Church at sea, with- 
 out chart or compass, that it has still to be determined whether the 
 religious teaching of her schools be of a tendency to add to or to 
 diminish the religious feeling of the country. ' I sometimes regretted 
 to observe,' says Dr. Reid, in his Report on the Schools in connection 
 with the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh, ' that [their lessons in the Bible 
 and Shorter Catechism] were taught rather too much in the style of the 
 ordinary lessons. I do not object to places being taken, or any other 
 means employed, which a teacher may consider necessary to secure 
 attention during a Scripture lesson ; but divine truth should always be 
 communicated with solemnity.' Now, such is the general defect of the 
 religious teaching of the schoolroom. Nor is it to be obviated, we 
 fear, by any expression of extra solemnity thrown into the pedagogical 
 face, or even by the taking of places or the taws. And there seems 
 reason to dread that lessons of this character can have but the effect of 
 commonplacing the great truths of religion in the mind, and hardening 
 the heart against their after application from the pulpit. But some ten 
 or twelve years will serve to unveil to the Free Church the real nature of 
 the experiment in which she is now engaged. For our own part, we can 
 have little doubt, be the matter decided as it may, that experience will 
 serve ultimately to show how vast the inferiority really is of man's 
 1 teachers of religion ' to Christ's preachers of the gospel. 
 
 We shall never forget at least the more prominent particulars of a 
 conversation on this subject which we were privileged to hold with one 
 of the most original-minded clergymen (now, alas, no more) our Church 
 ever produced. He referred, first, to the false association which those 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 83 
 
 of a Christian land, to which Christian parents had sent their 
 children, and for which, on their own proper responsibility, 
 they had chosen, so far as they could determine the point, 
 Christian teachers. And for this religious part of the ser- 
 vices of the day we would deem it derogatory to the charac- 
 ter of a schoolmaster to suppose that he could receive any 
 remuneration from the parents of his pupils, or from any one 
 else. For the proper devotional services of the school we 
 would place on exactly the same high disinterested level as the 
 
 words of world-wide meaning, ' religious education, ' are almost sure to 
 induce, when restricted, in a narrow, inadequate sense, to the teaching 
 of the schoolmaster ; and next, to the divine commission of the minister 
 of the gospel. ' Perverted as human nature is, ' he remarked, ' there 
 are cases in which, by appealing to its sentiments and affections, we 
 may derive a very nice evidence respecting the divine origin of certain 
 institutions and injunctions. For instance, the Chinese hold, as one of 
 their religious beliefs, that parents have a paramount claim to the affec- 
 tions of their sons and daughters, long after they have been married and 
 settled in the world ; whereas our Saviour teaches that a man should 
 leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the wife leave 
 father and mother and cleave to her husband. And as, in the case of 
 the dead and living child, Solomon sought his evidence, in the feelings 
 of the women that came before him, and determined her to be the true 
 mother in whom he found the true mother's love and regard, I would 
 seek my evidence, in this other case, in the affections of human nature ; 
 and ask them whether they declared for the law of the Chinese Baal, 
 or for that of Him who implanted them in the heart. And how prompt 
 and satisfactory the reply ! The love which of twain makes one flesh 
 approves itself, in all experience, to be greatly stronger and more en- 
 grossing than that which attaches the child to the parent ; and while we 
 see the unnatural Chinese law making the weaker traverse and overrule 
 the stronger affection, and thus demonstrating its own falsity, we find 
 the law of Christ exquisitely concerting with the nature which Christ 
 gave, and thus establishing its own truth. Now, regarding the com- 
 mission of the minister of the gospel,' he continued, 'I put a similar 
 question to the affections, and receive from them a not less satisfactory 
 reply. The God who gave the commission does inspire a love for him 
 who truly bears it ; ay, a love but even too engrossing at times, and 
 that, by running to excess, defeats its proper end, by making the servant 
 
84 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 devotional exercises of the family, or as those of the gallant 
 officer and his crew, who, paid for but the defence of their 
 country, gave God thanks on the blood-stained quarter-deck, 
 in their character as Christians, that He had sheltered their 
 heads in one of their country's battles, and then cast them- 
 selves in faith upon His further care. We would, we say, 
 deem it an insult to the profession to speak of a monetary 
 remuneration for the read word or the prayer offered up. 
 Nay, if either was rated at but a single penny as its price, 
 
 eclipse in the congregational mind the Master whose message he bears. 
 But I do believe that the sentiment, like the order to which it attaches, 
 is, in its own proper place, of divine appointment. It is a preparation 
 for the reception in love of the gospel message. God does not will that 
 His message should be injured by any prejudice against the bearer of 
 it ; and that His will in this matter might be adequately carried out, 
 was one of the grand objects of our contendings in the Church contro- 
 versy. But we are not to calculate on the existence of any such strong 
 feeling of love between the children of a school and their teacher. If, 
 founding on the experience of our own early years, we think of the 
 schoolmaster, not in his present relation to ourselves as a fellow-citizen, 
 or as a servant of the Church, but simply in his connection with the 
 immature class on which he operates, we will find him circled round in 
 their estimation (save in perhaps a very few exceptional cases) with 
 greatly more of terror than affection. There are no two classes of feel- 
 ings in human nature more diverse than the class with which the school- 
 master and the class with which the minister of the gospel is regarded 
 by their respective charges ; and right well was St. Paul aware of the 
 fact, when he sought in the terrors of the schoolmaster an illustration of 
 the terrors of the law. And in this fence of terror we may perhaps find 
 a reason why Christ never committed to the schoolmaster the gospel 
 message.' We are afraid we do but little justice, in this passage, to the 
 thinking of our deceased friend ; for we cannot recall his flowing and 
 singularly happy language, but we have, we trust, preserved his leading 
 ideas ; and they are, we think, worthy of being carefully pondered. 
 We may add, that he was a man who had done much in his parish for 
 education ; but that he had at length seen, though without relaxing his 
 efforts, that the religious teaching of his schools had failed to make the 
 rising generation under his charge religious, and had been led seriously 
 to inquire regarding the cause of its failure. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 85 
 
 or if there was a single penny expected for either, where is 
 there the man, Voluntary or Free Church, that would deem 
 it worth the money ? The story of the footman, who, upon 
 being told, on entering on his new place, that he would 
 have to attend family prayers, expressed a hope that the 
 duty would be considered in his wages, has become one of 
 the standard jokes of our jest-books. We would, however, 
 place the religious teaching of the school on an entirely 
 different footing from its religious services. We would 
 assign to it its separate class and its separate time, just as 
 we would assign a separate class and time to the teaching 
 of English grammar, or history, or the dead languages. 
 And whether the remuneration was specified or merely 
 understood, we would deem it but reasonable that this 
 branch of teaching, like all the other branches which occu- 
 pied the time and tasked the exertions of the teacher, should 
 be remunerated by a fee : in this department of tuition, as in 
 the others, we would deem the labourer worthy of his hire. 
 We need scarce add, however, that we would recognise no 
 power in the majority of any locality, or in the school- 
 master whom they had chosen, to render attendance at even 
 the devotional services of the seminary compulsory on the 
 children of parents who, on religious or other grounds, willed 
 that they should not join in the general worship. And, of 
 course, attendance on the religion-teaching class would be 
 altogether as much a matter of arrangement between the 
 parent and the schoolmaster, as attendance on the Latin or 
 English classes, or on arithmetic, algebra, or the mathematics. 
 While, however, we can see no proper grounds for dif- 
 ference between Voluntaries and Free Churchmen, on even 
 these details of school management, and see, further, that 
 they never differ regarding the way in which the adventure 
 schools of the country are conducted, we must remind the 
 reader that all on which they have really to agree on this 
 question, as Scotchmen and franchise-holders, is simply 
 
86 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 whether their country ought not, in the first place, to pos- 
 sess an efficient system of national schools, open to all 
 the Christian denominations ; whether, in the second, the 
 parents ought not to be permitted to exercise, on their 
 own responsibility, the natural right of determining what 
 their children should be taught ; and whether, in the third, 
 the householders of a district ought not to be vested in the 
 power, now possessed by the heritors and parish minister, 
 of choosing the teacher. Agreement on these heads is 
 really all that is necessary towards either the preliminary 
 agitation of the question, or in order to secure its ultimate 
 success. The minor points would all come to be settled, 
 not on the legislative platform, but in the parishes, by the 
 householders. Voluntaryism, wise and foolish, does not 
 reckon up more than a third of the population of Scotland ; 
 and foolish, i.e. extreme Voluntaries for the sensible ones 
 would be all with us would find themselves, when they 
 came to record their votes, a very small minority indeed. 
 And so, though their extreme views may now be repre- 
 sented as lions in the path, it would be found ultimately 
 that, like the Irons which affrighted Pilgrim in the avenue, 
 and made the poor man run back, they are lions well 
 chained up lions, in short, in a minority, like the agri- 
 cultural lion in Punch. Let us remark, further, that if 
 some of our friends deem the scheme proposed for Scot- 
 land too little religious, it is as certain that the assertors 
 of the scheme now proposed for England, and advocated 
 in Parliament by Mr. Fox, very decidedly object to it on 
 the opposite score. Like the grace said by the Rev. 
 Reuben Butler, which was censured by the Captain of 
 Knockdunder as too long, and by douce Davie Deans as 
 too short, it is condemned for faults so decidedly antago- 
 nistic in their character, that they cannot co-exist together. 
 One class of persons look exclusively at that lack of a 
 statutory recognition of religion which the scheme involves, 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 87 
 
 and denounce it as infidel; another, at the religious charac- 
 ter of the people of Scotland, and at the consequent cer- 
 tainty, also involved in the scheme, that they will render 
 their schools transcripts of themselves, and so they condemn 
 it as orthodox. And hence the opposite views entertained 
 by Mr. Combe of Edinburgh on the one hand, and Mr. 
 Gibson of Glasgow on the other. 1 
 
 1 Mr. Combe, however, may be regarded as an extreme man ; and 
 so the following letter, valuable as illustrating the views of a not very 
 extreme opponent, though a decided assertor of the non-religious system 
 of tuition, may be well deemed instructive. The writer, Mr. Samuel 
 Lucas, was for many years Chairman of that Lancashire Public School 
 Association which Mr. Fox proposes as the model of his scheme : 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE SCOTSMAN. 
 
 SIR, In your paper of the 26th ultimo, I observe among the adver- 
 tisements a set of resolutions which have been agreed to and signed by 
 a number of parties, with the view of a national movement in favour of 
 an unsectarian system of national education. It is perhaps too early to 
 say, that though the names of some of the parties are well known and 
 highly esteemed in this country, yet that the names of many who might 
 be expected to be foremost in promoting such an object are wanting. 
 
 I cannot, however, help thinking, that some of these may have been 
 prevented from signing the document in question by some considera- 
 . tions which have occurred to myself on the perusal of it ; and as a few 
 lines of editorial comment indicate that the project has your sanction, 
 you will perhaps allow me briefly to say why I think the people of 
 Scotland should give to it the most deliberate consideration before com- 
 mitting themselves to it. 
 
 Agreeing, as I do most fully, with a large proportion of the contents of 
 the resolutions, I regret that its authors have made an attempt, which it 
 is impossible can be successful, to unite in the national schoolhouses, and 
 in the school hours, a sound religious with an unsectarian education. 
 
 What is a sound religious education ? Will not the professors of every 
 variety of religious faith answer the question differently ? 
 
 I think it was Bishop Berkeley who said, Orthodoxy is my doxy ; 
 heterodoxy is another man's doxy. So it is with a sound religious 
 education. What is sound to me is hollow and superficial, or perhaps 
 full of error, to another. 
 
 If it be said that the majority of heads of families must decide as to 
 
88 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 CHAPTER SEVENTH. 
 
 General Outline of an Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the Age- 
 Remuneration of Teachers Mode of their Election Responsibility Influence 
 of the Church in such a Scheme Apparent Errors of the Church The Circum- 
 stances of Scotland very different now from what they were in the days of Knox. 
 
 SCOTLAND will never have an efficient educational system 
 at once worthy of her ancient fame, and adequate to the 
 demands of the age, until in every parish there be at least 
 one central school, known emphatically as the Parish or 
 Grammar School, and taught by a superior university-bred 
 teacher, qualified to instruct his pupils in the higher depart- 
 ments of learning, and fit them for college. And with this 
 central institute every parish must also possess its supple- 
 mentary English schools, efficient of their kind, though of 
 
 what is sound and what is unsound, I must protest against such an 
 injustice. The minority will contribute to the support of the public 
 schools, and neither directly nor indirectly can they with justice be 
 deprived of the use of them. 
 
 It appears to me that the authors of the resolutions are flying in the 
 face of their own great authority, in proposing to introduce religious 
 instruction into the public schools. It is true that Dr. Chalmers pro- 
 poses that Government should ' leave this matter entire to the parties 
 who had to do with the erection and management of the schools which 
 they had been called upon to assist ; ' but he was not then contemplat- 
 ing the erection of national schools by the public money, but schools 
 erected by voluntary subscription, which the Government might be 
 called on to assist. 
 
 His opinion on the right action of Government in the present state of 
 things is clear. He says : ' That in any public measure for helping on 
 the education of the people, Government [should] abstain from intro- 
 ducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme.' 
 
 What, then, should be the course taken by the promoters of public 
 schools, in accordance with the principles enunciated by Dr Chalmers? 
 It appears to me to be clearly this : to make no provision whatever for, 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 89 
 
 a lower standing, and sufficiently numerous to receive all 
 the youthful population of the district which fails to be 
 accommodated in the other. In these, the child of the 
 labourer or mechanic if, possessed of but ordinary powers, 
 he looked no higher than the profession of his father 
 could be taught to read, write, and figure. If, however, 
 there awakened within him during the process, the stirrings 
 of those impulses which characterize the superior mind, he 
 could remove to his proper place the central school 
 mayhap, in country districts, some two or three miles away; 
 but when the intellectual impulses are genuine, two or three 
 miles in such cases are easily got over. 
 
 We Avould fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on 
 no very extravagant rate of remuneration ; for it might 
 prove bad policy in this, as in other departments, to set a 
 man above his work. The salaries attached at present to 
 our parish schools vary from a minimum of ^25 to a 
 maximum of about ^"34. Let us suppose that they varied, 
 
 or rather directly to exclude, all religious teaching within the walls of 
 the school, and to leave, in the words of the fifth resolution, ' the duty 
 and responsibility of communicating religious instruction' in the hands 
 of those ' to whom they have been committed by God, viz. to their 
 parents, and, through them, to such teachers as they may choose to 
 entrust with that duty.' 
 
 This was the course pursued by the Government of Holland in the 
 early part of the present century ; and I suppose no one will venture to 
 call in question the morality or religion of the people of that country, or 
 to throw a doubt upon the success of the system. 
 
 It is as an ardent friend of National Education, both in Scotland and 
 England, that I have ventured to make these few observations. I desire 
 to throw no obstruction in the way of any movement calculated to attain 
 so desirable an object. It maybe that I am mistaken in supposing that 
 it is intended to convey religious instruction, in the public schools, of a 
 kind that will be obnoxious to a minority ; and if so, the design of the 
 authors of the resolutions will have no more sincere well-wisher than, 
 Sir, your obedient servant, 
 
 SAMUEL LUCAS. 
 
 LONDON, February 4, 1850. 
 
90 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 instead, from a minimum of ;6o to a maximum of 80 
 not large sums, certainly, but which, with the fees and a 
 free house, would render every parochial schoolmaster in 
 Scotland worth about from ^80 to ^100 per annum, and 
 in some cases dependent, of course, on professional effi- 
 ciency and the population of the locality worth consider- 
 ably more. The supplementary English schools we would 
 place on the average level maintained at present by our 
 parish schools, by providing the teachers with free houses, 
 and yearly salaries of a minimum of $v and a maximum 
 of 40. And as it is of great importance that men should 
 not fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach 
 more efficiently than when straining to keep ahead of their 
 pupils, we would fain have provision made that, by a per- 
 mitted use of occasional substitutes, this lower order of 
 schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare themselves, by 
 attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies occurred, 
 for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth 
 20 additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the 
 channels of preferment should be ever kept open to useful 
 talent and honest diligence, so that the humblest English 
 teacher in the land might rise, in the course of years, to be 
 at the head of its highest school ; nay, that, like that James 
 Beattie who taught at one time the parish school of For- 
 doun, he might, if native faculty had been given and wisely 
 improved, become one of the country's most distinguished 
 professors. In fixing our permanent castes of schools, 
 Grammar and English, we would strongly urge that there 
 should be no permanent castes of teachers fixed no men 
 condemned to the humbler w r alks of the profession if quali- 
 fied for the higher. The life-giving sap would thus have 
 free course, from the earth's level to the topmost boughs 
 of our national scheme ; and low as an Englishman might 
 deem our proposed rates of remuneration for university- 
 taught men, we have no fear that they would prove insuffi- 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 91 
 
 cient, coupled with such a provision, for the right education 
 of the country. 
 
 We are not sure that we quite comprehend the sort of 
 machinery meant to be included under the term Local or 
 Parochial Boards. It seems necessary that there should 
 exist Local Committees of the educational franchise-holders, 
 chosen by themselves, from among their own number, for 
 terms either definite or indefinite, and recognised by. statute 
 as vested in certain powers of examination and inquiry. 
 But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are in- 
 clined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable 
 and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the 
 term Committee ; and as large committees are apt to de- 
 generate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their 
 business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational com- 
 mittees to consist, in at least country districts or the smaller 
 towns, of some eight or ten individuals, selected by the 
 householders for their intelligence, integrity, and business 
 habits, and with a chairman at their head, chosen from 
 among their number by themselves. A vacancy occurs, let 
 us suppose, in either the Grammar or one of the English 
 schools of the place : the committee, through their chair- 
 man, put themselves in communication with some of the 
 Normal schoolmasters of the south, and receive from them 
 a few names of deserving and qualified teachers, possessed 
 of diplomas indicating their professional standing, and fur- 
 nished, besides, with trustworthy certificates of character. 
 Or, if the emoluments of the vacant school be considerable, 
 and some of the neighbouring teachers, placed on a lower 
 rate of income, have distinguished themselves by their 
 professional merits, and so rendered themselves known in 
 the district, let us suppose that they select their names, and 
 to the number of some two, three, four, or more, submit 
 them, with the necessary credentials, to their constituents 
 the householders. And these assemble on some fixed day, 
 
92 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 and, from the number placed on the list, select their men. 
 Such, in the business of electing a schoolmaster, would, we 
 hold, be the proper work of a committee. In all other 
 seasons, the committee might be recognised as vested in 
 some of the functions now exercised by the Established 
 presbyteries, such as that of presiding, in behalf of the 
 parentage of the locality, at yearly or half-yearly examina- 
 tions of the schools, and of watching over the general 
 morals and official conduct of the teacher. But the power 
 of trial and dismission, which, of course, would need to 
 exist somewhere, we would vest in other hands. Let us re- 
 mark, in the passing, that much might come to depend ulti- 
 mately on the portioning out of the localities into electoral 
 districts of a proper size, and that it would be perhaps well, 
 as a general rule, that there should be no subdivisions made 
 of the old parishes. There are few parishes in Scotland in 
 which the materials of a good committee might not be 
 found; but there are perhaps many half, and third, and 
 quarter parishes in which no such materials exist. Further, 
 the householders of some country hamlet or degraded town- 
 suburb, populous enough to require its school, might be yet 
 very unfit of themselves to choose for it a schoolmaster. 
 And hence the necessity for maintaining a local breadth of 
 representation sufficient to do justice to the principle of the 
 scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from sinking 
 in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial breadth 
 of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder por- 
 tions of the general surface, and give footing to a system of 
 schools and teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character 
 and the necessities of a country wise and enlightened in 
 the main, but that totters on the brink of a bottomless 
 abyss. 
 
 The power of trying, and, if necessary, of dismissing from 
 his charge, an offending teacher, would, however, as we 
 have said, require to exist somewhere. Every official, 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 93 
 
 whether of the State or Church, or whether dependent on a 
 single employer or on a corporation or company, bears 
 always a twofold character. He is a subject of the realm, 
 and, as such, amenable to its laws ; he has also an official 
 responsibility, and may be reprimanded or dismissed for 
 offences against the requirements and duties of his office. 
 A tradesman or mechanic may go on tippling for years, 
 wasting his means and neglecting his business, untouched 
 by any law save that great economic law of Providence 
 which dooms the waster to ultimate want ; but for the excise 
 officer, or bank accountant, or railway clerk, who pursues a 
 similar course, there exists a court of official responsibility, 
 which anticipates the slow operation of the natural law, by 
 at once divesting the offender of his office. And the State- 
 paid schoolmaster must have also his official responsibility. 
 But it would serve neither the ends of justice nor the interests 
 of a sound policy to erect his immediate employers into a 
 court competent to try and condemn : their proper place 
 would be rather that of parties than of judges; and as 
 parties, we would permit them simply to conduct against 
 him any case for which they might hold there existed proper 
 grounds. A schoolmaster chosen by a not large majority, 
 might find in a few years that his supporters had dwindled 
 into a positive minority : parents whose boys were careless, 
 or naturally thick-headed, would of course arrive at the 
 opinion that it was the teacher who was in fault ; nay, a 
 parent who had fallen into arrears with his fees might come 
 to entertain the design of discharging the account simply 
 by discharging the schoolmaster ; and thus great injustice 
 might be done to worthy and efficient men, and one of the 
 most important classes of the community placed in circum- 
 stances of a shackled dependency, which no right-minded 
 teacher could submit to occupy. What we would propose, 
 then, is, that the power of trial, and of dismission if neces- 
 sary, should be vested in a central national board, furnished 
 
94 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 with one or more salaried functionaries to record its sen- 
 tences and do its drudgery, but consisting mainly of unpaid 
 members of high character and standing, some of them, 
 mayhap, members exofficio; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, 
 let us suppose the Principal and some of the Professors of 
 the Edinburgh University the Rector, shall we say, of the 
 High School the Lord Advocate, and mayhap the Dean 
 of Faculty. And as it would be of importance that there 
 should be as little new machinery created as possible, the 
 evidence, criminatory or exculpatory, on which such a board 
 would have to decide could be taken before the Sheriff 
 Courts of the provinces, and then, after being carefully sifted 
 by the Sheriffs or their Substitutes, forwarded in a docu- 
 mentary form to Edinburgh. It would scarce be wise to 
 attempt extemporizing an official code in a newspaper 
 article ; but the laws of such a code might, we think, be 
 ranged under three heads, immorality, incompetency, and 
 breach of trust to the parents. We would urge the dismissal, 
 as wholly unqualified to stand in the relation of teacher 
 to the youthhead, of the tippling, licentious, or dishonest 
 schoolmaster ; further, we would urge the dismissal (and in 
 cases of this kind the corroborative evidence of the Govern- 
 ment inspector might be regarded as indispensable) of an 
 incompetent teacher who did not serve the purpose of his 
 appointment ; and, in the third and last place, we would 
 urge that a teacher who made an improper use of his pro- 
 fessional influence over his pupils, and of the opportunities 
 necessarily afforded him, and who taught them to enter- 
 tain beliefs, ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical, which their 
 parents regarded as erroneous, should be severely repri- 
 manded for such an offence in the first instance, and dis- 
 missed if he persevered in it. We would confer upon the 
 board, in cases of this last kind, no power of deciding re- 
 garding the absolute right or wrong of the dogmas taught. 
 The teacher might be a zealous Voluntary, who assured the 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 95 
 
 children of men such as the writer of these articles that 
 their fathers, in asserting the Establishment principle, ap- 
 proved themselves limbs of that mystic Babylon which was 
 first founded by Constantine j or he might be a conscientious 
 Establishment-man, who dutifully pressed upon the Voluntary 
 pupils under his care, that their parents, though they perhaps 
 did not know it, were atheistical in their views. And we 
 would permit no board to determine in such cases, whether 
 Voluntaryism was in any respect or degree tantamount to 
 atheism, or the Establishment principle to Popery. But 
 we would ask them to declare, as wise and honest men, that 
 no schoolmaster, under the pretext of a zeal for truth, should 
 with impunity break faith with the parents of his pupils, or 
 prejudice the unformed and ductile minds entrusted to his 
 care against their hereditary beliefs. Should we, however, 
 do no violence by such a provision, we have heard it asked, 
 to the conscientious convictions of the schoolmaster ? No, 
 not in the least. If he was in reality the conscientious man 
 that he professed to be, he would quit his equivocal position 
 as a teacher, in which, without being dishonest, he could 
 not fulfil what he deemed his religious duty, and become a 
 minister; a character in which he would find Churches 
 within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers 
 was, in virtue of his Establishment views, little better than 
 a Papist, or that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, 
 must have been an unconscious atheist at bottom. 
 
 Let us next consider what the influence of the ministers 
 of our Church would be under a national scheme such as 
 that which we desiderate, and what the probability that the 
 national teaching would be religious. The minister, as 
 such, would possess, nominally at least, but a single vote ; 
 and if he were what an ordained minister may in some 
 cases be merely a suit of black clothes surmounted by a 
 white neckcloth the vote, nominally one, would be also 
 really but one ; nor ought it, we at once say, to weigh in 
 
96 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 such cases an iota more than it counted. Mere black coats 
 and white neckcloths, though called by congregations, and 
 licensed and ordained by presbyteries, never yet carried on 
 the proper business of either Church or school. But if the 
 minister was no mere suit of clothes, but a Christian man, 
 ordained and called not merely by congregations and presby- 
 teries, but by God Himself, his one vote in the case would 
 outweigh hundreds, simply because it would represent the 
 votes of hundreds. Let us suppose that, with the national 
 schools thrown open, a vacancy had occurred in the parish 
 school of Cromarty during the incumbency of the lamented 
 Mr. Stewart. The people of the town and parish, possessing 
 the educational franchise, would meet ; their committee 
 would deliberate ; there would be a teacher chosen, in all 
 probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher of 
 the town ; and every man would feel that he had exercised 
 in the election his own judgment on his own proper re- 
 sponsibility. And yet it would assuredly be the teacher 
 whom the minister had deemed on the whole most eligible 
 for the office, that would find himself settled, in virtue of 
 the transaction, in the parish school. How? Not, cer- 
 tainly, through any exercise of clerical domination, nor 
 through any employment of what is still more hateful 
 clerical manoeuvre but in virtue of a widespread confi- 
 dence reposed by the people in the wisdom and the integrity 
 of the minister sent them by God Himself to preach to 
 them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surround- 
 ing parishes in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the 
 late Dr. M'Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, 
 etc. etc. etc. in similar cases similar results would follow ; 
 and if there are preachers in that vast northern or north- 
 western tract which, with the three northern counties, 
 includes also almost the entire Highlands in which such 
 results would not follow, it would be found that in most 
 cases the fault lay rather with the ordained suits of black, 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 97 
 
 topped by the white neckcloths, than with the people whom 
 they failed to influence. 
 
 As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, 
 we hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed 
 scheme, that it would really stir up both ministers and 
 people to think seriously of the matter, and to secure for 
 the country truly religious teaching, so far as it was found 
 to be at once practicable and good. Previous to the year 
 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power, 
 there was really nothing done to introduce religious teach- 
 ing into them : we had it all secure on written sheepskin, 
 that their teaching should and might be religious, for we 
 had them all fast bound to the Establishment ; and, as if 
 that were enough of itself, ministers, backed by heritors and 
 their factors, went on filling these parish schools with men 
 who stood the test of the Disruption worse, in the propor- 
 tion of at least five to one, than any other class in the 
 country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken 
 effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, 
 would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impos- 
 sibility. 1 And then, when that great event occurred, we 
 flung ourselves into an opposite extreme, eulogized our 
 Educational Scheme as the best and most important of all 
 the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the principle 
 so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the 
 other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme 
 was of ourselves, introduced, further, the design of 'in- 
 ducting' our teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any 
 substitute for the indispensable commission signed by the 
 Sovereign, and could make the non-commissioned by Him 
 at least half ecclesiastics. 2 And then, after teaching our 
 
 1 There are about one thousand one hundred parish schoolmasters in 
 Scotland : of these, not more than eighty (strictly, we believe, seventy- 
 seven) adhered to the Free Church at the Disruption. 
 
 2 The Church as such ought to employ the schoolmaster, it has been 
 
 G 
 
98 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 schoolmasters to teach religion, we sent them abroad in 
 shoals some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds 
 of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate to 
 make the children of the Free Church as good Christians 
 as themselves. And by attempting to make them half 
 ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in making them half 
 mendicants, and somewhat more, a character which as- 
 suredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear ; for while 
 his profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the 
 two secular branches of the learned professions, physic 
 and the law, he is as certainly worthy of his reward, and of 
 maintaining an independent position in society, as either 
 the lawyer or the physician. In schools truly national 
 with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on the one hand, 
 and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical 'induction' to 
 beguile on the other the item of religious teaching, 
 brought into prominence by both the Free and the Estab- 
 lished Churches in the preliminary struggle, would assert 
 
 argued, in virtue of the divine injunction, ' Search the Scriptures : ' 
 what God commands men to do, it is her duty to enable men to do. The 
 argument is excellent, we say, so far as it goes ; but of perilous applica- 
 tion in the case in hand. It is the Church's duty to teach those to 
 read the Scriptures, who, without her assistance, would not be taught to 
 read them. But if by teaching Latin, arithmetic, algebra, and the 
 mathematics to ten, she is incapacitating herself from teaching twenty to 
 read the Bible ; or if, by teaching twenty to read the Bible who would 
 have learned to read it whether she taught them or no, she is incapaci- 
 tating herself from teaching twenty others to read it, who, unless she 
 teach them, will never learn to read it at all ; then, instead of doing her 
 recognised duty in the matter, she is doing exactly the reverse of her 
 duty doing what prevents her from doing her duty. Let the Free 
 Church but take her stand on this argument, and straightway her 
 rectors, her masters in academies, and her schoolmasters planted in 
 towns and populous localities, to teach the higher branches, become 
 so many bars raised by herself virtually to impede and arrest her, 
 through the expense incurred in their maintenance, in her proper work 
 of enabling the previously untaught and ignorant to read the word of 
 God, in obedience to the divine injunction. 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 99 
 
 and receive its due place. Scotland would possess what 
 it never yet possessed, -not even some twenty years or so 
 after the death of Knox, a system of schools worthy, in the 
 main, of a Christian country. We are told by old Robert 
 Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under 
 religious impressions (in the year 1600), 'he durst never 
 play on the Lord's day, though the schoolmaster, after 
 taking an account of the Catechism, dismissed the children 
 with that express direction, " Go not to the town, but to 
 the fields, and play." I obeyed him,' adds the worthy 
 man, ' in going to the fields, but refused to play with my 
 companions, as against the commandment of God.' Now 
 it is not at all strange that there should have been such a 
 schoolmaster, in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in 
 one of the parish schools of our country ; but somewhat 
 strange, mayhap, considering the impression so generally 
 received regarding the Scottish schools of that period, that 
 Blair should have given us no reason whatever to regard 
 the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, 
 with such a central board in existence as that which we 
 desiderate, no such type of schoolmaster would continue to 
 hold office in a national seminary. 
 
 Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether 
 the difference between the old educational scheme of Knox 
 and that proposed at the present time by the Free Church, 
 or the difference between the circumstances of Scotland in 
 his days and of Scotland in the present day, be in truth the 
 wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of * necessitie 
 that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster ap- 
 pointed,' ' such a one at least as was able to teach gram- 
 mar and the Latine tongue ;' ' that there should be erected 
 in every notable town,' a 'colledge, in which the arts, 
 logic, and rhethorick, together with the tongues, should 
 be read by masters, for whom honest stipends should be 
 appointed;' and further, 'that fair provision should be 
 
ioo THOUGHTS OAT 
 
 made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial 
 those who came from landward,' and w^pre 'not able, by 
 their friends nor by themselves, to be sustained at letters.' 
 We know that the notable towns referred to here as of 
 importance enough to possess colleges were, many of them, 
 what we would now deem far from notable. Kirkwall, the 
 Chanonry of Ross, Brechin, St. Andrews, Inverary, Jed- 
 burgh, and Dumfries, are specially named in the list ; and 
 we know further, that what Knox deemed an 'honest 
 stipend' for a schoolmaster, amounted on the average to 
 about two-thirds the stipend of a minister. Such, in the 
 sixteenth century, was the wise scheme of the liberal and 
 scholarly Knox, the friend of Calvin, Beza, and Buchanan. 
 Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the 
 nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of 
 whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from ^"10 
 to ,13, 135. 4d. about half ploughman's wages and of 
 whom not a fourth have passed the ordeal of a Govern- 
 ment examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate 
 of attainment ? The scheme of the noble Knox ! Say 
 rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has" come 
 creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the 
 sagacious Reformer approved himself as much in advance 
 of his own age, as many of those who profess to walk most 
 closely in his steps demonstrate themselves to be in the 
 rear of theirs. 
 
 Let us next mark how entirely the circumstances of the 
 country have changed since the days of the First Book of 
 Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay 
 proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the 
 larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, 
 an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, 
 there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties un- 
 able, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the 
 Church had not taken upon herself the education of the 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 101 
 
 people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? 
 Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, 
 * Search the Scriptures,' would have remained to at least 
 nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely 
 different the circumstances of Scotland in the present time ! 
 The country has its lapsed masses, men in very much the 
 circumstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the popu- 
 lation in the age of Knox ; and we at once grant that, 
 unless the Churches of the country deal with these as 
 Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of 
 their ever being restored to society or the humanizing 
 influences of religion, let Government make for them what 
 provision it may. 1 But such is not the condition of the 
 membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is 
 palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free 
 Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly 
 bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their 
 children in the ' nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and 
 of the children for whom they have been thus taken 
 bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, their education 
 is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she 
 may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do 
 what would be done better without her. She has all along 
 contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her 
 own members ; and these form exactly that portion of the 
 people which unless, indeed, the solemn engagements 
 
 1 This statement has been quoted by an antagonist as utterly in- 
 consistent with our general line of argument ; but we think we may 
 safely leave the reader to determine whether it be really so. Did we 
 ever argue that any scheme of national education, however perfect, 
 could possibly supersede the proper missionary labours of the Churches, 
 whether educational or otherwise? Assuredly not. What we really 
 assert is, that if the Churches waste their energies on work not mis- 
 sionary, the work which, if they do it not, cannot be done must of 
 necessity be neglected ; seeing that, according to Bacon, ' chanty will 
 hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.' 
 
102 THOUGHTS ON 
 
 which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as 
 excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths may be safely left 
 to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of 
 parental responsibility. 
 
 ' If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time,' said 
 Mordecai to Esther, 'then shall there enlargement and 
 deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou 
 and thy father's house shall be destroyed.' Scotland will 
 have ultimately her Educational Scheme adequate to the 
 demands of the age ; but if the Free Church stand aloof, 
 and suffer the battle to be fought by others, her part or lot 
 in it may be a very small matter indeed. What, we ask, 
 would be her share, especially in the Highlands, in a scheme 
 that rendered the basis of the educational franchise merely 
 co-extensive with the basis of the political one? Nay, 
 what, save perhaps in the northern burghs, would be her 
 share in such a scheme over Scotland generally ? A mere 
 makeweight at best. But at least the lay membership of 
 the Free Church will, we are assured, not long stand aloof; 
 and this great question of national education being in no 
 degree an ecclesiastical one, nor lying within the jurisdic- 
 tion of presbyteries or assemblies, true lovers of their 
 country and of their species, whether of the Established or 
 of the Free Churches, will come forward and do their duty 
 as Scotchmen on the political platform. In neither body 
 does the attitude assumed by the ecclesiastical element in 
 this question, so far as has yet been indicated, appear of a 
 kind which plain, simple-minded laymen will delight to con- 
 template. The Established Church courts are taking up 
 the ground that the teaching in their parish schools has 
 been all along religious, and at least one great source from 
 which has sprung the vitalities of the country's faith. And 
 who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction, a 
 weak and hollow sham ? And, on the other hand, some of 
 our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not morally 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 103 
 
 bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and alto- 
 gether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, 
 when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced 
 from all other means of support, to regulate their very 
 limited expenditure by the specified incomes. Further, 
 they virtually tell us that we cannot possibly take our stand 
 as Scotchmen on this matter, in the only practical position, 
 without being untrue to our common Christianity, and 
 enemies to our Church. It has been urged against our 
 educational articles, that we have failed to take into ac- 
 count the fall of man : he would surely be an incorrigible 
 sceptic, we reply, who could look upon statements such as 
 these, and yet doggedly persist in doubting that man has 
 fallen. But, alas ! it is not a matter on which to congratu- 
 late ourselves, that when the Established Church is coming 
 forward to arrest the progress of national education with 
 her strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church the Church 
 of the Disruption should be also coming forward with a 
 caveat which at least seems scarce less equivocal ; and that, 
 like the twin giants of Guildhall huge, monstrous, unreal 
 both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to 
 the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom 
 to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour 
 of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers ! Ultimately, 
 however, the good cause is secure. It is a cause worth 
 struggling and suffering for. We know a little boy, not 
 yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of 
 Scott's Tales of a Grandfather - , which now opens of itself 
 at the battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, 
 somewhat more in advance, that she may read to him, for 
 the hundredth time, of Wallace and the Black Douglas, 
 and how the good King Robert struck down Sir Henry 
 Bohun with a single blow, full in the sight of both armies. 
 And after drinking in the narrative, he tells that, when 
 grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like 
 
io 4 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 
 
 Robert the Bruce, and to ' fight in the battle of Scotland. 1 
 And then he asks his father when the battle of Scotland 
 is to begin ! Laymen of the Free Church, the battle of 
 Scotland has already begun ; and 'tis a battle better worth 
 fighting than any other which has arisen within the political 
 arena since the times of the Reform Bill. Your country 
 has still claims upon you : the Disruption may have dis- 
 solved the tie which bound you to party ; but that which 
 binds you to Scotland still remains entire. The parental 
 right is not dissolved by any traditionary requirements of 
 the altar; nor can we urge with impunity to our country, 
 * It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou 
 mightest be profited by me.' 
 
LORD BROUGHAM. 
 
 THE history of Lord Brougham has no exact parallel in 
 that of British statesmen. Villiers Duke of Buckingham 
 (the Duke of the times of Charles n.) sunk quite as low, 
 but not from such an elevation. Of him too it was said, 
 as of his Lordship, that 'he left not faction, but of that was 
 left,' that every party learned to distrust and stand aloof 
 from him, and that his great parts had only the effect of 
 rendering his ultimate degradation the more marked and 
 the more instructive. Hume tells us that by his 'wild con- 
 duct, unrestrained either by prudence or principle, he found 
 means to render himself in the end odious, and even in- 
 significant.' But the Duke of Buckingham had been a 
 mere courtier from the beginning, and no man had ever 
 trusted or thought well of him. 
 
 Bolingbroke bears a nearly similar character. There 
 was a mighty difference between the influential and able 
 minister of Queen Anne, recognised by all as decidedly 
 one of the most accomplished statesmen of his age or 
 country, and the same individual, forlorn and an exile, 
 disliked and suspected by parties the most opposite, and 
 who agreed in nothing else, a fugitive from his own 
 country to avoid the threatened impeachment of the Whigs 
 for his Jacobitism, and a fugitive from France to avoid 
 being impeached by the Pretender for his treachery. But 
 Bolingbroke had never very seriously professed to be the 
 friend of his country, nor would his country have believed 
 him if he had. According to the shrewd remark of Fielding, 
 
 105 
 
io6 LORD BROUGHAM. 
 
 the temporal happiness, the civil liberties and properties 
 of Europe, had been the game of "his earliest youth, and 
 the eternal and final happiness of all mankind the sport 
 and entertainment of his advanced age. He would have 
 fain destroyed the freedom of his countrymen when in 
 power, and their hope of immortality when in disgrace. 
 Neither can we find a parallel in the history of that other 
 Lord Chancellor of England, who has been described by 
 the poet as ' the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.' 
 Two of the epithets would not suit Lord Brougham ; and 
 though he unquestionably bore himself more honourably in 
 the season of his elevation than his illustrious predecessor, 
 he has as certainly employed himself to worse purpose in 
 the time of his disgrace. 
 
 Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord 
 Brougham entered public life a reformer and a patriot. 
 The subject of his first successful speech in Parliament was 
 the slave-trade. He denounced not only the abominable 
 traffic itself, the men who stole, bought, and kept the 
 slave ; but also the traders and merchants, * the cowardly 
 suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,' as he termed 
 them, under whose remote influence the trade had been 
 carried on ; and the sympathies of the people went along 
 with him. He was on every occasion, too, the powerful 
 advocate of popular education. Brougham is no discoverer 
 of great truths ; but he has evinced a ' curious felicity ' in 
 expressing truths already discovered : he exerted himself in 
 sending ' the schoolmaster abroad,' and announced the fact 
 in words which became more truly his motto than the motto 
 found for him in the Herald's Office. He took part in well- 
 nigh every question of reform ; stood up for economy, the 
 reduction of taxes, and Queen Caroline ; found very vigorous 
 English in which to express all he ought to have felt regard- 
 ing the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester ; 
 and dealt with Cobbett as Cobbett deserved, for doing what 
 
LORD BROUGHAM. 107 
 
 he is now doing himself. There was always a lack of heart 
 about Brougham, so that men admired without loving him. 
 
 There were no spontaneous exhibitions of those noble- 
 nesses of nature which mark the true reformer, and which 
 compel the respect of even enemies. Luther, Knox, and 
 Andrew Thomson were all men of rugged strength, men 
 of war, and born to contend ; but they were also men of 
 deep and broad sympathies, and of kindly affections : they 
 could all feel as well as see the right ; what is even more 
 important still, they could all thoroughly forget themselves, 
 and what the world thought and said of them, in the pursuit 
 of some great and engrossing object : they could all love, 
 too, at least as sincerely as they could hate. Brougham, on 
 the contrary, could only see without feeling the right ; but 
 then he saw clearly. Brougham could not forget himself; 
 but then he succeeded in identifying himself with much that 
 was truly excellent. Brougham could not love as thoroughly 
 as he could hate; but then his indignation generally fell 
 where .it ought. His large intellect seemed based on an 
 inferior nature it was a brilliant set in lead; nor were 
 there indications wanting all along, it has been said, that 
 he was one of those patriots who have their price. But the 
 brilliant was a true, not a factitious brilliant, whatever the 
 value of the setting; and the price, if ever proffered, had not 
 been sufficiently large. Brougham became Lord Chancellor, 
 the Reform Bill passed into a law, and slavery was abolished 
 in the colonies. 
 
 The country has not yet forgotten that the Lord Chan- 
 cellor of 1832 and the two following years was no wild 
 Radical. There was no leaven of Chartism in Lord 
 Brougham, though a very considerable dash of eccen- 
 tricity; and really, for a man who had been contending 
 so many years in the Opposition, and who had attained 
 to so thorough a command of sarcasm, he learned to enact 
 the courtier wonderfully well. Neither 'Tompkins' nor 
 
io8 LORD BROUGHAM. 
 
 1 Jenkins' had as yet manifested their contempt for the 
 aristocracy ; nor had the l man well stricken in years ' 
 written anonymous letters to insult his sovereign. The 
 universal suffrage scheme found no advocate in the Lord 
 Chancellor. He could call on Cobbett in his chariot, to 
 attempt persuading the stubborn old Saxon to write down 
 incendiarism and machine-breaking. He breathed no 
 anticipation of the ' first cheer of the people on the first 
 refusal of the soldiery to fire on them.' As for Reform, 
 he was very explicit on that head : really so much had 
 been accomplished already, that a great deal more could 
 not be expected. Little could be done in the coming 
 years, he said, just because there had been so much done 
 in the years that had gone by. The Lord Chancellor was 
 comparatively a cautious and prudent man in those days 
 on the whole, a safe card for monarchy to play with. 
 Radicalism had learned that Whigs in office are not very 
 unlike Tories in office; and to Brougham it applied the 
 remark : nor was he at all indignant that it did so. All 
 his superabundant energies were expended in Chancery. 
 We unluckily missed hearing him deliver his famous speech 
 at Inverness, and that merely by an untoward chance, for 
 we were in that part of the country at the time ; but we 
 have seen and conversed with scores who did hear him : 
 we are intimate, too, with the gentleman who gave his 
 speech on that occasion to the world, and know that a 
 more faithful or more accomplished reporter than the 
 editor of the Invermss Courier is not to be found any- 
 where, nor yet a man of nicer discrimination, nor of a 
 finer literary taste. There was no mistake made regarding 
 his Lordship's sentiments when he spoke of the Reform 
 Bill as well-nigh a final measure ; nor did his delight in 
 the simple-minded natives arise when he pledged himself 
 to recommend them, by the evening mail, to the graces 
 of good King William, from their wishing the bill to be 
 
LORD BROUGHAM. 109 
 
 anything else than final. Even with its limited franchise, 
 he deemed it a very excellent bill ; and the woolsack, to 
 which it had elevated him, a very desirable seat. People 
 did occasionally see that Hazlitt was in the right that 
 he was rather a man of speech than of action ; that he 
 was somewhat too imprudent for a leader, somewhat too 
 petulant for a partisan ; and that he wanted in a consider- 
 able degree the principle of co-operation. 
 
 But Chatham wanted it quite as much as he ; and it was 
 deemed invidious to measure so accomplished a man, and 
 so sworn a friend of peace and good order, by the minuter 
 rules. But Napoleon should have died at Waterloo, 
 Brougham at Dunrobin. 
 
 What is ex-Chancellor Brougham now? What party 
 trusts to him ? What section of the community does he 
 represent ? Frost had his confiding friends and followers, 
 and Feargus O'Connor led a numerous and formidable body. 
 Even Sir William Courtenay had his disciples. Where are 
 Brougham's disciples? What moral influence does the 
 advocate of popular education, and the indignant de- 
 nouncer of the iniquities of the slave-trade, exert? In 
 what age or what country was there ever a man so * left 
 by faction?' The Socialism of England and the Volun- 
 taryism of Edinburgh entrust him with their petitions, and 
 Chartism stands on tiptoe when he rises in his place to 
 advocate universal suffrage ; but no one confides in him. 
 Owen does not, nor the Rev. Mr. Marshall of Kirkin- 
 tilloch, nor yet the conspirators of Sheffield or Newport. 
 Toryism scarcely thanks him for fighting its battles ; 
 Whiggism abhors him. There is no one credulous enough 
 to believe that his aims rise any higher than himself, or 
 blind enough not to see that even his selfishness is so ill- 
 regulated as to defeat its own little object. His lack of 
 the higher sentiments, the more generous feelings, the 
 nobler aims, neutralizes even his intellect. He publishes 
 
no LORD BROUGHAM. 
 
 his speeches, carefully solicitous of his fame, and provokes 
 comparison in laboured dissertations with the oratory of 
 Demosthenes and Cicero ; he eulogizes the Duke of Wel- 
 lington, and demands by inference whether he cannot 
 praise as classically as even the ancients themselves ; but 
 his heartless though well-modulated eloquence lingers in 
 first editions, like the effusions of inferior minds ; nor is 
 it of a kind which the * world will find after many days.' 
 Brougham will be less known sixty years hence than the 
 player Garrick is at present. 
 
 Bolingbroke, when thrown out of all public employment 
 gagged, disarmed, shut out from the possibility of a 
 return to office, suspected alike by the Government and 
 the Opposition, and thoroughly disliked by the people to 
 boot could yet solace himself in his uneasy and un- 
 honoured retirement by exerting himself to write down 
 the Ministry. 
 
 And his Craftsmen sold even more rapidly than the 
 Spectator itself. 
 
 But the writings of Brougham do not sell ; he lacks even 
 the solace of Bolingbroke. We have said that his history 
 is without parallel in that of Britain. Napoleon on his 
 rock was a less melancholy object : the imprisoned warrior 
 had lost none of his original power he was no moral 
 suicide ; the millions of France were still devotedly at- 
 tached to him, and her armies would still have followed 
 him to battle. It was no total forfeiture of character on 
 his own part that had rendered him so utterly powerless 
 either for good or ill. 
 
 1840. 
 
THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 
 
 THE foundation-stone of the metropolitan monument in 
 memory of Sir Walter Scott was laid with masonic honours 
 on Saturday last. The day was pleasant, and the pageant 
 imposing. All business seemed suspended for the time; 
 the shops were shut. The one half of Edinburgh had 
 poured into the streets, and formed by no means the least 
 interesting part of the spectacle. Every window and bal- 
 cony that overlooked the procession, every house-top 
 almost, had its crowd of spectators. According to the 
 poet, 
 
 ' Rank behind rank, close wedged, hung bellying o'er ;' 
 
 while the area below, for many hundred yards on either side 
 the intended site of the monument, presented a continuous 
 sea of heads. We marked, among the flags exhibited, the 
 Royal Standard of Scotland, apparently a piece of venerable 
 antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field 
 of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine 
 nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men 
 are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful 
 and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. 
 The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter himself 
 could perhaps have improved. He would not have fired so 
 many guns in the hollow, and the grey old castle so near : 
 he would have found means, too, to prevent the crowd from 
 so nearly swallowing up the procession. Perhaps no man 
 had ever a finer eye for pictorial effect than Sir Walter, 
 
 111 
 
1 1 2 THE SCO TT MONUMENT. 
 
 whether art or nature supplied the scene. It has been well 
 said that he rendered Abbotsford a romance in stone and. 
 lime, and imparted to the king's visit to Scotland the in- 
 terest and dignity of an epic poem. Still, however, the 
 pageant was an imposing one, and illustrated happily the 
 influence of a great and original mind, whose energies had 
 been employed in enriching the national literature, over an 
 educated and intellectual people. 
 
 It is a bad matter when a country is employed in build- 
 ing monuments to the memory of men chiefly remarkable 
 for knocking other men on the head ; it is a bad matter, 
 too, when it builds monuments to the memory of mere 
 courtiers, of whom not much more can be said than that 
 when they lived they had places and pensions to bestow, 
 and that they bestowed them on their friends. We cannot 
 think so ill, however, of the homage paid to genius. 
 
 The Masonic Brethren of the several lodges mustered 
 in great numbers. It has been stated that more than a 
 thousand took part in the procession. Coleridge, in his 
 curious and highly original work, The Friend a work which, 
 from its nature, never can become popular, but which, 
 though it may be forgotten for a time, will infallibly be dug 
 up and brought into public view in the future as an unique 
 fossil impression of an extinct order of mind refers to a 
 bygone class of mechanics, ' to whom every trade was an 
 allegory, and had its guardian saint.' * But the time has 
 gone by,' he states, ' in which the details of every art were 
 ennobled in the eyes of its professors by being spiritually 
 improved into symbols and mementoes of all doctrines and 
 all duties.' We could hardly think so as we stood watch- 
 ing the procession, with its curiously fantastic accumulation 
 of ornament and symbol ; it seemed, however, rather the 
 relic of a former age than the natural growth of the present 
 a spectre of the past strangely resuscitated. 
 
 The laugh, half in ridicule, half in good nature, with 
 
THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 1 1 3 
 
 which the crowd greeted every very gaudily dressed mem- 
 ber, richer in symbol and obsolete finery than his neigh- 
 bour, showed that the day had passed in which such things 
 could produce their originally intended effect. Will the 
 time ever arrive in which stars and garters will claim as 
 little respect as broad-skirted doublets of green velvet, sur- 
 mounted with three-cornered hats tagged with silver lace ? 
 Much, we suppose, must depend upon the characters of 
 those who wear them, and the kind of services on which 
 they will come to be bestowed. An Upper House of mere 
 diplomatists skilful only to overreach imprudent enough 
 to substitute cunning for wisdom ignorant enough to deem 
 the people not merely their inferiors in rank, but in dis- 
 cernment also weak enough to believe that laws may be 
 enacted with no regard to the general good wrapped up 
 in themselves, and acquainted with the masses only through 
 their eavesdroppers and dependants would bring titles and 
 orders to a lower level in half an age, than the onward pro- 
 gress of intellect has brought the quaintnesses of mechanic 
 symbol and mystery in two full centuries. We but smile at 
 the one, we would learn to execrate the other. Has the 
 reader ever seen Quarles' Emblems, or Flavel's Husbandry 
 and Navigation Spiritualized? Both belong to an extinct 
 species of literature, of which the mechanic mysteries 
 described by Coleridge, and exhibited in the procession of 
 Saturday last, strongly remind us. Both alike proceeded 
 on a process of mind the reverse of the common. Com- 
 parison generally leads from the moral to the physical, from 
 the abstract to the visible and the tangible ; here, on the 
 contrary, the tangible and the visible the emblem and the 
 symbol were made to lead to the moral and the abstract. 
 There are beautiful instances, too, of the same school in 
 the allegories of Bunyan, the wonders in the house of the 
 Interpreter, for instance, and the scenes exhibited in the 
 cave of the ' man named Contemplation.* 
 
 H 
 
ii 4 THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 
 
 Sir Walter's monument will have one great merit, regarded 
 as a piece of art. It will be entirely an original, such a 
 piece of architecture as he himself would have delighted to 
 describe, and the description of which he, and he only, 
 could have sublimed into poetry. There is a chaste and 
 noble beauty in the forms of Greek and Roman architec- 
 ture which consorts well with the classic literature of those 
 countries. The compositions of Sir Walter, on the con- 
 trary, resemble what he so much loved to describe the 
 rich and fantastic Gothic, at times ludicrously uncouth, at 
 times exquisitely beautiful. There are not finer passages 
 in all his writings than some of his architectural descrip- 
 tions. How exquisite is his Melrose Abbey, the external 
 view in the cold, pale moonshine, 
 
 * When buttress and buttress alternately 
 Seemed formed of ebon and ivory ; ' 
 
 internally, when the strange light broke from the wizard's 
 tomb ! Who, like Sir Walter, could draw a mullioned 
 window, with its ' foliaged tracery,' its ' freakish knots,' its 
 pointed and moulded arch, and its dyed and pictured 
 panes ? We passed, of late, an hour amid the ruins of 
 Crichton, and scarce knew whether most to admire the fine 
 old castle itself, so worthy of its poet, or the exquisite pic- 
 ture of it we found in Marmion. 
 
 Sir Walter's monument would be a monument without 
 character, if it were other than Gothic. Still, however, we 
 have our fears for the effect. In portrait-painting there is 
 the full life-size, and a size much smaller, and both suit 
 nearly equally well, and appear equally natural; but the 
 intermediate sizes do not suit. Make the portrait just a 
 very little less than the natural size, and it seems not the 
 reduced portrait of a man, but the full-sized portrait of a 
 dwarf. Now a similar principle seems to obtain in Gothic 
 architecture. 
 
THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 115 
 
 The same design which strikes as beautiful in a model 
 the piece which, if executed in spar, and with a glass cover 
 over it, would be regarded as exquisitely tasteful would 
 impress, when executed on a large scale, as grand and mag- 
 nificent in the first degree. And yet this identical design, 
 in an intermediate size, would possibly enough be pro- 
 nounced a failure. Mediocrity in size is fatal to the Gothic, 
 if it be a richly ornamented Gothic ; nor are we sure that 
 the noble design of Mr. Kemp is to be executed on a 
 scale sufficiently extended. We are rather afraid not, but 
 the result will show. Such a monument a hundred yards 
 in height would be one of the finest things perhaps in 
 Europe. 
 
 What has Sir Walter done for Scotland, to deserve so gor- 
 geous a monument? Assuredly not all he might have done; 
 and yet he has done much more, in some respects, than 
 any other merely literary man the country ever produced. 
 He has interested Europe in the national character, and in 
 some corresponding degree in the national welfare ; and this 
 of itself is a very important matter indeed. Shakespeare 
 perhaps the only writer who, in the delineation of cha- 
 racter, takes precedence of the author of Waverky seems 
 to have been less intensely imbued with the love of country. 
 It is quite possible for a foreigner to luxuriate over his 
 dramas, as the Germans are said to do, without loving 
 Englishmen any the better in consequence, or respecting 
 them any the more. But the European celebrity of the 
 fictions of Sir Walter must have had the inevitable effect 
 of raising the character of his country, its character as a 
 country of men of large growth, morally and intellectually. 
 Besides, it is natural to think of foreigners as mere abstrac- 
 tions ; and hence one cause at least of the indifference with 
 which we regard them, an indifference which the first slight 
 misunderstanding converts into hostility. It is something 
 towards a more general diffusion of goodwill to be enabled 
 
1 1 6 THE SCO TT MONUMENT. 
 
 to conceive of them as men with all those sympathies of 
 human nature, on which the corresponding sympathies lay 
 hold, warm and vigorous about them. Now, in this aspect 
 has Sir Walter presented his countrymen to the world. 
 Wherever his writings are known, a Scotsman can be no 
 mere abstraction ; and in both these respects has the poet 
 and novelist deserved well of his country. 
 
 Within the country itself, too, his great nationality, like 
 that of Burns, has had a decidedly favourable effect. The 
 cosmopolism so fashionable among a certain class about the 
 middle of the last century, was but a mock virtue, and a 
 very dangerous one. The ' citizen of the world,' if he be 
 not a mere pretender, is a man to be denned by negatives. 
 It is improper to say he loves all men alike : he is merely 
 equally indifferent to all. Nothing can be more absurd 
 than to oppose the love of country to the love of race. 
 The latter exists but as a wider diffusion of the former. Do 
 we not know that human nature, in its absolute perfection, 
 and blent with the absolute and infinite perfection of Deity, 
 indulged in the love of country? The Saviour, when He 
 took to Himself a human heart, wept over the city of His 
 fathers. Now, it is well that this spirit should be fostered, 
 not in its harsh and exclusive, but in its human and more 
 charitable form. 
 
 Liberty cannot long exist apart from it. The spirit of 
 war and aggression is yet abroad : there are laws to be 
 established, rights to be defended, invaders to be repulsed, 
 tyrants to be deposed. And who but the patriot is equal 
 to these things ? How was the cry of * Scotland for ever' 
 responded to at Waterloo, when the Scots Greys broke 
 through a column of the enemy to the rescue of their coun- 
 trymen, and the Highlanders levelled their bayonets for the 
 charge ! A people cannot survive without the national spirit, 
 except as slaves. The man who adds to the vigour of the 
 feeling at the same time that he lessens its exclusiveness, 
 
THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 1 1 7 
 
 deserves well of his country ; and who can doubt that Sir 
 Walter has done so ? 
 
 The sympathies "of Sir Walter, despite his high Tory 
 predilections, were more favourable to the people as such 
 than those of Shakespeare. If the station be low among 
 the characters of the dramatist, it is an invariable rule that 
 the style of thinking and of sentiment is low also. 
 
 The humble wool-comber of Stratford-on-Avon, possessed 
 of a mind more capacious beyond comparison than the 
 minds of all the nobles and monarchs of the age, intro- 
 duced no such man as himself into his dramas no such 
 men as Bunyan or Burns, men low in place, but kingly 
 in intellect. Not so, however, the aristocratic Sir Walter. 
 There is scarcely a finer character in all his writings than 
 the youthful peasant of Glendearg, Halbert Glendinning, 
 afterwards the noble knight of Avenel, brave and wise, and 
 alike fitted to lead in the councils of a great monarch, or 
 to carry his banner in war. His brother Edward is scarcely 
 a lower character. And when was unsullied integrity in 
 a humble condition placed in an attitude more suited to 
 command respect and regard, than in the person of Jeanie 
 Deans? 
 
 A man of a lower nature, wrapt round by the vulgar 
 prejudices of rank, could not have conceived such a cha- 
 racter : he would have transferred to it a portion of his 
 own vulgarity, dressed up in a few borrowed peculiarities 
 of habit and phraseology. Even the character of Jeanie's 
 father lies quite as much beyond the ordinary reach. Men 
 such as Sheridan, Fielding, and Foote, would have repre- 
 sented him as a hypocrite a feeble and unnatural mixture 
 of baseness and cunning. Sir Walter, with all his pre- 
 judices and all his antipathies, not only better knew the 
 national type, but he had a more comprehensive mind ; 
 and he drew David Deans, therefore, as a man of stern 
 and inflexible integrity, and as thoroughly sincere in his 
 
n8 THE SCOTT MONUMENT. 
 
 religion. Not but that in this department he committed 
 great and grievous mistakes. The main doctrine of reve- 
 lation, with its influence on character that doctrine of 
 regeneration which our Saviour promulgated to Nicodemus, 
 and enforced with the sanctity of an oath was a doctrine 
 of which he knew almost nothing. What has the first 
 place in all the allegories of Bunyan, has no place in the 
 fictions of Sir Walter. None of his characters exhibit the 
 change displayed in the life of the ingenious allegorist of 
 Elston, or of James Gardener, or of John Newton. 
 
 He found human nature a terra incognita when it came 
 under the influence of grace ; and in this terra incognita, 
 the field in which he could only grope, not see, his way, 
 well-nigh all his mistakes were committed. But had his 
 native honesty been less, his mistakes would have been 
 greater. 
 
 He finds good even among Christians. What can be 
 finer than the character of his Covenanter's widow, standing 
 out as it does in the most exceptionable of all his works, 
 the blind and desolate woman, meek and forgiving in her 
 utmost distress, who had seen her sons shot before her 
 eyes, and had then ceased to see more ? 
 
 Our subject, however, is one which we must be content 
 not to exhaust 
 
THE LATE MR. KEMP. 
 
 THE funeral of this hapless man of genius took place 
 yesterday, and excited a deep and very general interest, 
 in which there mingled the natural sorrow for high talent 
 prematurely extinguished, with the feeling of painful regret, 
 awakened by a peculiarly melancholy end. It was nume- 
 rously attended, and by many distinguished men. The 
 several streets through which it passed were crowded by 
 saddened spectators in some few localities very densely ; 
 and the windows overhead were much thronged. At no 
 place was the crowd greater, except perhaps immediately 
 surrounding the burying-ground, than at the fatal opening 
 beside the Canal Basin, into which the unfortunate man had 
 turned from the direct road in the darkness of night, and 
 had found death at its termination. The scene of the 
 accident is a gloomy and singularly unpleasant spot. A 
 high wall, perforated by a low, clumsy archway, closes 
 abruptly what the stranger might deem a thoroughfare. 
 There is a piece of sluggish, stagnant water on the one 
 hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form 
 and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; 
 not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear 
 sides : all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, 
 muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat ; while on 
 the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of 
 the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments 
 of canal passage -boats and coal -barges, with here and 
 there some broken-backed hulk, muddy and green, the 
 
 119 
 
120 THE LATE MR. KEMP. 
 
 timbers peering out through the planking, and all around 
 heaps of the nameless lumber of a deserted boat-yard. 
 The low, clumsy archway is wholly occupied by a narrow 
 branch of the canal, brown and clay-like as the main 
 trunk, from which it strikes off at nearly right angles. It 
 struck us forcibly, in examining the place, that in the 
 uncertain light of midnight, the flat, dead water must have 
 resembled an ordinary cart-road, leading through the arched 
 opening in the direction of the unfortunate architect's 
 dwelling; and certainly at this spot, just where he might 
 be supposed to have stepped upon the seeming road under 
 the fatal impression, was the body found. 
 
 It had been intended, as the funeral letters bore, to 
 inter the body of Mr. Kemp in the vault under the Scott 
 Monument, a structure which, erected to do honour to 
 the genius of one illustrious Scotsman, will be long re- 
 cognised as a proud trophy of the fine taste and vigorous 
 talent of another. The arrangement was not without pre- 
 cedent ; and had it been possible for Sir Walter to have 
 anticipated it, we do not think it would have greatly dis- 
 pleased him. The Egyptian architect inscribed the name 
 of his kingly master on but the plaster of the pyramid, 
 while he engraved his own on the enduring granite under- 
 neath; and so the name of the king has been lost, and 
 only that of the architect has survived. And there are, 
 no doubt, monuments in our own country which have been 
 transferred in some sort, and on a somewhat similar prin- 
 ciple, from their original object. There are fine statues 
 which reflect honour on but the sculptor that chiselled 
 them, and tombs and cenotaphs inscribed with names so 
 very obscure, that they give place in effect, if not literally, 
 like that of the Egyptian king, to the name of the architect 
 who reared them. Had the Scott Monument been erected, 
 like the monument of a neighbouring square, to express 
 a perhaps not very seemly gratitude for the services of 
 
THE LATE MR. KEMP. 121 
 
 some tenth-rate statesman, who procured places for his 
 friends, and who did not much else, it would have been 
 perilous to convert it into the tomb of a man of genius 
 like poor Kemp. It would have been perilous had it been 
 the monument of some mere litterateur. The litterateur's 
 works would have disappeared from the public eye, while 
 that of the hapless architect would be for ever before it. 
 And it would be thus the architect, not the litterateur ; that 
 would be permanently remembered. But the monument 
 of Sir Walter was in no danger ; and Sir Walter himself 
 would have been quite aware of the fact. It would not 
 have displeased him, that in the remote future, when all 
 its buttresses had become lichened and grey, and genera- 
 tion after generation had disappeared from around its base, 
 the story would be told like that connected in so many 
 of our older cathedrals with ' prentice pillars' and 'prentice 
 aisles' that the poor architect who had designed its ex- 
 quisite arches and rich pinnacles in honour of the Shake- 
 speare of Scotland, had met an untimely death when 
 engaged on it, and had found under its floor an appro- 
 priate grave. 
 
 The intention, however, was not carried into effect. It 
 had been intimated in the funeral letters that the burial 
 procession should quit the humble dwelling of the archi- 
 tect for a humble dwelling it is at half-past one. It 
 had been arranged, too, that the workmen employed at 
 the monument, one of the most respectable-looking bodies 
 of mechanics we ever saw, should carry the corpse to the 
 grave. They had gathered round the dwelling, a cottage 
 at Morningside, with a wreath of ivy nodding from the 
 wall ; and the appearance of both it and them naturally 
 suggested that the poor deceased, originally one of them- 
 selves, though he had risen, after a long struggle, into 
 celebrity, had not risen into affluence. Death had come 
 too soon. He had just attained his proper position just 
 
122 THE LATE MR. KEMP. 
 
 reached the upper edge of the table-land which his genius 
 had given him a right to occupy, and on which a com- 
 petency might be soon and honourably secured when a 
 cruel accident struck him down. The time specified for 
 the burial passed first one half-hour, and then another. 
 The assembled group wondered at the delay. And then 
 a gentleman from the dwelling-house came to inform them 
 that some interdict or protest, we know not what some, 
 we suppose, perfectly legal document had inhibited, at 
 this late hour, the interment of the body in the monument, 
 and that there was a grave in the course of being pre- 
 pared for it in one of the city churchyards. 
 
ANNIE M'DONALD AND THE 
 FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 
 
 IT was the religion of Scotland that first developed the 
 intellect of the country. Nor would it be at all difficult to 
 show how. It is sufficiently easy to conceive the process 
 through which earnest feeling concentrated on the great 
 concerns of human destiny leads to earnest thinking, and 
 how thinking propagates itself in its abstract character as 
 such, even after the moving power which had first set its 
 wheels in motion has ceased to operate. The Reformation 
 was mainly a religious movement, but it was pregnant with 
 philosophy and the arts. The grand doctrine of justification 
 by faith, for which* Luther and the other reformers con- 
 tended, was wonderfully linked, by the God from whom it 
 emanated, with all the great discoveries of modern science, 
 and not a few of the proudest triumphs of literature. It 
 drew along with it in the train of events, as if by a golden 
 chain, the philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the poesy 
 of Milton and Shakespeare. But though the general truth 
 of the remark has been acknowledged, the connection 
 which it intimates a connection clearly referable to the 
 will of that adorable Being who has made 'godliness 
 profitable for all things ' has been too much lost sight of. 
 Religious belief, transmuted in its reflex influences into 
 mere intellectual activity, has too often assumed another 
 nature and name, and forgotten or disowned its origin ; 
 and whatever is suited to remind us of the certainty of the 
 
 123 
 
124 ANNIE MCDONALD AND 
 
 connection, or to illustrate the mode of its operations, 
 cannot be deemed other than important. From a conside- 
 ration of this character, we have been much pleased with a 
 little work just published, which, taking up a single family 
 in the humblest rank, shows, without any apparent intention 
 of the kind on the part of the writer, how the Christianity 
 of the country has operated on the popular intellect ; and 
 we think we can scarce do better than introduce it to the 
 acquaintance of our readers. Most of them have perhaps 
 seen a memoir of one Annie M 'Donald, published in Edin- 
 burgh some eight or ten years ago. It is a humble produc- 
 tion, given chiefly, as the title-page intimates, in Annie's own 
 words; and Annie ranked among the humblest of our people. 
 She had never seen a single day in school. When best and 
 most favourably circumstanced, she was the wife of a farm- 
 servant, no very exalted station surely ; but still a lowlier 
 station awaited her, and she passed more than half a cen- 
 tury in widowhood. One of her daughters became the wife 
 of a poor labourer, her two grandchildren were labourers 
 also. It is not easy to imagine a humbler lot, without 
 crossing the line beyond which independence cannot be 
 achieved ; and yet Annie was a noble-hearted matron, one 
 of the true aristocracy of the country. Pier long life was a 
 protracted warfare a scene of privation, sorrow, and sore 
 trial ; but she struggled bravely through, ever trusting in 
 God, dependent on Him, and Him only ; and if the dignity 
 of human nature consist in integrity the most inflexible, 
 energy the most untiring, strong sound thinking, deep 
 devotional feeling, and a high-toned yet chastened spirit of 
 independence, then was there more true dignity to be 
 found in the humble cottage of Annie M 'Donald, than in 
 half the proud mansions of the country. Many of our 
 readers must be acquainted, as we have said, with her 
 character, and some of the outlines of her story. Most of 
 them are acquainted, too, with the character of another very 
 
THE FIFE SHIRE FORESTER. 125 
 
 remarkable person, John Bethune, the Fifeshire Forester, 
 a man whose name, in all probability, they have never 
 associated with Annie M'Donald. He belongs to quite a 
 different class of persons. The venerable matron takes 
 her place among those cultivators of the moral nature who 
 live in close converse with their God, and on whom are re- 
 stamped, if we may so speak, the lineaments of the divine 
 image obliterated at the fall. The poet, too early lost, 
 ranks, on the other hand, among those hardy cultivators of 
 the intellectual nature who, among all the difficulties inci- 
 dent to imperfect education, and a life of hardship and 
 labour, struggle into notice through the force of an innate 
 vigour, and impress the stamp of their mind on the litera- 
 ture of their country. Much of the interest of the newly 
 published memoir before us arises from the connection 
 which it establishes between the matron and the poet. It 
 purports to be 'A Sketch of the Life of Annie M 'Donald, by 
 her Grandson, the late John Bethune.' And scarce any one 
 can peruse it without marking the powerful influence which 
 the high religious character of the grandmother exerted on 
 the intellectual character of her descendant. The nobility 
 of the humble family from which he sprung was derived 
 evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a 
 homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustain- 
 ing ' stalk of carle hemp ' which bore it up and kept it from 
 grovelling on the depressed level of its condition. How 
 very interesting a subject of thought and inquiry ! A little 
 Highland girl, when tending cattle in the fields nearly a cen- 
 tury ago, was led, through divine grace, to * apprehend the 
 mercy of God in Christ,' and to close with His free offers of 
 salvation ; and in the third generation we can see the effects 
 of the transaction, not only in the blameless life and the pure 
 sentiments of a true though humble poet, but in, also, the 
 manly vigour of his thinking, and the high degree of culture 
 which he was enabled to bestow on his intellectual faculties. 
 
126 ANNIE MCDONALD AND 
 
 The story of Annie M 'Donald is such an one as a poet 
 of Wordsworth's cast would delight to tell. She was born 
 in a remote and thinly inhabited district of the Highlands, 
 and lost her father, a Highland crofter, while yet an infant. 
 She was his youngest child, but the other members of the 
 family were all very young and helpless ; and her poor 
 mother, a woman still in the prime of life, had to wander 
 with them into the low country, friendless and penniless, in 
 quest of employment. And employment after a weary pil- 
 grimage she at length succeeded in procuring from a hos- 
 pitable farmer in the parish of Kilmany, in Fifeshire. An 
 unoccupied hovel furnished her with a home ; and here, 
 with hard labour, she reared her children, till they were 
 fitted to leave her one by one, and do something for them- 
 selves, chiefly in the way of herding cattle. Annie grew up 
 to be employed like the rest ; and when a little herd-girl in 
 the fields, ' she frequently fell into strains of serious medi- 
 tation,' says her biographer, ' on the works of God, and on 
 her own standing before Him.' Let scepticism assert what 
 it may, such is the nature of man. God has written on 
 every human heart the great truth of man's responsibility ; 
 and the simple, ignorant herd-girl could read it there, amid 
 the solitude of the fields. But the inscription seemed 
 fraught with terror : she was perplexed by alternate doubts 
 and fears, and troubled by wildly vivid imaginings during 
 the day, and by frightful dreams by night. Her mother 
 had been unable to send her to school, but she got 
 occasional lessons in the evenings from a fellow-servant ; 
 and through the desultory assistance obtained in this way, 
 backed by her solitary efforts at self-instruction, she learned 
 to read. She must have deemed that an important day on 
 which she found she could at length converse with books ; 
 and the books with which she most loved to discourse were 
 such as related to the spiritual state. She pored over the 
 Shorter Catechism, and acquainted herself with her Bible. 
 
THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 127 
 
 But for years together, at this period, she suffered much 
 distress of mind. Her imagination possessed a wild 
 activity, and the scenes and shapes which it was con- 
 tinually calling up before her were all of horror and dismay 
 the place of the lost, the appalling forms with which 
 fancy invests the fallen spirits, the terrors of the last day, 
 and the dread throne of judgment. But a time of peace 
 and comfort came ; and she was enabled to lay hold on 
 God in faith and hope as her God, through the all-sufficient 
 blood of the atonement. And this hold she never after 
 relinquished. 
 
 There was no pause in her humble toils. From her 
 early occupations in the fields, she passed in riper youth 
 to the labours of the farm - house ; and at the age of 
 twenty-five experienced yet another change, in becoming 
 the wife of a farm-servant, a quiet man of solid character, 
 and whose religious views and feelings coincided with 
 her own. Her humble home was a solitary hut on the 
 uplands, far from even her nearest neighbours; but it 
 was her home, and she was happy. With the con- 
 sent of her husband, she took her aged mother under 
 her care, and succeeded in repaying more than the obli- 
 gations incurred in infancy; for her instructions, through 
 the blessing of God, were rendered apparently the means 
 of the old woman's conversion. There were sorrows that 
 came to her even at the happiest, but they were mingled 
 with comfort. She lost one of her children by small-pox 
 at a very early age; and yet, very early as the age was, 
 evidence was not wanting in its death that the Psalmist 
 spoke with full meaning when he said that God can perfect 
 praise out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But 
 there was a deeper grief awaiting her. After a happy 
 union of twelve years, her husband was seized in the night 
 in their lonely shieling by a mortal distemper, at a time 
 when only herself and her young children were present, 
 
i 2 8 ANNIE MCDONALD AND 
 
 and ere assistance could be procured he expired. There 
 is something extremely touching in. the details of this event, 
 as given by the poet, her grandson. They strongly show 
 how real an evil poverty is, in even the most favourable 
 circumstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper 
 ceased to envy the '"peasant's nest" when he thought how 
 its solitude made scant the means of life.' We would 
 almost covet the hut of Annie M 'Donald as described by 
 her grandson. ' It appeared,' he says, ' as if separated and 
 raised above the world by the cultureless and elevated soli- 
 tude on which it stood. Around it on every side were grey 
 rocks, peering out from among tufted grass, heath furze, and 
 many-coloured mosses ; forming what had been, till more 
 recently when the whole was converted into a plantation 
 a rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to 
 more than half the horizon, the eye might stretch away to 
 the distant mountains, or repose on the intervening valleys ; 
 and from the highest part of the hill, a little to the east- 
 ward, the dark blue of the German Ocean was clearly 
 visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear 
 sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look 
 gay when the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening 
 its tints to harmonize with the deep blue of the sky when 
 the hum of the bee is heard amid the heath, and the lark 
 high overhead. But it must have been a gloomy and miser- 
 able solitude on that night when the husband of Annie lay 
 tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour near to counsel 
 or assist, her weeping children around her, and with neither 
 lamp nor candle in the cottage. It was only by the ' light 
 of a burning coal taken from the fire, and exchanged for 
 another as the flame waxed faint, that she was enabled to 
 watch the progress of the fatal malady, and to tell at what 
 time death set his unalterable seal on the pallid features 
 of her husband.' 
 
 Long years of incessant labour followed; her children 
 
THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 129 
 
 were young and helpless, and her aged mother still with 
 her. She removed to another cottage, where she rented an 
 acre or two of land, that enabled her to keep a cow, and 
 gave her opportunity, as the place was situated beside a 
 considerable stream, of earning a small income as a bleacher 
 of home-made linen. The day, and not unfrequently the 
 night, was spent in toil; but she was strengthened to 
 endure, and so her children were bred up in hardy inde- 
 pendence. ' During the weeks of harvest,' says her bio- 
 grapher, ' she was engaged as a reaper by the farmer from 
 whom she rented her little tenement ; and when her day's 
 work was done, while her fellow-labourers retired to rest, 
 she employed herself in reaping her own crops, or provid- 
 ing grass for the cow, and often continued her toil by the 
 light of the harvest moon till it was almost midnight. After 
 a number of years thus spent, the expiration of the farmer's 
 lease occasioned her removal. Her family were now grown 
 up ; she could afford, in consequence, to have recourse to 
 means of subsistence which, if more scanty, were less labo- 
 rious than those which she had plied so long ; and so, re- 
 moving to a neighbouring village, she earned a livelihood 
 for herself and her infirm mother by spinning carpet worsted 
 at twopence a-day, the common wages for a woman at that 
 period.' * The cottage which she now occupied,' we again 
 quote, * happened to be one of a number which the Coun- 
 tess of Leven charitably kept for the accommodation of 
 poor people who were unable to pay a rent. She, however, 
 considered that she had no right to reckon herself among 
 this class, so long as it should please God to afford her 
 strength to provide for her own necessities ; and therefore 
 she deemed it unjustifiable to deprive the truly indigent of 
 what had been intended exclusively for them. Influenced 
 by these motives, she removed at the next term to an 
 adjacent hamlet, and here her aged mother died.' We 
 need not minutely follow her after-course : it bore but one 
 
 i 
 
130 ANNIE M'DONALD AND 
 
 complexion to the end. She taught a school for many 
 years, and was of signal use to not a few of her pupils. 
 At an earlier period she experienced a desire to be able 
 to write. There was a friend at a distance whom she 
 wished to comfort, by suggesting to her those topics of 
 consolation which she herself had found of such solid use; 
 and the wish had suggested the idea. And so she did learn 
 to write. She took up a pen, and tried to imitate the let- 
 ters in her Bible ; an acquaintance subsequently furnished 
 her with a copy of the alphabet commonly used in writing ; 
 and such was all the instruction she ever received in an art 
 to which in after life she devoted a considerable portion of 
 her time, and in the exercise of which she derived no small 
 enjoyment. In extreme old age she was rendered unable 
 by deafness properly to attend to her school, and so, with 
 her characteristic conscientiousness, she threw it up ; but 
 bodily strength was spared to her in a remarkable degree, 
 and her last years were not wasted in idleness. ' Her 
 spinning-wheel was again eagerly resorted to; even out- 
 door labour, when it could be obtained, was sometimes 
 adopted.' And the editor of the memoir before us 
 Alexander Bethune, the brother and biographer of John 
 relates that he recollects seeing her engaged in reaping, on 
 one occasion, when in her eighty-second year ; and that on 
 the same field her favourite nephew the poet, at that time a 
 boy of ten, was also essaying the labours of the harvest. In 
 one of the simple but touching epistles which we owe to her 
 singularly acquired accomplishment of writing a letter to 
 one of her daughters we find her thus expressing herself: 
 ' We finished our harvest last Monday, and here again 
 I have cause for thankfulness. I would desire to be doubly 
 thankful to God for enabling my old and withered arms to 
 use the sickle almost as well as they were wont to do when 
 I was young, and for the favourable weather and abundant 
 crop which in His mercy He has bestowed on us. But, 
 
THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 131 
 
 my dear child, there is in very deed a more important har- 
 vest before us. Oh ! may God, for Christ's sake, ripen us 
 by the sunshine of His Spirit for the sickle of death, and 
 stand by us in that trying hour, that we may be cut down 
 as a shock of corn which is fully ripe.' 
 
 Annie survived twelve years longer ; for her life was pro- 
 longed through three full generations. ' In the intervals of 
 domestic duty, her book and her pen were her constant 
 companions.' ' The process of committing her thoughts to 
 paper was rendered tedious, latterly, by the weakness and 
 tremor of her hand ; and her mind not unfrequently outran 
 her pen, leaving blanks in her composition, which she did 
 not always detect so as to enable her to fill them up. And 
 this circumstance sometimes rendered her meaning a little 
 obscure. But with all these deficiencies, her letters were 
 generally appreciated by those to whom they were ad- 
 dressed. Her conversation, too, was much sought after by 
 serious individuals in all ranks in society ; and occasionally 
 it was pleasing to see the promiscuous visitors who met in 
 her lowly cottage laying aside for a time the fastidious dis- 
 tinctions of birth and station, and humbly uniting in the 
 exercise of Christian love.' At length she could no longer 
 leave her bed : * her hearing was so much impaired, that 
 it was with the greatest difficulty she could be made to 
 understand what was said to her; and those friends who 
 came to visit her were frequently requested to sit down by 
 her bedside, where she might see their faces, though she 
 could no longer enjoy their conversation. After raising 
 herself to a convenient position, she generally addressed 
 them upon the importance of preparing for another world 
 while health and strength remained ; and tried to direct 
 their attention to the merits and sufferings of the Saviour as 
 the only sure ground of hope upon which sinners could 
 rest their salvation in the hour of trial.' As for her own 
 departure, she 'had a thousand reasons,' she said, 'for 
 
132 ANNIE MCDONALD AND 
 
 wishing to be gone ; but there was one reason which over- 
 balanced them all God's time had not yet arrived.' But 
 at length it did arrive. * Lay me down,' she said, for the 
 irritability of her nervous system had rendered frequent 
 change of posture necessary, and her friends had just been 
 indulging her, ' Lay me down ; let me sleep my last sleep 
 in Jesus.' And these were her last words. Her grandson 
 John seems to have cherished, when a mere boy, years 
 before she died, the design of writing her story ; and the 
 whole tone of his memoir (apparently one of his earlier prose 
 compositions) shows how thorough was the respect which 
 he entertained for her memory. She forms the subject, too, 
 of a copy of verses evidently of later production, and at 
 least equal to any he ever wrote, in which he affectingly 
 tells us how, when sadness and disease pressed upon the 
 springs of life, and he lingered in suspense and disappoint- 
 ment, the hopes which she had so long cherished 
 
 * The glorious hopes which flattered not 
 Dawned on him by degrees.' 
 
 He found the Saviour whom she had worshipped ; and one 
 of the last subsidiary hopes in which he indulged ere he 
 bade the world farewell, was that in the place to which he 
 was going he should meet with his beloved grandmother. 
 We have occupied so much space with our narrative, brief 
 as it is, that we cannot follow up our original intention of 
 showing how, in principle, the intellectual history of Bethune 
 is an epitome of that of his country ; but we must add that 
 it would be well if, in at least one important respect, the 
 history of his country resembled his history more. The 
 thoughtful piety of the grandmother prepared an atmo- 
 sphere of high-toned thought, in which the genius of the 
 grandson was fostered. It constituted, to vary the figure, 
 the table-land from which he arose ; but how many of 
 a resembling class, and indebted in a similar way, have 
 
THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 133 
 
 directed the influence of their writings to dissipate that 
 atmosphere to lower that table-land ! We refer the reader 
 to the interesting little work from which we have drawn 
 our materials. It is edited by the surviving Bethune, the 
 brother and biographer of the poet, and both a vigorous 
 writer and a worthy man. There are several of the pas- 
 sages which it comprises of his composition ; among the 
 rest, the very striking passage with which the memoir con- 
 cludes, and in which he adds a few additional facts illus- 
 trative of his grandmother's character, and describes her 
 personal appearance. The description will remind our 
 readers of one of the more graphic pictures of Wordsworth, 
 that of the stately dame on whose appearance the poet 
 remarks quaintly, but significantly, 
 
 ' Old times are living there.' 
 
 1 From the date of her birth,' says Alexander Bethune, 
 'it will be seen that she (Annie M'Donald) was in her 
 ninety-fourth year at the time of her death. In person she 
 was spare ; and ere toil and approaching age had bent her 
 frame, she must have been considerably above the middle 
 size. Even after she was far advanced in life, there was in her 
 appearance a rigidity of outline and a sinewy firmness which 
 told of no ordinary powers of endurance. There was much 
 of true benevolence in the cast of her countenance ; while 
 the depth of her own Christian feelings gave an expression 
 of calm yet earnest sympathy to her eye, which was par- 
 ticularly impressive. Limited as were her resources, she 
 had been a regular contributor to the Bible and Missionary 
 Societies for a number of years previous to her death. Nor 
 was she slow to minister to the necessities of others accord- 
 ing to her ability. Notwithstanding the various items thus 
 disposed of during the latter part of her life, she had saved 
 a small sum of money, which at her death was left to her 
 unmarried daughters.' 
 
134 ANNIE M'DONALD AND 
 
 The touching description of the poet we must also sub- 
 join. No one can read it without feeling its truth, or 
 without being convinced that, to be thoroughly true in the 
 circumstances, was to be intensely poetical. The recollec- 
 tion of such a relative affectionately retained was of itself 
 poetry. 
 
 MY GRANDMOTHER. 
 
 Long years of toil and care, 
 
 And pain and poverty, have passed 
 Since last I listened to her prayer, 
 
 And looked upon her last ; 
 Yet how she spoke, and how she smiled 
 Upon me, when a playful child 
 
 The lustre of her eye 
 The kind caress the fond embrace 
 The reverence of her placid face, 
 
 All in my memory lie 
 As fresh as they had only been 
 Bestowed and felt, and heard and seen, 
 
 Since yesterday went by. 
 
 Her dress was simply neat 
 
 Her household tasks so featly done : 
 Even the old willow-wicker seat 
 
 On which she sat and spun 
 The table where her Bible lay, 
 Open from morn till close of day 
 
 The standish, and the pen 
 With which she noted, as they rose, 
 Her thoughts upon the joys, the woes, 
 
 The final fate of men, 
 And sufferings of her Saviour God, 
 Each object in her poor abode 
 
 Is visible as then. 
 
 Nor are they all forgot, 
 
 The faithful admonitions given, 
 And glorious hopes which flattered not, 
 
 But led the soul to heaven ! 
 . These had been hers, and have been mine 
 When all beside had ceased to shine 
 
THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER. 135 
 
 When sadness and disease, 
 And disappointment and suspense, 
 Had driven youth's fairest fancies hence, 
 
 Short'ning its fleeting lease : 
 'Twas then these hopes, amid the dark 
 Just glimmering, like an unquench'd spark, 
 
 Dawned on me by degrees. 
 
 To her they gave a light 
 
 Brighter than sun or star supplied ; 
 And never did they shine more bright 
 
 Than just before she died. 
 Death's shadow dimm'd her aged eyes, 
 Grey clouds had clothed the evening skies, 
 
 And darkness was abroad ; 
 But still she turned her gaze above, 
 As if the eternal light of love 
 
 On her glazed organs glowed, 
 Like beacon-fire at closing even, 
 Hung out between the earth and heaven, 
 
 To guide her soul to God. 
 
 And then they brighter grew, 
 
 Beaming with everlasting bliss, 
 As if the eternal world in view 
 
 Had weaned her eyes from this : 
 And every feature was composed, 
 As with a placid smile they closed 
 
 On those who stood around, 
 Who felt it was a sin to weep 
 O'er such a smile and such a sleep 
 
 So peaceful, so profound j 
 And though they wept, their tears expressed 
 Joy for her time-worn frame at rest 
 
 Her soul with mercy crowned. 
 
 A ngust 10, 1842. 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 
 
 How quickly the years fly ! One twelvemonth more, and it 
 will be a full quarter of a century since we last saw the wild 
 Highland valley so well described by Mr. Robertson in his 
 opening paragraphs. 1 And yet the recollection is as fresh 
 in our memory now as it was twenty years ago. The chill 
 winter night had fallen on the brown round hills and alder- 
 skirted river, as we turned from off the road that winds 
 along the Kyle of the Dornoch Frith into the bleak gorge 
 of Strathcarron. The shepherd's cottage, in which we pur- 
 posed passing the night, lay high up in the valley, where the 
 lofty sides partially covered at that period by the remnants 
 of an ancient forest approach so near each other, and rise 
 so abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never 
 falls on the stream below. There were still some ten or 
 twelve miles of broken road before us. The moon in its 
 first quarter hung low over the hills, dimly revealing their 
 rough outline, and throwing its tinge of faint bronze on the 
 broken clumps of wood in the hollows. A keen frost had 
 set in ; and a thick trail of fog-rime, raised by its influence 
 in the calm, and which at the height of some eighty or a 
 hundred feet hung over the river scarce less defined in 
 its margin than the river itself, for it winded wherever 
 the stream winded, and ran straight as an arrow wherever 
 the stream ran straight occupied the whole length of the 
 valley, like an enormous snake lying uncoiled in its den. 
 
 1 The Rosses of Glencalvie, by John Robertson, Esq. (article in the 
 Glasgow National, August 1844). ED. 
 
 136 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 137 
 
 The numerous turf cottages on either side were invisible 
 in the darkness, save that ever and anon the brief twinkle 
 of a light indicated their existence and their places. In a 
 recess of the stream the torch of some adventurous fisher 
 now gleamed red on rock and water, now suddenly dis- 
 appeared, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood, or by 
 some jutting angle of the bank. The distant roar of the 
 stream mingled sullenly in the calm, with its nearer and 
 hoarser dash, as it chafed on the ledges below, filling the 
 air with a wild music, that seemed the appropriate voice of 
 the impressive scenery from amid which it arose. It was 
 late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage a dark, raftered, 
 dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for 
 several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the 
 flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common 
 scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and 
 unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins 
 besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the 
 conservative influences of the smoke ; and on a rude plank 
 table below there rose two tall pyramids of dark-coloured 
 joints of braxy mutton, heaped up each on a corn riddle. 
 The shepherd a Highlander of colossal proportions, but 
 hard and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least 
 sixty winters sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his 
 flocks was not particularly cheering ; and he had, besides, 
 seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his mind with 
 strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on the 
 previous evening to a dank hollow on the hill-side, in which 
 many of his flock had died ; the rain had ceased a few 
 hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this 
 second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of 
 silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a 
 moon that appeared as if resting at the time on the hill-top. 
 The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him, for he 
 had climbed half-way up the acclivity, when suddenly what 
 
138 A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 
 
 seemed the figure of a man in heated metal the figure of 
 a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace sprang 
 up out of the darkness ; and after stalking over the surface 
 of the fog for a few seconds in which, however, it traversed 
 the greater part of the valley as suddenly disappeared, 
 leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could 
 be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one 
 of those shooting lights that in mountain districts, during 
 unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller, 
 and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been 
 exaggerated by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime 
 and the briefness of the survey; but the apparition had 
 filled his whole mind, as one of strange and frightful portent 
 from the spiritual world. And often since that night has it 
 returned to us in recollection, as a vision in singular keeping 
 with the wild valley which it traversed, and the credulous 
 melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness, 
 
 ' A meteor of the night of distant years, 
 That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld 
 Musing at midnight upon prophecies.' 
 
 By much the greater part of Strathcarron, in those days, 
 was in the possession of its ancient inhabitants; and we 
 learn from the description of Mr. Robertson, that it has 
 since undergone scarce any change. * Strathcarron,' he 
 says, 'is still in the old state.' Throughout its whole 
 extent the turf cottages of the aborigines rise dark and 
 'thick as heretofore, from amid their irregular patches of 
 potatoes and corn. But in an adjacent glen, through 
 which the Calvie works its headlong way to the Carron, 
 that terror of the Highlanders, a summons of removal, has 
 been served within the last few months on a whole com- 
 munity ; and the graphic sketch of Mr. Robertson relates 
 both the peculiar circumstances in which it has been issued, 
 and the feelings which it has excited. We find from his 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 139 
 
 testimony, that the old state of things which is so imme- 
 diately on the eve of being broken up in this locality, 
 lacked not a few of those sources of terror to the pro- 
 prietary of the country, that are becoming so very formid- 
 able to them in the newer states. A spectral poor-law sits 
 by our waysides, wrapped up in death -flannels of the 
 English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion- 
 houses of our landlords, vision beyond comparison more 
 direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone 
 shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, 
 it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of 
 things the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent 
 removal-summonses that it threatens. The existing poor- 
 law in Glencalvie is a self-enforcing law, that rises direct 
 out of the unsophisticated sympathies of the Highland 
 heart, and costs the proprietary nothing. ' The constitution 
 of society in the glen,' says Mr. Robertson, ' is remarkably 
 simple. Four heads of families are bound for the whole rental 
 of ^55, 135. a year ; the number of souls is about ninety. 
 Sixteen cottages pay rent ; three cottages are occupied by old 
 lone women, who pay no rent, and who have a grace from 
 the others for the grazing of a few goats or sheep, by which 
 they live. This self-working poor-law system,' adds Mr. 
 Robertson, 'is supported by the people themselves; the 
 laird, I am informed, never gives anything to it.' Now there 
 must be at least some modicum of good in such a state of 
 things, however old-fashioned ; and we are pretty sure such 
 of our English neighbours as leave their acres untilled year 
 after year, to avoid the crushing pressure of the statute- 
 enforced poor-law that renders them not worth the tilling, 
 would be somewhat unwilling, were the state made theirs, 
 to improve it away. Nor does it seem a state with all its 
 simplicity, and all its perhaps blameable indifferency to 
 modern improvement particularly hostile to the develop- 
 ment of mind or the growth of morals. 'The people of 
 
i4o A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 
 
 Amat and Glencalvie themselves supported a teacher for 
 the education of their children,' says Mr. Robertson. * The 
 laird,' he adds, ' has never lost a farthing of rent. In bad 
 years, such as 1836 or 1837, the people may have required 
 the favour of a few weeks' delay, but they are now not a 
 single farthing in arrears.' 
 
 Mr. Robertson gives us the tragedy of a clearing in its 
 first act. We had lately the opportunity of witnessing the 
 closing scene in the after-piece, by which a clearing more 
 than equally extensive has been followed up, and which 
 bids fair to find at no distant day many counterparts in the 
 Highlands of Scotland. Rather more than twenty years 
 ago, the wild, mountainous island of Rum, the home of 
 considerably more than five hundred souls, was divested 
 of all its inhabitants, to make way for one sheep-farmer 
 and eight thousand sheep. It was soon found, however, 
 that there are limits beyond which it is inconvenient to 
 depopulate a country on even the sheep-farm system : the 
 island had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the 
 comfort of the tenant ; and on the occasion of a clearing 
 which took place in a district of Skye, and deprived of their 
 homes many of the old inhabitants, some ten or twelve 
 families of the number were invited to Rum, and may now 
 be found squatting on the shores of the only bay of the 
 island, on a strip of unprofitable morass. But the whole of 
 the once peopled interior remains a desert, all the more 
 lonely in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary 
 glens, with their green, plough-furrowed patches, and their 
 ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as 
 solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea 
 stretches drearily around. We spent a long summer's day 
 amidst its desert recesses, and saw the sun set behind its 
 wilderness of pyramidal hills. The evening was calm and 
 clear; the armies of the insect world were sporting by 
 millions in the light ; a brown stream that ran through the 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 141 
 
 valley at our feet yielded an incessant poppling sound from 
 the myriads of fish that were incessantly leaping in the 
 pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and 
 gold that incessantly fluttered over them ; the half-effaced 
 furrows borrowed a richer hue from the yellow light of sun- 
 set ; the broken cottage-walls stood up more boldly promi- 
 nent on the hill-side, relieved by the lengthening shadows; 
 along a distant hill-side there ran what seemed the ruins of 
 a grey stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a very remote 
 age to facilitate the hunting of deer : all seemed to bespeak 
 the place a fitting habitation for man, and in which not only 
 the necessaries, but not a few also of the luxuries of life, might 
 be procured ; but in the entire prospect not a man nor a 
 man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was 
 one without figures. And where, it may be asked, was the 
 one tenant of the island for whose sake so many others had 
 been removed ? We found his house occupied by a humble 
 shepherd, who had in charge the wreck of his property, 
 property no longer his, but held for the benefit of his 
 creditors. The great sheep-farmer had gone down under 
 circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after 
 development, when in their latent state, improving land- 
 lords had failed to calculate ; the island itself was in the 
 market, and a report went current at the time that it was 
 on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, 
 who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The cycle 
 which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally 
 had already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum. 
 
 We have said that the sheep-farmer had gone down, in 
 this instance, under adverse circumstances of very exten- 
 sive bearing. In a beautiful transatlantic poem, a North 
 American Indian is represented as visiting by night the 
 tombs of his fathers, now surrounded, though reared in the 
 depths of a forest, by the cultivated farms and luxurious 
 dwellings of the stranger, and there predicting that the race 
 
142 A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 
 
 by which his had been supplaced should be in turn cast out 
 of their possessions. His fancy on the subject is a wild 
 one, though not unfitted for the poet. The streams, he 
 said, were yielding a lower murmur than of old, and rolling 
 downwards a decreasing volume ; the springs were less 
 copious in their supplies j the land, shorn of its forests, was 
 drying up under the no longer softened influence of summer 
 suns. Yet a few ages more, and it would spread out all 
 around an arid and barren wilderness, unfitted, like the 
 deserts of the East, to be a home of man. The fancy, we 
 repeat, though a poetic, is a wild one ; but the grounds 
 from which we infer that the clearers of the Highlands 
 the supplanters of the Highlanders are .themselves to be 
 cleared and supplanted in turn, is neither wild nor poetic. 
 The voice which predicts in the case is a voice, not of 
 shrinking rivulets nor failing springs, but of the ' Cloth 
 Hall ' in Leeds, and of the worsted factories of Bradford 
 and Halifax. Most of our readers must be aware that 
 the great woollen trade of Britain divides into two main 
 branches its woollen cloth manufacture, and its worsted 
 and stuff manufactures : and in both these the estimation 
 in which British wool is held has mightily sunk of late 
 years, never apparently to rise again ; for it has sunk, not 
 through any caprice of fashion, but in the natural progress 
 of improvement. Mr. Dodd, in his interesting little work 
 on the Textile Manufactures of Great Britain, refers inci- 
 dentally to the fact, in drawing a scene in the Cloth Hall 
 of Leeds, introduced simply for the purpose of showing at 
 how slight an expense of time and words business is trans- 
 acted in this great mart of trade. * All the sellers,' says Mr. 
 Dodd, ' know all the buyers ; and each buyer is invited, as 
 he passes along, to look at some " olives," or " browns," or 
 " pilots," or " six quarters," or " eight quarters ;" and the 
 buyer decides in a wonderfully short space of time whether 
 it will answer his purpose to purchase or not. " Mr. A., just 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 143 
 
 look at these olives." "How much?" "Six and eight." 
 "Too high." Mr. A. walks on, and perhaps a neighbouring 
 clothier draws his attention to a piece, or " end," of cloth. 
 "What's this?" "Five and three." "Too low." The 
 " too high " relates, as may be supposed, to the price per 
 yard j whereas the " too low " means that the quality of the 
 cloth is lower than the purchaser requires. Another seller 
 accosts him with "Will this suit you, Mr. A.?" "Any 
 English wool?" "Not much; it is nearly all foreign;" a 
 question and answer which exemplify the disfavour into 
 which English wool has fallen in the cloth trade. But it is 
 not the cloth trade alone in which it has fallen into dis- 
 favour. The rapid extension of the worsted manufacture in 
 this country,' says the same writer in another portion of his 
 work, * is very remarkable. So long as efforts were made 
 by English wool-growers to compel the use of the English 
 wool in cloth-making efforts which the Legislature for 
 many years sanctioned by legal enactments the worsted 
 fabrics made were chiefly of a coarse and heavy kind, such 
 as " camlets ;" but when the wool trade was allowed to flow 
 into its natural channels by the removal of restrictions, the 
 value of all the different kinds of wool became appreciated, 
 and each one was appropriated to purposes for which it 
 seemed best fitted. The wool of one kind of English 
 sheep continued in demand for hosiery and coarse worsted 
 goods ; and the wool of the Cashmere and Angora goats 
 came to be imported for worsted goods of finer quality.' 
 The colonist and the foreign merchant have been brought 
 into the field, and the home producer labours in vain to 
 compete with them on what he finds unequal terms. 
 
 Hence the difficulties which, in a season of invigorated 
 commerce and revived trade, continue to bear on the 
 British wool-grower, and which bid fair to dear him from 
 the soil which he divested of the original inhabitants. Every 
 new sheep-rearing farm that springs up in the colonies 
 
144 A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 
 
 whether in Australia, or New Zealand, or Van Diemen's 
 Land, or Southern Africa sends him its summons of removal 
 in the form of huge bales of wool, lower in price and better 
 in quality than he himself can produce. The sheep-breeders 
 of New Holland and the Cape threaten to avenge the Rosses 
 of Glencalvie. But to avenge is one thing, and to right 
 another. The comforts of our poor Highlander have been 
 deteriorating, and his position lowering, for the last three 
 ages, and we see no prospect of improvement. 
 
 * For a century,' says Mr. Robertson, ' their privileges have 
 been lessening : they dare not now hunt the deer, or shoot 
 the grouse or the blackcock ; they have no longer the range 
 of the hills for their cattle and their sheep ; they must not 
 catch a salmon in a stream : in earth, air, and water, the 
 rights of the laird are greater, and the rights of the people 
 are smaller, than they were in the days of their forefathers. 
 Yet, forsooth, there is much talk of philosophers of the 
 progress of democracy as a progress to equality of conditions 
 in our day ! One of the ministers who accompanied me 
 had to become bound for law expenses to the amount of 
 .20, inflicted on the people for taking a log from the 
 forest for their bridge, a thing they and their fathers had 
 always done unchallenged.' 
 
 One eloquent passage more, and we have done. It is 
 thus we find Mr. Robertson, to whose intensely interesting 
 sketch we again direct the attention of the reader, summing 
 up the case of the Rosses of Glencalvie : 
 
 ' The father of the laird of Kindeace bought Glencalvie. 
 It was sold by a Ross two short centuries ago. The swords 
 of the Rosses of Glencalvie did their part in protecting this 
 little glen, as well as the broad lands of Pitcalnie, from the 
 ravages and the clutches of hostile septs. These clansmen 
 bled and died in the belief that every principle of honour 
 and morals secured their descendants a right to subsisting 
 on the soil. The chiefs and their children had the same 
 
A HIGHLAND CLEARING. 145 
 
 charter of the sword. Some Legislatures have made the 
 right of the people superior to the right of the chief; British 
 law-makers have made the rights of the chief everything, and 
 those of their followers nothing. The ideas of the morality 
 of property are in most men the creatures of their interests 
 and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however : 
 the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the 
 clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands 
 their children in mournful groups going into exile the 
 faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin 
 the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep- 
 walks of the stranger. 
 
 ' Sad it is, that it is seemingly the will of our constitu- 
 encies that our laws shall prefer the few to the many. Most 
 mournful will it be, should the clansmen of the Highlands 
 have been cleared away, ejected, exiled, in deference to 
 a political, a moral, a social, and an economical mistake, 
 a suggestion not of philosophy, but of mammon, a system 
 in which the demon of sordidness assumed the shape of the 
 angel of civilisation and of light.' 
 
 September 4, 1844. 
 
THE POET MONTGOMERY. 
 
 THE reader will find in our columns a report, as ample as 
 our limits have allowed, of the public breakfast given in 
 Edinburgh on Wednesday last 1 to our distinguished country- 
 man James Montgomery, and his friend the missionary 
 Latrobe. We have rarely shared in a more agreeable enter- 
 tainment, and have never listened to a more pleasing or 
 better-toned address than that in which the poet ran over 
 some of the more striking incidents of his early life. It was 
 in itself a poem, and a very fine one. An old and venerable 
 man returning to his native country after an absence of 
 sixty years after two whole generations had passed away, 
 and the grave had closed over almost all his contemporaries 
 would be of itself a matter of poetical interest, even were 
 the aged visitor a person of but the ordinary cast of thought 
 and depth of feeling. How striking the contrast between 
 the sunny, dream-like recollections of childhood to such an 
 individual, and the surrounding realities between the scenes 
 and figures on this side the wide gulf of sixty years, and the 
 scenes and figures on that : yonder, the fair locks of infancy, 
 its bright, joyous eyes, and its speaking smiles ; here, the 
 grey hairs and careworn wrinkles of rigid old age, tottering 
 painfully on the extreme verge of life ! But if there attaches 
 thus a poetic interest to the mere circumstances of such a 
 visit, how much more, in the present instance, from the 
 character of the visitor, a man whose thoughts and feelings, 
 1 aoth October 1841. 
 
 146 
 
THE POET MONTGOMER K 147 
 
 tinted by the warm hues of imagination, retain in his old 
 age all the strength and freshness of early youth ! 
 
 Hogg, when first introduced to Wilkie, expressed his 
 gratification at finding him so young a man. We experi- 
 enced a similar feeling on first seeing the poet Montgomery. 
 He can be no young man, who, looking backwards across 
 two whole generations, can recount from recollection, like 
 Nestor of old, some of the occurrences of the third. But 
 there is a green old age, in which the spirits retain their 
 buoyancy, and the intellect its original vigour ; and the 
 whole appearance of the poet gives evidence that his even- 
 ing of life is of this happy and desirable character. His 
 appearance speaks of antiquity, but not of decay. His 
 locks have assumed a snowy whiteness, and the lofty and 
 full-arched coronal region exhibits what a brother poet has 
 well termed the l clear bald polish of the honoured head ;' 
 but the expression of the countenance is that of middle life. 
 It is a clear, thin, speaking countenance : the features are 
 high ; the complexion fresh, though not ruddy ; and age has 
 failed to pucker either cheek or forehead with a single 
 wrinkle. The spectator sees at a glance that all the poet 
 still survives that James Montgomery in his sixty-fifth year 
 is all that he ever was. The forehead, rather compact than 
 large, swells out on either side towards the region of idea- 
 lity, and rises high, in a fine arch, into what, if phrenology 
 speak true, must be regarded as an amply developed organ 
 of veneration. The figure is quite as little touched by age 
 as the face. It is well but not strongly made, and of the 
 middle size ; and yet there is a touch of antiquity about it 
 too, derived, however, rather from the dress than from any 
 peculiarity in the person itself. To a plain suit of black 
 Mr. Montgomery adds the voluminous breast ruffles of the 
 last age exactly such things as, in Scotland at least, the 
 fathers of the present generation wore on their wedding- 
 days. These are perhaps but small details ; but we notice 
 
148 THE POET MONTGOMERY. 
 
 them just because we have never yet met with any one who 
 took an interest in a celebrated name, without trying to 
 picture to himself the appearance of the individual who 
 bore it. 
 
 There are some very pleasing incidents beautifully re- 
 lated in the address of Mr. Montgomery. It would have 
 been false taste and delicacy in such a man to have for- 
 borne speaking of himself. His return, after an absence 
 equal to the term of two full generations, to his native 
 cottage, is an incident exquisitely poetic. He finds his 
 father's humble chapel converted into a workshop, and 
 strangers sit beside the hearth that had once been his 
 mother's. And where were that father and mother ? Their 
 bones moulder in a distant land, where the tombstones cast 
 no shadow when the fierce sun looks down at noon upon 
 their graves. ' Taking their lives in their hands/ they had 
 gone abroad to preach Christ to the poor enslaved negro, 
 for whose soul at that period scarce any one cared save the 
 United Brethren ; and in the midst of their labours of piety 
 and love, they had fallen victims to the climate. He passed 
 through the cottage and the workshop, calling up the dream- 
 like recollections of his earliest scene of existence, and recog- 
 nising one by one the once familiar objects within. One 
 object he failed to recognise. It was a small tablet fixed in 
 the wall. He went up to it, and found it intimated that 
 James Montgomery the poet had been born there. Was it 
 not almost as if one of the poets or philosophers of a former 
 time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as a disembodied 
 spirit, on his own monument ? Of scarce less interest is his 
 anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone 
 abroad, as we have said, and their little boy was left with 
 the Brethren at Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the sister 
 kingdom. He was one of their younger scholars at a time 
 when Lord Monboddo, still so well known for his great 
 talents and acquirements, and his scarce less marked eccen- 
 
THE POET MONTGOMER Y. 149 
 
 tricities, visited the settlement, and was shown, among other 
 things, their little school. His Lordship stood among the 
 boys, coiling and uncoiling his whip on the floor, and en- 
 gaged as if in counting the nail-heads in the boarding. The 
 little fellows were all exceedingly curious ; none of them 
 had ever seen a real live lord before, and Monboddo was a 
 very strange-looking lord indeed. He wore a large, stiff, 
 bushy periwig, surmounted by a huge, odd-looking hat ; his 
 very plain coat was studded with brass buttons of broadest 
 disk, and his voluminous inexpressibles were of leather. 
 And there he stood, with his grave, absent face bent down- 
 wards, drawing and redrawing his whip along the floor, as 
 the Moravian, his guide, pointed out to his notice boy after 
 boy. * And this,' said the Moravian, coming at length to 
 young Montgomery, ' is a countryman of your Lordship's.' 
 His Lordship raised himself up, looked hard at the little 
 fellow, and then shaking his huge whip over his head, ' Ah,' 
 he exclaimed, ' I hope his country will have no reason to be 
 ashamed of him.' ' The circumstance,' said the poet, ' made 
 a deep impression on my mind; and I determined I trust 
 the resolution was not made in vain I determined in that 
 moment that my country should not have reason to be 
 ashamed of me.' 
 
 Scotland has no reason to be ashamed of James Mont- 
 gomery. Of all her poets, there is not one of equal power, 
 whose strain has been so uninterruptedly pure, or whose 
 objects have been so invariably excellent. The child of 
 the Christian missionary has been the poet of Christian 
 missions. The parents laid down their lives in behalf of 
 the enslaved and perishing negro ; the son, in strains the 
 most vigorous and impassioned, has raised his generous 
 appeal to public justice in his behalf. Nor has the appeal 
 been in vain. All his writings bear the stamp of the Chris- 
 tian j many of them embodying feelings which all the truly 
 devout experience, but which only a poet could express 
 
1 50 THE POET MONTGOMER Y. 
 
 have been made vehicles for addressing to the Creator the 
 emotions of many a grateful heart ; and, employed chiefly 
 on themes of immortality, they promise to outlive not only 
 songs of intellectually a lower order, but of even equal 
 powers of genius, into whose otherwise noble texture sin 
 has introduced the elements of death. 
 
 28/7* October 1841. 
 
CRITICISM INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 THE reader must have often remarked, in catalogues of the 
 writings of great authors such as Dr. Johnson, and the 
 Rev. John Gumming, of the Scotch Church, London that 
 while some of the pieces are described as acknowledged, the 
 genuineness of others is determined merely by internal 
 evidence. We know, for instance, that the Doctor wrote the 
 English Dictionary, not only because no other man in the 
 world at the time could have written it, but also because he 
 affixed his name to the title-page. We know, too, that he 
 wrote some of the best of Lord Chatham's earlier speeches, 
 just because he said so, and pointed out the very garret in 
 Fleet Street in which they had been written. But it is from 
 other data we conclude that, during his period of obscurity 
 and distress, he wrote prefaces for the Gentleman's Maga- 
 zine, for some six or seven years together, data derived 
 exclusively from a discriminating criticism ; and his claim 
 to the authorship of Taylor's Sermons rests solely on the 
 vigorous character of the thinking displayed in these com- 
 positions, and the marked peculiarities of their style. Now, 
 in exactly the same way in which we know that Johnson 
 wrote the speeches and the Dictionary, do we know that the 
 Rev. John Gumming drew up an introductory essay to the 
 liturgy of a Church that never knew of a liturgy, and that 
 he occasionally contributes tales to morocco annuals, won- 
 derful enough to excite the astonishment of ordinary readers. 
 To these compositions he affixes his name, a thing very few 
 men would have the courage to do ; and thus are we assured 
 
 151 
 
152 CRITICISM: 
 
 of their authorship. But there are other compositions to 
 which he does not affix his name, and it is from internal 
 evidence alone that these can be adjudged to him: it is 
 from internal evidence alone, for instance, that we can con- 
 clude him to be the author of the article on the Scottish 
 Church question which has appeared in Prater's Magazine 
 for the present month. 
 
 May we crave leave to direct the attention of the reader 
 for a very few minutes to the grounds on which we decide ? 
 It is of importance, as Johnson says of Pope, that no part 
 of so great a writer should be suffered to be lost, and a 
 little harmless criticism may have the effect of sharpening 
 the faculties. 
 
 There is a class of Scottish ministers in the present day, 
 who, though they detest show and coxcombry, have yet a 
 very decided leaning to the picturesque ceremonies of the 
 Episcopal Church. They never weary of apologizing to 
 our southern neighbours for what they term the baldness of 
 our Presbyterian ritual, or in complaining of it to ourselves. 
 It was no later than last Sunday that Dr. Muir sorrowed 
 in his lecture over the ' stinted arrangement in the Presby- 
 terian service, that admits of no audible response from the 
 people;' and all his genteeler hearers, sympathizing with 
 the worthy man, felt how pleasant a thing it would be were 
 the congregation permitted to do for him in the church 
 what the Rev. Mr. Macfarlane, erst of Stockbridge, does 
 for him in the presbytery. Corporal Trim began one of 
 his stories on one occasion, by declaring l that there was 
 once an unfortunate king of Bohemia;' and when Uncle 
 Toby, interrupting him with a sigh, exclaimed, 'Ah, Cor- 
 poral Trim, and was he unfortunate ?' ' Yes, your honour,' 
 readily replied Trim ; ' he had a great love of ships and sea- 
 ports, and yet, as your honour knows, there was ne'er a 
 ship nor a seaport in all his dominions.' Now this semi- 
 Episcopalian class are unfortunate after the manner of the 
 
INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 153 
 
 king of Bohemia. The objects of their desire lie far beyond 
 the Presbyterian territories. They are restricted to one 
 pulpit, they are limited to one dress ; they have actually to 
 read and preach from the same footboard ; they are pro- 
 hibited the glories of white muslin ; liturgy have they none. 
 No audible responses arise from the congregation ; the pre- 
 centor is silent, save when he sings; their churches are 
 organless; and though they set themselves painfully to 
 establish their claim to the succession apostolical, the Hon. 
 Mr. Percevals of the Church which they love and admire 
 see no proof in their evidence, and look down upon them 
 as the mere preaching laymen of a sectarian corporation. 
 
 Thrice unfortunate men ! What were the unhappinesses 
 of the king of Bohemia, compared with the sorrows of these 
 humble but rejected followers of Episcopacy ! 
 
 Now, among this highly respectable but unhappy class, 
 the Rev. John Gumming, of the Scotch Church, London, 
 stands pre-eminent. So grieved was Queen Mary of 
 England by the loss of Calais, that she alleged the very 
 name of the place would be found written on her heart after 
 her death. The words that have the best chance of being 
 found inscribed on the heart of the Rev. Mr. dimming are, 
 bishop, liturgy, apostolical succession, burial service, organ, 
 and surplice. The ideas attached to these vocables per- 
 vade his whole style, and form from their continual recur- 
 rence a characteristic portion of it. They tumble up and 
 down in his mind like the pieces of painted glass in a 
 kaleidoscope, and present themselves in new combinations 
 at every turn. His last acknowledged composition was a 
 wonderful tale which appeared in the Protestant Annual for 
 the present year, and strange subject for such a writer 
 it purported to be a Tale of the Covenant. Honest Peter 
 Walker had told the same story, that of John Brown of 
 Priesthill, about a century and a half ago ; but there had 
 been much left for Mr. Cumming to discover in it of which 
 
154 CRITICISM: 
 
 the poor pedlar does not seem to have had the most distant 
 conception. 
 
 Little did Peter know that John Brown's favourite mini- 
 ster 'held the sacred and apostolical succession of the 
 Scottish priesthood.' Little would he have thought of 
 apologizing to the English reader for l the antique and 
 ballad verses ' of our metrical version of the Psalms. In- 
 deed, so devoid was he of learning, that he could scarce 
 have valued at a sufficiently high rate the doctrines of 
 Oxford ; and so little gifted with taste, that he would have 
 probably failed to appreciate the sublimities of Brady and 
 Tate. Nor could Peter have known that the ' liturgy of 
 the heart ' was in the Covenanter's cottage, and that the 
 1 litany ' of the spirit breathed from his evening devotions. 
 But it is all known to the Rev. Mr. Gumming. He knows, 
 too, that there were sufferings and privations endured by 
 the persecuted Presbyterians of those days, of which writers 
 of less ingenuity have no adequate conception ; that they 
 were forced to the wild hill-sides, where they could have no 
 ' organs,' and compelled to bury their dead without the 
 solemnities of the funeral service. Unhappy Covenanters ! 
 It is only now that your descendants are beginning to learn 
 the extent of your miseries. Would that it had been your 
 lot to live in the days of the Rev. John Gumming of the 
 Scottish Church, London ! 
 
 He would assuredly have procured for you the music-box 
 of some wandering Italian, and gone away with you to the 
 wilds to mingle exquisite melody with your devotions, 
 qualifying with the sweetness of his tones the ' antique and 
 ballad ' rudeness of your psalms ; nor would he have failed 
 to furnish you with a liturgy, by means of which you could 
 have interred your dead in decency. Had such been the 
 arrangement, no after writer could have remarked, as the 
 Rev. Mr. Gumming does now, that no ' pealing organ' 
 mingled ' its harmony of bass, tenor, treble, and soprano ' 
 
INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 155 
 
 when you sung, or have recorded the atrocious fact, that 
 not only was John Brown of Priesthill shot by Claverhouse, 
 but actually buried by his friends without the funeral service. 
 And how striking and affecting an incident would it not 
 form in the history of the persecution, could it now be told, 
 that when surprised by the dragoons, the good Mr. Gumming 
 fled over hill and hollow with the box on his back, turning 
 the handle as he went, and urging his limbs to their utmost 
 speed, lest the Episcopalian soldiery should bring him back 
 and make'him a bishop ! 
 
 It is partly from the more than semi-Episcopalian charac- 
 ter of this gentleman's opinions, partly from the inimitable 
 felicities of his style, and partly from one or two peculiar 
 incidents in his history which lead to a particular tone of 
 remark, that we infer him to be the writer of the article in 
 Eraser. 
 
 We may be of course mistaken, but the internal evidence 
 seems wonderfully strong. The Rev. Mr. Gumming, though 
 emphatically powerful in declamation, has never practised 
 argument, a mean and undignified art, which he leaves to 
 men such as Mr. Cunningham, just as the genteel leave the 
 art of boxing to the commonalty ; and in grappling lately 
 with a strong-boned Irish Presbyterian, skilful of fence, he 
 caught, as gentlemen sometimes do, a severe fall, and 
 began straightway to characterize Irish Presbyterians as a 
 set of men very inferior indeed. Now the writer in Eraser 
 has a fling a la Gumming at the Irish Presbyterians. Popular 
 election has, it seems, done marvellously little for them; 
 with very few exceptions, their ' ministry ' is neither ' erudite, 
 influential, nor accomplished,' and their Church 'exhibits 
 the symptoms of heart disease.' Depend on it, some stout 
 Irish Presbyterian has entailed the shame of defeat on the 
 writer in Eraser. Mr. Gumming, in his tale, adverts to the 
 majority of the Scottish Church as ' radical subverters of 
 Church and State, who claim the Covenanters as precedents 
 
156 CRITICISM: 
 
 for a course of conduct from which the dignified Henderson, 
 the renowned Gillespie, the learned Binning, the laborious 
 Denham, the heavenly-minded Rutherford, the religious 
 Wellwood, the zealous Cameron, and the prayerful Peden, 
 would have revolted in horror.' The writer of the article 
 brings out exactly the same sentiment, though not quite so 
 decidedly, in what Meg Dodds would have termed a grand 
 style of language. At no time, he asserts, did non-intrusion 
 exist in the sense now contended for in Scotland ; at no 
 time might not qualified ministers be thrust upon reclaiming 
 parishes by the presbytery : and as for the vetoists, they are 
 but wild radicals, who are to be * classified by the good sense 
 of England with those luminaries of the age, Dan O'Connell, 
 John Frost, and others of that ilk.' In the article there is 
 a complaint that our majority are miserably unacquainted 
 with Scottish ecclesiastical history; and there is special 
 mention made of Mr. Cunningham as an individual not 
 only ignorant of facts, but as even incapable of being made 
 to feel their force. In the Annual, as if Mr. Gumming 
 wished to exemplify, there is a passage in Scottish ecclesi- 
 astical history, of which we are certain Mr. Cunningham 
 not only knows nothing, but which we are sure he will prove 
 too obstinate to credit or comprehend. 'The celebrated 
 Mr. Cameron,' says the minister of the Scottish Church, 
 London, ' was left on Drumclog a mangled corpse.' Fine 
 thing to be minutely acquainted with ecclesiastical history ! 
 We illiterate non-intrusionists hold, and we are afraid Mr. 
 Cunningham among the rest, that the celebrated Cameron 
 was killed, not at the skirmish of Drumclog, but at the 
 skirmish of Airdmoss, which did not take place until about a 
 twelvemonth after ; but this must result surely from our igno- 
 rance. Has the Rev. Mr. Gumming no intention of settling 
 our disputes, by giving us a new history of the Church ? 
 
 That portion of the internal evidence in the article before 
 us which depends on style and manner, seems very conclu- 
 
INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 157 
 
 give indeed.. Take some of the avowed sublimities of the 
 Rev. Mr. Gumming. No man stands more beautifully on 
 tiptoe when he sets himself to catch a fine thought. In 
 describing an attached congregation, ' The hearer's prayers 
 rose to heaven,' he says, * and returned in the shape of 
 broad impenetrable bucklers around the venerable man. 
 A thousand broadswords leapt in a thousand scabbards, as 
 if the electric eloquence of the minister found in them con- 
 ductors and depositories.' 
 
 Poetry such as this is still somewhat rare ; but mark the 
 kindred beauties of the writer in Fraser. Around such men 
 as Mr. Tait, Dr. M'Leod, and Dr. Muir, ' must crystallize 
 the piety and the hopes of the Scottish Church.' What a 
 superb figure ! Only think of the Rev. Dr. Muir as of a 
 thread in a piece of sugar candy, and the piety of the 
 Dean of Faculty and Mr. Penney, joined to that of some 
 four or five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, 
 all sticking out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, 
 like cleft almonds in a bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the 
 figurative is the passage which follows : ' The Doctor (Dr. 
 Chalmers) rides on at a rickety trot, Messrs. Cunningham, 
 Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up the wornout 
 Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills are 
 Church principles, and the echoes of their thunder solid 
 argument. A ditch will come ; and when the first effects 
 of the fall are over, the dumbfounded Professor will awake 
 to the deception, and smite the minnows of vetoism hip 
 and thigh.' The writer of this passage is unquestionably an 
 ingenious man, but he could surely have made a little more 
 of the last figure. A dissertation on the hips and thighs of 
 minnows might be made to reflect new honour on even the 
 genius of the Rev. Mr. Gumming. 
 
 It is mainly, however, from the Episcopalian tone of the 
 article that we derive our evidence. The writer seems to 
 hold, with Charles IL, that Presbyterianism is no fit religion 
 
158 CRITICISM: 
 
 for a gentleman. True, the Moderates were genteel men, of 
 polish and propriety, such as Mr. Jaffray of Dunbar, who 
 never at synod or presbytery did or said anything that was 
 not strictly polite ; but then the Moderates had but little 
 of Presbyterianism in their religion, and perhaps, notwith- 
 standing their ' quiet, amiable, and courteous demeanour,' 
 little of religion itself. It is to quite a different class that 
 the hope of the writer turns. He states that * melancholy 
 facts and strong arguments against the practical working 
 of Presbytery is at this moment impressing itself in Scot- 
 land on every unprejudiced spectator ; ' that there is a party, 
 however, ' with whom the ministerial office is a sacred in- 
 vestiture, transmitted by succession through pastor to pastor, 
 and from age to age, men inducted to their respective 
 parishes, not because their flocks like or dislike them, but 
 because the superintending authorities, after the exercise 
 of solemn, minute, and patient investigation, have deter- 
 mined that this or that pastor is the fittest and best for this 
 or that parish;' that there exist in this noble party 'the 
 germs of a possible unity with the southern Church ; ' and 
 that there is doubtless a time coming when the body of our 
 Establishment, ' sick of slavery under the name of freedom, 
 and of sheer Popery under Presbyterian colours, shall send 
 up three of their best men to London for consecration, and 
 Episcopacy shall again become the adoption of Scotland.' 
 Rarely has the imagination of the poet conjured up a vision 
 of greater splendour. The minister of the Scotch Church, 
 London, may die Archbishop of St. Andrews. And such 
 an archbishop ! We are told in the article that ' the chan- 
 nel along which ministerial orders are to be transmitted is 
 the pastors of the Church, whether they meet together in 
 the presbytery, or are compressed and consolidated in the 
 bishop.' But is not this understating the case on the Epis- 
 copal side ? What would not Scotland gain if she could 
 compress and consolidate a simple presbytery, such as that 
 
INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 159 
 
 of Edinburgh its Chalmers and its Gordon, its Candlish 
 and its Cunningham, its Guthrie, its Brown, its Bennie, its 
 Begg in short, all its numerous members into one great 
 Bishop John Gumming, late of the Scotch Church, London! 
 The man who converts twenty-one shillings into a gold 
 guinea gains nothing by the process ; but the case would 
 be essentially different here, for not only would there be 
 a great good accomplished, but also a great evil removed. 
 As for Dr. Chalmers, it is * painfully evident,' says the writer 
 of the article, ' that he regards only three things additional 
 to a " supernal influence " as requisite to constitute any 
 one a minister a knowledge of Christianity, and endow- 
 ment, and a parish ; ' and as for the rest of the gentlemen 
 named, they are just preparing to do, in an ' ecclesiastical 
 way in Edinburgh, what Robespierre, Marat, and others did 
 in a corporal way in the Convention of 1793.' 
 
 Hogarth quarrelled with Churchill, and drew him as a 
 bear in canonicals. Had he lived to quarrel with the Rev. 
 John Gumming, he would in all probability have drawn him 
 as a puppy in gown and band; and no one who knows 
 aught of the painter can doubt that he would have strik- 
 ingly preserved the likeness. As for ourselves, we merely 
 indulge in a piece of conjectural criticism. The other parts 
 of the article are cast very much into the ordinary type of 
 that side of the controversy to which it belongs : there is 
 rather more than the usual amount of misrepresentation, 
 inconsistency, and abuse, with here and there a peculiarity 
 of statement. Patrons are described as the 'trustees of 
 the supreme magistrate, beautifully and devoutly appointed 
 to submit the presentee to the presbytery.' Lord Aber- 
 deen's bill is eulogized as suited to ' confer a greater boon 
 on the laity of Scotland than was ever conferred on them 
 by the General Assembly.' The seven clergymen of Strath- 
 bogie are praised for * having rendered unto God the things 
 that are God's,' ' their enemies being judges.' 
 
160 CRITICISM: INTERNAL EVIDENCE. 
 
 The minority of the Church contains, it is stated, its best 
 men, and its most diligent ministers. As for the majority, 
 they have been possessed by a spirit of * deep delusion ; ' 
 their only idea of a ' clergyman is a preaching machine, 
 that makes a prodigious vociferation, and pleases the herd.' 
 They are destined to become c contemptible and base;' their 
 attitude is an ' unrighteous attitude ; ' they are aiming, ' like 
 Popish priests,' at ' supremacy ' and a deadly despotism, 
 through the sides of the people; |they are * suicidally 
 divesting themselves of their power as clergymen, by sur- 
 rendering to the people essentially Episcopal functions ; ' 
 they are * wild men,' and offenders against the ' divine 
 headship ; ' and the writer holds, therefore, that if the Estab- 
 lishment is to be maintained in Scotland, they must be 
 crushed, and that soon, by the strong arm of the law. 
 We need make no further remarks on the subject. To 
 employ one of the writer's own illustrations, the history of 
 Robespierre powerfully demonstrates that great vanity, great 
 weakness, and great cruelty, may all find room together in 
 one little mind. 
 
 March 10, 1841. 
 
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE WITNESS. 
 
 SIR, Upon hearing read aloud your remarks 1 in the Witness 
 of Saturday the 28th ultimo, upon the danger of investing 
 the mere building in which we meet for public worship with 
 a character of sanctity, an English gentleman asked, * How 
 does the writer of that article reconcile with his views our 
 Saviour's conduct, described by St. John, ii. 14-17, and by 
 each of the other evangelists ?' 
 
 Though quite disposed to agree with the purport of your 
 remarks, and fully aware that the tendency of the opinions 
 openly promulgated by a large section of the clergy of the 
 Church of England is to give ' the Church' the place which 
 should be occupied by a living and active faith in our Saviour, 
 I found it difficult to meet this gentleman's objections, and 
 only reminded him that you made a special exception in 
 the case of the Jewish temple. Brought up from childhood, 
 as Englishmen are, with almost superstitious reverence for 
 the buildings ' consecrated ' and set apart for religious uses, 
 it is difficult to meet objections founded on such strong 
 prejudices as were evident in this case. 
 
 If any arguments suggest themselves to you, to show that 
 the passage above referred to cannot be fairly employed in . 
 the defence of the Church of England tenets, in favour of 
 consecrating churches, and of reverence amounting almost 
 to the worship of external objects devoted to religious pur- 
 1 See First Impressions of England and its Psofic, ch. II. ED. 
 
1 62 THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 
 
 poses, you will oblige me by stating them. I remain, Sir, 
 Your obedient servant, AN ABSENTEE. 
 
 The passage of Scripture referred to by the ' English 
 Gentleman' here as scarcely reconcilable with the views 
 promulgated in the Witness of the 28thult. runs as follows : 
 'And Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the 
 temple those that sold oxen, and sheep, and doves, and the 
 changers of money, sitting; and when He had made a scourge 
 of small cords, He drove them all out of the temple, and 
 the sheep and the oxen ; and poured out the changers' 
 money, and overthrew the tables ; and said unto them that 
 sold doves, Take these things hence ; make not my Father's 
 house a house of merchandise .' 
 
 It will perhaps be remembered by our readers, that in 
 referring to the Scotch estimate of the sacredness of eccle- 
 siastical edifices, we employed words to the following effect: 
 ' We (the Scotch people) have been taught that the world, 
 since it began, saw but two truly holy edifices ; and that 
 these, the Tabernacle and the Temple, were as direct revela- 
 tions from God as the Scriptures themselves, and were as 
 certain embodiments of His will, though they spoke in the 
 obscure language of type and symbol.' Now the passage 
 of Scripture here cited is in harmonious accordance with 
 this view. It was from one of these truly holy edifices that 
 our Saviour drove the sheep and oxen, and indignantly 
 expelled the money-changers. Without, however, begging 
 the whole question at issue without taking for granted the 
 very point to be proven, i.e. the intrinsic holiness of Christian 
 places of worship the text has no bearing whatever on the 
 view taken by the ' English Gentleman.' If buildings such 
 as York Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and St. Paul's, be 
 holy in the sense in which the temple was holy, then the 
 passage as certainly applies to them as it applied, in the 
 times of our Saviour, to the sacred edifice which was so re- 
 
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 163 
 
 markable a revelation of Himself. But where is the evidence 
 of an intrinsic holiness in these buildings ? Where is the 
 proof that the rite of consecration is a rite according to the 
 mind of God ? Where is the probability even that it is other 
 than a piece of mere will -worship, originated in the dark 
 ages ; or that it confers one whit more sanctity on the edifice 
 which it professes to render sacred, than the breaking a 
 bottle of wine on the ship's stem, when she is starting off 
 the slips, confers sanctity on the ship ? Stands it on any 
 surer ground than the baptism of bells, the sacrifice of the 
 mass, or the five spurious sacraments? If it be a New 
 Testament institution, it must possess New Testament 
 authority. Where is that authority ? 
 
 Can it be possible, however, that the shrewd English 
 really differ from us in our estimate ? We think we have 
 good grounds for holding they do not. On a late occasion 
 we enjoyed the pleasure of visiting not only York Cathedral, 
 but Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, and saw quite enough 
 to make even the least mistrustful suspect that the professed 
 Episcopalian belief in the sacredness of ecclesiastical edifices 
 is but sheer make-belief after all. The * English Gentleman' 
 refers to the example of our Saviour in thrusting forth the 
 money-changers from the temple, as a sort of proof that 
 ecclesiastical edifices are holy ; and we show that it merely 
 proves the temple to have been holy. The passage has, 
 however, a direct bearing on a somewhat different point : 
 it constitutes a test by which to try the reality of this 
 ostensible belief of English Episcopalians in the sacredness 
 of their churches and cathedrals. If the English, especially 
 English Churchmen, act with regard to their ecclesiastical 
 buildings in the way our Saviour acted with regard to the 
 temple, then it is but fair to hold that their belief in their 
 sacredness is real. But if, on the contrary, we find them 
 acting, not as our Saviour acted, but as the money-changers 
 or the cattle-sellers acted, then is it equally fair to conclude 
 
1 64 THE SANCTITIES OF MATTE . 
 
 that their belief in their sacredness is not a real belief, but 
 a piece of mere pretence. In the north transept of York 
 Minster there may be seen a table like a tomb of black 
 Purbec marble, supported by an iron trellis, and bearing 
 atop the effigy of a wasted corpse wrapped in a winding- 
 sheet. ' This monument,' says a little work descriptive of 
 the edifice, 'was erected to the memory of John Haxby, 
 formerly treasurer to the church, who died in 1424; and in 
 compliance with stipulations in some of the ancient church 
 deeds and settlements, occasional payments of money are 
 made on this tomb to the present day.' Here, at least, is 
 one money-changing table introduced into the consecrated 
 area, and this not irregularly or surreptitiously, like the 
 money-changing tables which of old profaned the temple, 
 but through the deliberately formed stipulations of eccle- 
 siastical deeds and settlements. The state of things in St. 
 Paul's and Westminster, however, throws the money-table 
 of York Minster far into the shade. The holinesses of St. 
 Paul's we found converted into a twopenny, and those of 
 Westminster into a sixpenny show. For the small sum of 
 twopence one may be admitted, at an English provincial 
 fair, to see the old puppet exhibition of Punch and Judy, 
 and of Solomon in all his glory ; and for the small sum of 
 twopence were we admitted, in like manner, to see St. 
 Paul's, to see choir, communion-table, and grand altar, and 
 everything else of peculiar sacredness within the edifice. 
 The holinesses of Westminster cost thrice as much, but were 
 a good bargain notwithstanding. Would English Church- 
 men permit, far less originate and insist in doggedly main- 
 taining, so palpable a profanation, did they really believe 
 their cathedrals to be holy? The debased Jewish priesthood 
 of the times of our Saviour suffered the money-changers to 
 traffic unchallenged within the temple ; but they did not 
 convert the temple itself into a twopenny show : they did 
 not make halfpence by exhibiting the table of shew-bread, 
 
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 165 
 
 the altar of incense, and the golden candlestick, nor lift up 
 corners of the veil at the rate of a penny a peep. It is 
 worse than nonsense to hold that a belief in the sacredness 
 of ecclesiastical buildings can co-exist with clerical practices 
 of the kind we describe : the thing is a too palpable impro- 
 bability ; the text quoted by the Englishman is conclusive 
 on the point. Would any man in his senses now hold that 
 the old Jewish priests really believed their temple to be 
 holy, had they done, what they had decency enough not 
 to do converted it into a raree-show ? And are we not 
 justified in applying to English Churchmen the rule which 
 would be at once applied to Jewish priests ? The Presby- 
 terians of Scotland do not deem their ecclesiastical edifices 
 holy, but there are certain natural associations that throw 
 a degree of solemnity over places in which men assemble to 
 worship God ; and in order that these may not be outraged, 
 they never convert their churches into twopenny show- 
 boxes. Practically, at least, the Scotch respect for decency 
 goes a vast deal further than the English regard for what 
 they profess, very insincerely it would seem, to hold sacred. 
 We have said there is quite as little New Testament 
 authority for consecrating a place of worship as for baptiz- 
 ing a bell ; and if in the wrong, can of course be easily set 
 right. If the authority exists, it can be no difficult matter 
 to produce it. We would fain ask the reader to remark the 
 striking difference which obtains between the Mosaic and 
 the New Testament dispensations in all that regards the 
 materialisms of their respective places of worship. We find 
 in the Pentateuch chapter after chapter occupied with the 
 mechanism of the tabernacle. The pattern given in the 
 mount is as minutely described as any portion of the cere- 
 monial law, and for exactly the same reason : the one as 
 certainly as the other was ' a figure of things to come.' How 
 exceedingly minute, too, the description of- the temple ! 
 How very particular the narrative of its dedication ! The 
 
1 66 THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 
 
 prayer of Solomon, Heaven-inspired for the occasion, forms 
 an impressive chapter in the sacred record, that addresses 
 itself to all time. But when the old state of things had 
 passed away, when the material was relinquished for the 
 spiritual, the shadow for the substance, the type for the 
 antitype, we hear no more of places of worship to which 
 an intrinsic holiness attached, or of imposing rites of dedi- 
 cation. Not in edifices deemed sacred was the gospel pro- 
 mulgated, so long as the gospel remained pure, but in ' hired 
 houses' and ' upper rooms,' or 'river-sides, where prayer was 
 wont to be made/ in chambers on the * third loft,' often in 
 the streets, often in the market-place, in the fields and by 
 solitary waysides, on. shipboard and by the sea-shore, ' in 
 the midst of Mars Hill' at Athens, and, when persecution 
 began to darken, amid the deep gloom of the sepulchral 
 caverns of Rome. The time had evidently come, referred 
 to by the Saviour, when neither in the temple at Jerusalem, 
 nor on the mountain deemed sacred by the Samaritans, was 
 the Father to be worshipped ; but all over the world, * in 
 spirit and in truth.' Until Christianity had become corrupt, 
 we do not hear even of ornate churches, far less of Christian 
 altars, of an order of Christian priests, of the will-worship 
 of consecration, or of the presumed holiness of insensate 
 matter, all unauthorized additions of man's making to a 
 religion fast sinking at the time under a load of human 
 inventions, additions which were in no degree the more 
 sacred, because filched, amid the darkness of superstition 
 and error, from the abrogated Mosaic dispensation. The 
 following is, we believe, the first notice of fine Christian 
 churches which occurs in history; we quote from the eccle- 
 siastical work of Dr. Welsh, and deem the passage a signi- 
 ficant one : ' From the beginning of the reign of Gallienus 
 till the nineteenth year of Diocletian,' says the historian, 
 ' the external tranquillity of the Church suffered no general 
 interruption. The Christians, with partial exceptions, were 
 
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 167 
 
 allowed the free exercise of their religion. Under Diocletian 
 open profession of the new faith was made even in the imperial 
 household; nor did it prove a barrier to the highest honours 
 and employments. In this state of affairs the condition 
 of the Church seemed in the highest degree prosperous. 
 Converts were multiplied throughout all the provinces of 
 the empire; and the ancient churches proving insufficient 
 for the accommodation of th.e increasing multitudes of wor- 
 shippers, splendid edifices were erected in every city, which were 
 filled with crowded congregations. But with this outward 
 appearance of success, the purity of faith and worship be- 
 came gradually corrupted ; and, still more, the vital spirit of 
 religion suffered a melancholy decline. Pride and ambi- 
 tion, emulation and strifes, hypocrisy and formality among 
 the clergy, and superstitions and factions among the people, 
 brought reproach on the Christian cause. In these circum- 
 stances the judgments of the Lord were manifested, and the 
 Church was visited with the severest persecution to which 
 it ever yet had been subjected.' 
 
 There are few more valuable chapters in Locke than the 
 one in which he traces some of the gravest errors that infest 
 human life to a false association of ideas. But of all his 
 illustrations, employed to exhibit in the true light this copious 
 source of error, there is not one half so striking as that fur- 
 nished by the false association which connects the holiness 
 that can alone attach to the living and the immortal, with 
 earth, mortar, and stone, pieces of mouldering serge, and 
 bits of rotten wood. Nearly one half of the errors with 
 which Popery has darkened and overlaid the religion of the 
 Cross, have originated in this particular species of false 
 association. The superstition of pilgrimages, with all its 
 long catalogue of crime and suffering, inclusive of bloody 
 wars, protracted for ages, 
 
 * When men strayed far to seek 
 In Golgotha Him dead who lives in heaven,' 
 
168 THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 
 
 the idolatry of relics, so strangely revived on the Continent 
 in our own times, the allegorical will-worship embodied in 
 stone and lime, which Puseyism is at present so busy in 
 introducing into the Church of England, and which renders 
 every ecclesiastical building a sort of apocryphal temple, 
 full, like the apocryphal books, of all manner of error and 
 nonsense, a thousand other absurdities and heterodoxies 
 besides, have all originated in this cause. True, such 
 association is most natural to man, and, when of a purely 
 secular character, harmless ; nay, there are cases in which 
 it may be even laudably indulged. * When I find Tully 
 confessing of himself,' says Johnson, 'that he could not 
 forbear at Athens to visit the walks and houses which the 
 old philosophers had frequented or inhabited, and recollect 
 the reverence which every nation, civil and barbarous, has 
 paid to the ground where merit has been buried, I am 
 afraid to declare against the general voice of mankind, and 
 am inclined to believe that this regard which we involun- 
 tarily pay to the meanest relique of a man great and illus- 
 trious, is intended as an incitement to labour, and an 
 encouragement to expect the same renown if it be sought 
 by the same virtues.' We find nearly the same sentiment 
 eloquently expounded in the Doctor's famous passage on 
 lona. But there exists a grand distinction between natural 
 feelings proper in their own place, and natural feelings 
 permitted to enter the religious field, and vitiate the in- 
 tegrity of revelation. It is from the natural alone in such 
 cases that danger is to be apprehended ; seeing that what 
 is not according to the mental constitution of man, is of 
 necessity at once unproductive and shortlived. Let due 
 weight be given to the associative feeling, in its proper 
 sphere, let it dispose us to invest with a quiet decency 
 our places of worship, let us, at all events, not convert 
 them into secular counting-rooms or twopenny show-boxes; 
 but let us also remember that natural association is not 
 
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. 169 
 
 divine truth that there attaches no holiness to slated roofs 
 or stone walls that under the New Testament dispensa- 
 tion men do not worship in temples, which, like the altar 
 of old, sanctified the gift, but in mere places of shelter, that 
 confer no sacredness on their services ; and that the * hour 
 has come, and now is, when they that worship the Father 
 must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' 
 
 A$ril 15, 1846. 
 
THE LATE 
 REV. ALEXANDER STEWART. 
 
 OUR last conveyed to our readers the mournful intelligence 
 of the illness and death of the Rev. Alexander Stewart of 
 Cromarty, a man less known, perhaps, than any other of 
 nearly equal calibre, or of a resembling exquisitiveness of 
 mental faculty, which his country has ever produced, but 
 whose sudden removal has, we find, created an impression 
 far beyond the circle of even his occasional hearers, that 
 the spirit which has passed away was one of the high cast 
 which nature rarely produces, and that the consequent 
 blank created in the existing phalanx of intellect is one 
 which cannot be filled up. Comparatively little as the 
 deceased was known beyond his own immediate walk of 
 duty or circle of acquaintanceship, it is yet felt by thou- 
 sands, of whom the greater part knew of him merely at 
 second-hand by the abiding impression which he had left 
 on the minds of the others, that, according to the poet, 
 
 * A mighty spirit is eclipsed ; a power 
 Hath passed from day to darkness, to whose hour 
 Of light no likeness is bequeathed no name.' 
 
 The subject is one with which we can scarce trust our- 
 selves. There are no writings to which we can appeal, 
 for Mr. Stewart has left none, or at least none suited to 
 convey an adequate impression of his powers ; and yet of 
 nothing are we more thoroughly convinced, than that the 
 originality and vigour of his thinking, and the singular 
 
 170 
 
THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 171 
 
 vividness and force of his illustrations, added to a com- 
 mand of the principles of analogical reasoning, which even 
 a Butler might have envied, entitled him to rank with the 
 ablest and most extraordinary men of the age. Coleridge 
 was not more thoroughly original, nor could he impart to 
 his pictures more vividness of colouring, or more decided 
 strength of outline. In glancing over our limited stock of 
 idea, to note how we have come by it, we find that to 
 two Scotchmen of the present century we stand more 
 largely indebted than to any of their contemporaries, either 
 at home or abroad. More of their thinking has got into 
 our mind than that of any of the others ; and their images 
 and illustrations recur to us more frequently. And one of 
 these is Thomas Chalmers ; the other, Alexander Stewart. 
 
 There is an order of intellect decidedly original in its 
 cast, and of considerable power, to whom notwithstanding 
 originality is dangerous. Goldsmith, when he first entered 
 on his literary career, found that all the good things on the 
 side of truth had already been said ; and that his good 
 things, if he really desired to produce any, would require 
 all to be said on the side of paradox and error. ' When I 
 was a young man,' he states, in a passage which Johnson 
 censured him for afterwards expunging, ' being anxious to 
 distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new proposi- 
 tions. But I soon gave this over, for I found that generally 
 what was new was false.' Poor Edward Irving formed a 
 melancholy illustration of this species of originality. His 
 stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon ex- 
 pended ; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to 
 his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker, 
 or his pernicious drug to that of the inveterate opium-eater; 
 and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, 
 without which he could not continue to exist, he launched 
 into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and 
 made shipwreck of his faith. His originality formed but 
 
172 THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 
 
 the crooked wanderings of a journeyer who had forsaken 
 the right way, and lost himself in the mazes of a doleful 
 wilderness. Not such the originality of the higher order of 
 minds ; not such, for instance, the originality of a Newton, 
 of whom it has been well said by a distinguished French 
 critic, that ' what province of thought soever he undertook, 
 he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by 
 the rest of men.' One of the most striking characteristics of 
 Mr. Stewart's originality was the solidity of the truths which 
 it always evolved. His was not the ability of opening up 
 new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the 
 direction in which they led was one in which men's thought 
 had no occasion to travel, and no business to perform. It 
 was, on the contrary, the greatly higher ability of enlarging, 
 widening, and lengthening the avenues long before opened 
 upon important truths, and, in consequence, enabling men 
 to see new and unwonted objects in old, familiar directions. 
 That in which he excelled all men we ever knew, was the 
 analogical faculty the power of detecting and demon- 
 strating occult resemblances. He could read off as if by 
 intuition not by snatches and fragments, but as a consecu- 
 tive whole that older revelation of type and symbol which 
 God first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to 
 him, we have recognised, in the evident integrity of the 
 reading, and the profound and consistent wisdom of what 
 the record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its 
 origin, not less powerful and convincing than that to be 
 found in any department of the Christian evidences yet 
 opened up. Compared with even the higher names in this 
 department, we have felt under his ministry as if, when 
 admitted to the company of some party of modern savans 
 employed in deciphering a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk of 
 the desert, and here successful in discovering the meaning 
 of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we 
 had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, 
 
THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 173 
 
 to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of 
 common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who 
 could read off fluently and as a whole what the others 
 could but darkly and painfully guess at in detached and 
 broken parts. 
 
 To this singular power of tracing analogies there was 
 added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most 
 vivid illustrations. In some instances a single stroke pro- 
 duced a figure that swept across the subject-matter of his 
 discourse like the image of a lantern on a wall ; in others, 
 he dwelt upon the picture produced, finishing it with stroke 
 after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination, and sank 
 deep into the memory. We remember hearing him preach 
 on one occasion on the return of the Jews, as a people, to 
 Him whom they had rejected, and the effect which their 
 sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving 
 and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high 
 level of eloquent simplicity, became at once that of meta- 
 phor : ' When Joseph] he said, ' shall reveal himself to his 
 brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping? 
 Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or 
 more finely charged with typical truth ? And yet such was 
 one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative 
 faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard 
 him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the 
 scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and 
 broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, 
 until at length the student struck at first by its expansive- 
 ness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere measured 
 expansiveness finds that it partakes of the unlimited in- 
 finity of the divine nature itself. Naturally and simply, as 
 if growing out of the subject, like a green berry-covered 
 misletoe on the mossy trunk of a reverend oak, there 
 sprang up one of his more lengthened illustrations. A 
 child bred up in the interior of the country has been 
 
174 THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 
 
 brought for the first time to the sea-shore, and carried out 
 to the middle of one of the noble friths that indent so deeply 
 our line of coast \ and on his return he informs his father, 
 with all a child's eagerness, of the wonderful expansiveness 
 of the ocean which he has seen. He went out, he tells, far 
 amid the great waves and the rushing tides, till at length the 
 huge hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the 
 wide land itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip 
 of blue. And then when in mid-sea the sailors heaved the 
 lead ; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long 
 line slipped swiftly away over the boat-edge coil after coil, till, 
 ere the plummet rested on the ouse below, all was well-nigh 
 expended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that 
 was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep ? Ah ! my 
 child, exclaims the father, you have not yet seen aught of 
 its greatness, you have sailed over merely one of its little 
 arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the sea- 
 men had carried you, you would have seen no shore, and 
 you would have found no bottom. In one rare quality of 
 the orator, Mr. Stewart stood alone among his contem- 
 poraries. Pope refers, in one of his satires, to a strange 
 power of creating love and admiration by just ' touching the 
 brink of all we hate ;' and Burke, in some of his nobler 
 passages, happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the 
 effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of figures 
 so homely, nay, almost so repulsive in themselves, that a 
 man of lower powers who ventured their use would find 
 them efficient merely in lowering his subject and ruining his 
 cause. We may refer, in illustration, to Burke's celebrated 
 figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in his indig- 
 nant denial that the character of the revolutionary French 
 in aught resembled that of the English. * We have not,' he 
 says, 'been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be 
 filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, 
 and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man.' 
 
THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 175 
 
 Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed 
 against even superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely 
 and at will. We heard him, scarce a twelvemonth since, 
 deliver a discourse of singular power, on the sin-offering 
 of the Jewish economy, as minutely particularized by the 
 divine penman in Leviticus. He described the slaughtered 
 animal foul with dust and blood its throat gashed across 
 its entrails laid open and steaming in its impurity to 
 the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire, amid the unclean- 
 ness of ashes outside the camp, a vile and horrid thing, 
 which no one could see without experiencing emotions of 
 disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The 
 picture appeared too painfully vivid, its introduction too 
 little in accordance with the rules of a just taste. It 
 seemed a thing to be covered up, not exhibited. But the 
 master in this difficult walk well knew what he was doing. 
 * And that,' he said, as if pointing to the strongly-coloured 
 picture he had just completed, ' and that is SIN.' By one 
 stroke the intended effect was produced, and the rising 
 disgust and horror transferred from the revolting material 
 image to the great moral evil. 
 
 We had fondly hoped that for a man so singularly gifted, 
 and who had but reached the ripe maturity of middle life, 
 there remained important work yet to do. He seemed 
 peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a commanding sphere, for 
 ministering to some of the intellectual wants, and for with- 
 standing with singular efficiency some of the more perilous 
 tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That 
 Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which 
 many have so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome 
 and the pernicious, he could satisfy with provision at once 
 sound and novel. And no man of the age had more 
 thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors of the 
 time in their first insidious approaches, or could more skil- 
 fully indicate the exact point at which they diverge from 
 
176 THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 
 
 the truth. But his work on earth is for ever over ; and the 
 sense of bereavement is deepened by the reflection that, 
 save in the memory of a few, he has left behind him no 
 adequate impress of the powers of his understanding or of 
 the fineness of his genius. It is strange how much the 
 lack of a single ingredient in a man's moral constitution 
 and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar 
 cast may affect one's whole destiny. It was the grand 
 defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, 
 which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a 
 thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain 
 strike out from among the components of human character, 
 was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached 
 provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study 
 much and deeply ; and he poured forth viva voce his full- 
 volumed and many-sparkling tide of eloquent idea as freely 
 and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, 
 pours forth her melody in the shade. But he could not be 
 made to understand or believe, that what so impressed and 
 delighted the privileged few who surrounded him was 
 equally suited to impress and delight the many outside, or 
 that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which 
 would compel the attention not merely of the religious, but 
 also of the literary world. And so his exquisitely-toned 
 thinking perished like the music of the bygone years, has 
 died with himself, or, we should perhaps rather say, has 
 gone with him to that better land, where all those fruits 
 of intellect that the human spirits of greatest calibre have 
 in this world produced, must form but the comparatively 
 meagre beginnings of infinite, never-ending acquirement. 
 
 Mr. Stewart was one of the eminently excellent and love- 
 able, and his entire character of the most transparent, child- 
 like simplicity. The great realities of eternity were never 
 far distant from his thoughts. Endowed with powers of 
 humour at least equal to his other faculties, and a sense of 
 
THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 177 
 
 the ludicrous singularly nice, he has often reminded us in 
 his genial moments, when indulging most freely, of a happy 
 child at play in the presence of its father. Never was there 
 an equal amount of wit more harmlessly indulged, or from 
 which one could pass more directly or with less distraction 
 to the contemplation of the matters which pertain to eternity. 
 And no one could be long in his company without having 
 his thoughts turned towards that unseen world to which he 
 has now passed, or without receiving emphatic testimony 
 regarding that Divine Person who is the wisdom and the 
 power of God. 
 
 We have seen it stated that Mr. Stewart 'was slow to 
 join the non-intrusion party, and to acquiesce in the neces- 
 sity of the secession.' On this point we are qualified to 
 speak. No one enjoyed more of his society during the 
 first beginnings of the controversy, or was more largely 
 honoured with his confidence, than the writer of these 
 remarks ; and the one point of difference between Mr. 
 Stewart and him in their discussions in those days was, 
 that while the writer was sanguine enough to anticipate a 
 successful termination to the Church's struggle, his soberer 
 anticipations were of a character which the Disruption in 
 1843 entirely verified. But with the actual result full in 
 view, he was yet the first man in his parish we believe, 
 in his presbytery also to take his stand, modestly and 
 unassumingly as became his character, but with a firmness 
 which never once swerved or wavered. ' Nay, long ere the 
 struggle began, founding on data with which we pretend 
 not to be acquainted, he declared his conviction to not a 
 few of his parishioners, that of the Establishment, as then 
 constituted, he was to be the last minister in that parish. 
 We know nothing, we repeat, of the data on which he 
 founded; but he himself held that the conclusion was 
 fairly deducible from those sacred oracles which no man 
 more profoundly studied or more thoroughly knew. Alas ! 
 
 M 
 
iy8 THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 
 
 what can it betoken our Church, that we should thus see 
 such men, at once its strength and its ornament, so fast 
 falling around us, like commanding officers picked down at 
 the beginning of a battle, and that so few of resembling 
 character, and none of at least equal power, should be 
 rising to occupy the places made desolate by their fall ! 
 
 Nwember 13, 1847. 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 THERE are some two or three slight advantages which real 
 merit has, that fictitious merit has not; among the rest, 
 an especial advantage, which, we think, should recommend 
 it to at least the quieter members of society the advantage 
 of being unobtrusive and modest. It presses itself much 
 less on public notice than its vagabond antagonist, and 
 makes much less noise ; it walks, for a time at least, as if 
 slippered in felt, and leaves the lieges quite at freedom to 
 take notice of it or no, as they may feel inclined. It is 
 content, in its infancy, to thrive in silence. It does not 
 squall in the nursery, to the disturbance of the whole 
 house, like * the major roaring for his porridge.' What, for 
 instance, could be quieter or more modest, in its first 
 stages, than the invention of James Watt? what more 
 obtrusive or noisy, on the contrary, than the invention of 
 Mr. Hen son ? And we have illustrations of the same truth 
 in our Scottish metropolis at the present moment, that 
 seem in no degree less striking. Phreno-mesmerism and 
 the calotype have been introduced to the Edinburgh 
 public about much the same time ; but how very differently 
 have they fared hitherto ! A real invention, which bids 
 fair to produce some of the greatest revolutions in the fine 
 arts of which they have ever been the subject, has as yet 
 attracted comparatively little notice ; an invention which 
 serves but to demonstrate that the present age, with all its 
 boasted enlightenment, may yet not be very unfitted for the 
 reception of superstitions the most irrational and gross, is 
 
 179 
 
i So THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 largely occupying the attention of the community, and filling 
 column after column in our public prints. We shall venture 
 to take up the quieter invention of the two as the genuine 
 one, as the invention which will occupy most space a 
 century hence, and direct the attention of our readers to 
 some of the more striking phenomena which it illustrates, 
 and some of the purposes which it may be yet made to 
 subserve. There are few lovers of art who have looked 
 on the figures or landscapes of a camera obscura without 
 forming the wish that, among the hidden secrets of matter, 
 some means might be discovered for fixing and rendering 
 them permanent. If nature could be made her own limner, 
 if by some magic art the reflection could be fixed upon the 
 mirror, could the picture be other than true ? But the wish 
 must have seemed an idle one, a wish of nearly the same 
 cast as those which all remember to have formed at one 
 happy period of life, in connection with the famous cap 
 and purse of the fairy tale. Could aught seem less pro- 
 bable than that the forms of the external world should be 
 made to convert the pencils of light which they emit into 
 real bona fide pencils, and commence taking their own 
 likenesses? Improbable as the thing may have seemed, 
 however, there were powers in nature of potency enough 
 to effect it, and the newly discovered art of the photo- 
 grapher is simply the art of employing these. The figures 
 and landscapes of the camera obscura can now be fixed 
 and rendered permanent, not yet in all their various 
 shades of colour, but in a style scarce less striking, and 
 to which the limner, as if by anticipation, has already had 
 recourse. The connoisseur unacquainted with the results 
 of the recent discovery, would decide, if shown a set of 
 photographic impressions, that he had before him the 
 carefully finished drawings in sepia of some great master. 
 The stronger lights, as in sketches done in this colour, 
 present merely the white ground of the paper ; a tinge of 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 181 
 
 soft warm brown indicates the lights of lower tone; a 
 deeper and still deeper tinge succeeds, shading by scarce 
 perceptible degrees through all the various gradations, 
 until the darker shades concentrate into an opaque and 
 dingy umber, that almost rivals black in its intensity. We 
 have at the present moment before us and very wonderful 
 things they certainly are drawings on which a human 
 pencil was never employed. They are strangely suggestive 
 of the capabilities of the art. Here, for instance, is a 
 scene in George Street, part of the pavement ; and a 
 line of buildings, from the stately erection at the corner of 
 Hanover Street, with its proud Corinthian columns and 
 rich cornice, to Melville's Monument and the houses 
 which form the eastern side of St. Andrew Square. St. 
 Andrew's Church rises in the middle distance. The draw- 
 ing is truth itself; but there are cases in which mere truth 
 might be no great merit : were the truth restricted here to 
 the proportions of the architecture, there could be nothing 
 gained by surveying the transcript, that could not be gained 
 by surveying the originals. In this little brown drawing, 
 however, the truth is truth according to the rules of lineal 
 perspective, unerringly deduced ; and from a set of similar 
 drawings, this art of perspective, so important to the artist 
 which has been so variously taught, and in which so 
 many masters have failed could be more surely acquired 
 than by any other means. Of all the many treatises yet 
 written on the subject, one of the best was produced by 
 the celebrated Ferguson the astronomer, the sole fruit 
 derived to the fine arts by his twenty years' application to 
 painting. There are, however, some of his rules arbitrary 
 in their application, and the propriety of which he has not 
 even attempted to demonstrate. Here, for the first time, 
 on this square of paper, have we the data on which per- 
 spective may be rendered a certain science. We have 
 but to apply our compasses and rules in order to discover 
 
i82 THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 the proportions in which, according to their distances, 
 objects dimmish. Mark these columns, for instance. One 
 line prolonged in the line of their architrave, and another 
 line prolonged in the line of their bases, bisect one another 
 in the point of sight fixed in the distant horizon ; and in this 
 one important point we find all the other parallel lines of 
 the building converging. The fact, though unknown to the 
 ancients, has been long familiar to the artists of compara- 
 tively modern times, so familiar, indeed, that it forms one 
 of the first lessons of the drawing-master. The rule is a fixed 
 one ; but there is another rule equally important, not yet fixed, 
 that rule of proportion by which to determine the breadth 
 which a certain extent of frontage between these converging 
 lines should occupy. The principle on which the horizontal 
 lines converge is already known, but the principle on which 
 the vertical lines cut these at certain determinate distances 
 is not yet known. It is easy taking the latitudes of the art, 
 if we may so speak, but its longitudes are still to discover. 
 At length, however, have we the lines of discovery indicated : 
 in the architectural drawings of the calotype the perspective 
 is that of nature itself; and to arrive at just conclusions, we 
 have but to measure and compare, and ascertain propor- 
 tions. One result of the discovery of the calotype will be, 
 we doubt not, the production of completer treatises on per- 
 spective than have yet been given to the world. Another 
 very curious result will be, in all probability, a new mode 
 of design for the purposes of the engraver, especially for all 
 the illustrations of books. For a large class of works the 
 labours of the artist bid fair to be restricted to the compo- 
 sition of tableaux vivants, which it will be the part of the 
 photographer to fix, and then transfer to the engraver. To 
 persons of artistical skill at a distance, the suggestion may 
 appear somewhat wild. Such of our readers, however, as 
 have seen the joint productions of Mr. Hill and Mr. Adam- 
 son in this department, will, we are convinced, not deem it 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 183 
 
 wild in the least. Compared with the mediocre prints of 
 nine-tenths of the illustrated works now issuing from the 
 press, these productions serve admirably to show how im- 
 mense the distance between nature and her less skilful 
 imitators. There is a truth, breadth, and power about 
 them which we find in only the highest walks of art, and 
 not often even in these. We have placed a head of Dr. 
 Chalmers taken in this way beside one of the most power- 
 ful prints of him yet given to the public, and find from the 
 contrast that the latter, with all its power, is but a mere 
 approximation. There is a skinniness about the lips which 
 is not true to nature j the chin is not brought strongly 
 enough out ; the shade beneath the under lip is too broad 
 and too flat; the nose droops, and lacks the firm-set ap- 
 pearance so characteristic of the original ; and while the 
 breadth of the forehead is exaggerated, there is scarce 
 justice done to its height. We decide at once in favour of 
 the calotype it is truth itself; and yet, while the design of 
 the print a mere approximation as it is must have cost 
 a man of genius much pains and study, the drawing in 
 browYi beside it was but the work of a few seconds : the 
 eye of an accomplished artist determined the attitude of the 
 original, and the light reflected from the form and features 
 accomplished the rest. Were that sketch in brown to be 
 sent to a skilful engraver, he would render it the ground- 
 work of by far the most faithful print which the public has 
 yet seen. And how interesting to have bound up with the 
 writings of this distinguished divine, not a mere print in 
 which there might be deviations from the truth, but the 
 calotype drawing itself ! In some future book sale, copies 
 of the Astronomical Discourses with calotype heads of the 
 author prefixed, may be found to bear very high prices 
 indeed. An autograph. of Shakespeare has been sold of 
 late for considerably more than an hundred guineas. 
 What price would some early edition of his works bear, 
 
i8 4 THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 with his likeness in calotype fronting the title ? Corpora- 
 tions and colleges, nay, courts and governments, would 
 outbid one another in the purchase. Or what would we 
 not give to be permitted to lool^ even on a copy of the 
 Paradise Lost with a calotype portrait of the poet in front 
 serenely placid in blindness and adversity, solacing him- 
 self, with upturned though sightless eyes, amid the sublime 
 visions of the ideal world ? How deep the interest which 
 would attach to a copy of Clarendon's History of the Civil 
 War, with calotypes of all the more remarkable personages 
 who figured in that very remarkable time Charles, Crom- 
 well, Laud, Henderson, Hampden, Strafford, Falkland, and 
 Seklen, and with these the Wallers and Miltons and 
 Cowleys, their contemporaries and coadjutors ! The his- 
 tory of the Reform Bill could still be illustrated after this 
 manner; so also could the history of Roman Catholic 
 Emancipation in Ireland, and the history of our Church 
 Question in Scotland. Even in this department the de- 
 partment of historic illustrations we anticipate much and 
 interesting employment for the photographer. 
 
 We have two well-marked drawings before us, in which 
 we recognise the capabilities of the art for producing pic- 
 tures of composition. They are tableaux vivants transferred 
 by the calotype. In the one 1 a bonneted mechanic rests 
 over his mallet on a tombstone his one arm bared above 
 his elbow ; the other wrapped up in the well-indicated shirt 
 folds, and resting on a piece of grotesque sculpture. There 
 is a powerful sun ; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of 
 coarse stuff are well marked ; one half the face is in deep 
 shade, the other in strong light ; the churchyard wall throws 
 a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a 
 gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light 
 in the form of a mass of rank grass and foliage. Had an 
 old thin man of striking figure and features been selected, 
 1 See Frontispiece. 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 185 
 
 and some study-worn scholar introduced in front of him, 
 the result would have been a design ready for the engraver 
 when employed in illustrating the Old Mortality of Sir 
 Walter. The other drawing presents a tableau vivant on a 
 larger scale, and of a much deeper interest. It forms one 
 of the groups taken under the eye of Mr. Hill, as materials 
 for the composition of his historic picture. In the centre 
 Dr. Chalmers sits on the Moderator's chair, and there are 
 grouped round him, as on the platform, some eighteen or 
 twenty of the better known members of the Church, clerical 
 and lay. Nothing can be more admirable than the truth- 
 fulness and ease of the figures. Wilkie, in his representa- 
 tions of a crowd, excelled in introducing heads, and hands, 
 and faces, and parts of faces into the interstices behind, 
 one of the greatest difficulties with which the artist can 
 grapple. Here, however, is the difficulty surmounted 
 surmounted, too, as if to bear testimony to the genius of 
 the departed in the style of Wilkie. We may add further, 
 that the great massiveness of the head of Chalmers, com- 
 pared with the many fine heads around him, is admirably 
 brought out in this drawing. 
 
 In glancing over these photographic sketches, one cannot 
 avoid being struck by the silent but impressive eulogium 
 which nature pronounces, through their agency, on the 
 works of the more eminent masters. There is much in 
 seeing nature truthfully, and in registering what are in 
 reality her prominent markings. Artists of a lower order 
 are continually falling into mere mannerisms peculiarities 
 of style that belong not to nature, but to themselves, just 
 because, contented with acquirement, they cease seeing 
 nature. In order to avoid these mannerisms, there is an 
 eye of fresh observation required that ability of con- 
 tinuous attention to surrounding phenomena which only 
 superior men possess ; and doubtless to this eye of fresh 
 observation, this ability of continuous attention, the masters 
 
1 86 THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 owed much of their truth and their power. How very 
 truthfully and perseveringly some of them saw, is well 
 illustrated by these photographic drawings. Here, for in- 
 stance, is a portrait exactly after the manner of Raeburn. 
 There is the same broad freedom of touch ; no nice minia- 
 ture stipplings, as if laid in by the point of a needle no 
 sharp-edged strokes : all is solid, massy, broad ; more dis- 
 tinct at a distance than when viewed near at hand. The 
 arrangement of the lights and shadows seems rather the 
 result of a happy haste, in which half the effect was pro- 
 duced by design, half by accident, than of great labour 
 and care ; and yet how exquisitely true the general aspect ! 
 Every stroke tells, and serves, as in the portraits of Rae- 
 burn, to do more than relieve the features : it serves also 
 to indicate the prevailing mood and predominant power 
 to the mind. And here is another portrait, quiet, deeply- 
 toned, gentlemanly, a transcript apparently of one of the 
 more characteristic portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence. 
 Perhaps, however, of all our British artists, the artist 
 whose published works most nearly resemble a set of 
 these drawings is Sir Joshua Reynolds. We have a folio 
 volume of engravings from his pictures before us j and 
 when, placing side by side with the prints the sketches 
 in brown, we remark the striking similarity of style that 
 prevails between them, we feel more strongly than at per- 
 haps any former period, that the friend of Johnson and of 
 Burke must have been a consummate master of his art. 
 The engraver, however, cannot have done full justice to 
 the originals. There is a want of depth and prominence 
 which the near neighbourhood of the photographic drawings 
 renders very apparent : the shades in the subordinate parts 
 of the picture are more careless and much less true ; nor 
 have the lights the same vivid and sunshiny effect. There 
 is one particular kind of resemblance between the two 
 which strikes as remarkable, because of a kind which could 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 187 
 
 scarce be anticipated. In the volume of prints there are 
 three several likenesses of the artist himself, all very ad- 
 mirable as pieces of art, and all, no doubt, sufficiently like, 
 but yet all dissimilar in some points from each other. And 
 this dissimilarity in the degree which it obtains, one might 
 naturally deem a defect the result of some slight inaccuracy 
 in the drawing. Should not portraits of the same indi- 
 vidual, if all perfect likenesses of him, be all perfectly like 
 one another ? No ; not at all. A man at one moment 
 of time, and seen from one particular point of view, may 
 be very unlike himself when seen at another moment of 
 time, and from another point of view. We have at present 
 before us the photographic likenesses of four several in- 
 dividuals three likenesses of each and no two in any 
 of the four sets are quite alike. They differ in expression, 
 according to the mood which prevailed in the mind of the 
 original at the moment in which they were imprinted upon 
 the paper. In some respects the physiognomy seems dif- 
 ferent ; and the features appear more or less massy in the 
 degree in which the lights and shadows were more or less 
 strong, or in which the particular angle they were taken 
 in brought them out in higher or lower relief. 
 
 We shall venture just one remark more on these very 
 interesting drawings. The subject is so suggestive of 
 thought at the present stage, that it would be no easy 
 matter to exhaust it; and it will, we have no doubt, be 
 still more suggestive of thought by and by; but we are 
 encroaching on our limits, and must restrain ourselves, 
 therefore, to the indication of just one of the trains of 
 thought which it has served to originate. Many of our 
 readers must be acquainted with Dr. Thomas Brown's 
 theory of attention, l a state of mind,' says the philosopher, 
 ' which has been understood to imply the exercise of a 
 peculiar intellectual power, but which, in the case of atten- 
 tion to objects of sense, appears to be nothing more than 
 
1 88 THE CALOTYPE. 
 
 the co-existence of desire with the perception of the object 
 to which we are said to attend.' He proceeds to instance 
 how, in a landscape in which the incurious gaze may see 
 many objects without looking at or knowing them, a mere 
 desire to know brings out into distinctness every object 
 in succession on which the desire fixes. * Instantly, or 
 almost instantly,' continues the metaphysician, ' without 
 our consciousness of any new or peculiar state of mind 
 intervening in the process, the landscape becomes to our 
 vision altogether different. Certain parts only those parts 
 which we wished to know particularly are seen by us ; 
 the remaining parts seem almost to have vanished. It is 
 as if everything before had been but the doubtful colouring 
 of enchantment, which had disappeared, and left us the 
 few prominent realities on which we gaze ; or rather as 
 if some instant enchantment, obedient to our wishes, had 
 dissolved every reality beside, and brought closer to our 
 sight the few objects which we desired to see.' Now, in 
 the transcript of the larger tableau vivant before us that 
 which represents Dr. Chalmers seated among his friends 
 on the Moderator's chair we find an exemplification suffi- 
 ciently striking of the laws on which this seemingly myste- 
 rious power depends. They are purely structural laws, and 
 relate not to the mind, but to the eye, not to the province 
 of the metaphysician, but to that of the professor of optics. 
 The lens of the camera obscura transmits the figures to the 
 prepared paper, on quite the same principle on which in 
 vision the crystalline lens conveys them to the retina. In 
 the centre of the field in both cases there is much distinct- 
 ness, while all around its circumference the images are 
 indistinct and dim. We have but to fix the eye on some 
 object directly in front of us, and then attempt, without 
 removing it, to ascertain the forms of objects at some dis- 
 tance on both sides, in order to convince ourselves that the 
 field of distinct vision is a very limited field indeed. And 
 
THE CALOTYPE. 189 
 
 in this transcript of the larger tableau vivant we find ex- 
 actly the same phenomena. The central figures come all 
 within the distinct field. Not so, however, the figures on 
 both sides. They are dim and indistinct ; the shades dilute 
 into the lights, and the outlines are obscure. How striking 
 a comment on the theory of Brown ! We see his myste- 
 rious power resolved in that drawing into a simple matter 
 of light and shade, arranged in accordance with certain 
 optical laws. The qlear central space in which the figures 
 are so distinct, corresponds to the central space in the 
 retina ; it is the attention-point of the picture, if we may 
 so speak. In the eye this attention-point is brought to 
 bear, through a simple effort of the will, on the object 
 to be examined ; and the rest of the process, so pleasingly, 
 but at the same time so darkly, described by the philo- 
 sopher, is the work of the eye itself. 
 
THE TENANT'S TRUE QUARREL. 
 
 IT has been remarked by Sir James Mackintosh, that there 
 are four great works, in four distinct departments of know- 
 ledge, which have more visibly and extensively influenced 
 opinion than any other productions of the human intellect. 
 The first of these is the Treatise on the Law of War and 
 Peace, by Grotius. It appeared about two centuries ago ; 
 and from that period downwards, international law became 
 a solid fact, which all civilised countries have recognised, 
 and which even the French Convention, during the Reign 
 of Terror, dared, in its madness, to outrage but for a 
 moment. The second is the Essay on the Human Under- 
 standing, by Locke. It struck down, as with the blow of 
 a hatchet, the wretched mental philosophy of the dark ages, 
 that philosophy which Puseyism, in its work of diffusing 
 over the present the barbarism and ignorance of the past, 
 would so fain revive and restore, and which has been ever 
 engaged, as its proper employment, in imparting plausibility 
 to error and absurdity, and in furnishing apology for crime. 
 The third was the Spirit of Laws, by Montesquieu. It 
 placed legislation on the basis of philosophy ; and straight- 
 way law began to spring up among the nations out of a new 
 soil. The fourth and last great work An Inquiry into the 
 Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith 
 was by far the most influential of them all. ' It is,' says Sir 
 James, ' perhaps the only book which produced an imme- 
 diate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most 
 
 190 
 
THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 191 
 
 important parts of the legislation of all civilised states. 
 Touching those matters which may be numbered, and 
 measured, and weighed, it bore visible and palpable fruit. 
 In a few years it began to alter laws and treaties, and has 
 made its way throughout .'the convulsions of revolution and 
 conquest to a due ascendant over the minds of men, with 
 far less than the average obstructions of prejudice and 
 clamour, which check the channels through which truth 
 flows into practice.' 
 
 And yet, though many of the seeds which this great work 
 served to scatter sprung up thus rapidly, and produced 
 luxuriant crops, there were others, not less instinct with the 
 vital principles, of which the germination has been slow. 
 The nurseryman expects, in sowing beds of the stone-fruit- 
 bearing trees, such as the plum or the hawthorn, to see the 
 plants spring up very irregularly. One seed bursts the 
 enveloping case, and gets up in three weeks ; another 
 barely achieves the same work in three years. And it has 
 been thus with the harder-coated germens of the Wealth of 
 Nations. It is now exactly eighty years since the philo- 
 sopher set himself to elaborate the thinking of his great 
 work in his mother's house in Kirkcaldy, and exactly 
 seventy years since he gave it to the world. It appeared 
 in 1776; and now, for the first time, in 1846, the Queen's 
 Speech, carefully concocted by a Conservative Ministry, 
 embodies as great practical truths its free-trade principles. 
 The shoot a true dicotyledon has fairly got its two 
 vigorous lobes above the surface : freedom of trade in all 
 that the farmer rears, and freedom of trade in all that the 
 manufacturer produces ; and there cannot be a shadow of 
 doubt that it will be by and by a very vigorous tree. No 
 Protectionist need calculate, from its rate of progress in the 
 past, on its rate of progress in the future. Nearly three 
 generations have come and gone since, to vary the figure, 
 the preparations for laying the train began ; but now that 
 
1 92 THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 
 
 the train is fairly ready and fired, the explosion will not be 
 a matter of generations at all. Explosions come under an 
 entirely different law from the law of laying trains. It will 
 happen with the rising of the free-trade agitation as with 
 the rising of water against a dam-head stretched across a 
 river. Days and weeks may pass, especially if droughts 
 have been protracted and the stream low, during which the 
 rising of the water proves to be a slow, silent, inefficient 
 sort of process, of half-inches and eighth-parts ; but when 
 the river gets into flood, when the vast accumulation 
 begins to topple over the dam-dyke, when the dyke itself 
 begins to swell, and bulge, and crack, and to disgorge, at 
 its ever-increasing flaws and openings, streams of turbid 
 water, let no one presume to affirm that the after-process 
 is to be slow. In mayhap one minute more, in a few 
 minutes at most, stones, sticks, turf, the whole dam-dyke, 
 in short, but a dam-dyke no longer, will be roaring adown 
 the stream, wrapped up in the womb of an irresistible wave. 
 Now there have been palpable openings, during the last 
 few months, in the Protectionist dam-head. We pointed 
 years since to the rising of the water, and predicted that it 
 would prevail at last. But the droughts were protracted, 
 and the river low. Good harvests and brisk trade went 
 hand in hand together ; and the Protectionist dam-head 
 though feeble currents and minute waves beat against it, 
 and the accumulation within rose by half-inches and eighth- 
 parts stood sure. But the river is now high in flood the 
 waters are toppling over the yielding masonry has begun 
 to bulge and crack. The Queen's Speech, when we con- 
 sider it as emanating from a Conservative Ministry, in- 
 dicates a tremendous flaw ; the speech of Sir Robert Peel 
 betrays an irreparable bulge; the sudden conversions to 
 free-trade principles of officials and place-holders show a 
 general outpouring at opening rents and crannies : depend 
 on it, Protectionists, your dam-dyke, patch or prop it as 
 
THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 193 
 
 you please, is on the eve of destruction ; yet a very little 
 longer, and it will be hurtling down the stream. 
 
 For what purpose, do we say ? Simply in the hope of 
 awakening to a sense of their true interest, ere it be too 
 late, a class of the Scottish people in which we feel deeply 
 interested, we mean the tenant agriculturists of the king- 
 dom. They have in this all-important crisis a battle to 
 fight ; and if they do not fight and win it, they will be irre- 
 vocably ruined by hundreds and thousands. The great 
 Protectionist battle the battle in which they may make 
 common cause with their landlords if they will, against the 
 League, and the Free-Trade Whigs, and Sir Robert Peel, 
 and Adam Smith, and the Queen is a battle in which to 
 a certainty they will be beat. They may protract the con- 
 test long enough to get so thoroughly wearied as to be no 
 longer fit for the other great battle which awaits them ; but 
 they may depend on it as one of the surest things in all the 
 future, that they will have to record a disastrous issue. 
 They must be defeated. We would fain ask them for it 
 is sad to see men spending their strength to no end to 
 look fairly at the aspect things are beginning to wear, and 
 the ever-extending front which is arraying against them. 
 We would ask them first to peruse those chapters in Adam 
 Smith which in reality form the standing-ground of their 
 opponents, chapters whose solid basis of economic philo- 
 sophy has made anti-corn-law agitation and anti-corn-law 
 tracts and speeches such formidable things. We would 
 ask them next to look at the progress of the League, at its 
 half-million fund, its indomitable energy and ever-growing 
 influence. We would then ask them to look at the recent 
 conversions of Whig and Tory to free-trade principles, at 
 the resignation of Sir Robert Peel, and the proof the 
 country received in consequence, that in the present ex- 
 tremity there is no other pilot prepared to take the helm ; 
 at the strangely marked Adam Smith cast of the Queen's 
 
i 9 4 THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 
 
 Speech ; and at the telling facts of Sir Robert's explanatory 
 statement. We request them to take a cool survey of all 
 these things, and to cogitate for themselves the issue which 
 they so clearly foretell. It seems as certain that free-trade 
 principles are at last to be established in Britain, as that 
 there is a sun in the sky. Nor does there seem much 
 wisdom in fighting a battle that is inevitably to be lost. 
 The battle which it is their true interest to be preparing to 
 fight, is one in which they must occupy the ground, not of 
 agriculturists, but simply of tenants : it is a battle with the 
 landlords, not with the free-traders. 
 
 We believe Dr. Chalmers is right in holding that, ulti- 
 mately at least, the repeal of the corn-laws will not greatly 
 affect the condition of our agriculturists. There is, how- 
 ever, a transition period from which they have a good deal 
 to dread. The removal of the protective duties on meat 
 and wool has not had the effect of lowering the prices of 
 either ; but the fear of such an effect did for a time what 
 the repeal of the duties themselves failed to do, and bore 
 with disastrous consequences on the sheep and cattle 
 market. And such a time may, we are afraid, be antici- 
 pated on the abolition of the corn-laws. Nay, it is probable 
 that, even when the transition state shall be over, there will 
 be a general lowering of price to the average of that of the 
 Continent and America, an average heightened by little 
 more than the amount of the true protective duties of the 
 trade, the expense of carriage from the foreign farm to the 
 British market. And woe to the poor tenant, tied down by 
 a long lease to a money-rent rated according to the average 
 value of grain under the protective duties, if the defalcation 
 is to fall on him ! If he has to pay the landlord according 
 to a high average, and to be paid by the corn-factor accord- 
 ing to a low one, he is undone. And his real danger in 
 the coming crisis indicates his proper battle. It is not with 
 his old protector Sir Robert that he should be prepar- 
 
THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 195 
 
 ing to fight ; it is, we repeat, with his old ally the land- 
 holder. Nay, lie will find, ultimately at least, that he has 
 no choice in the matter. With Sir Robert he may fight if 
 it please him, and fight, as we have shown, to be beaten ; 
 but with the landlord he must fight, whether he first enter 
 the lists with Sir Robert or no. When his preliminary 
 struggle shall have terminated unsuccessfully, he shall then 
 without heart, without organization, without ally, have to 
 enter on the inevitable struggle, a struggle for very exist- 
 ence. We of course refer to landlords as a class : there 
 are among them not a few individuals with whom the 
 tenant will have no struggle to maintain, conscientious 
 men, at once able and willing to adjust their demands to 
 the circumstances of the new state of things. But their 
 character as a class does not stand so high. Many of their 
 number are in straitened circumstances, so sorely bur- 
 dened with annuities and mortgages, as to be somewhat in 
 danger of being altogether left, through the coming change, 
 without an income ; and it is not according to the nature 
 of things that the case of the tenant should be very con- 
 siderately dealt with by them. When a hapless crew are 
 famishing on the open sea, and the fierce, cannibal comes 
 to be developed in the man, it is the weaker who are first 
 devoured. Now we would ill like to see any portion of 
 our Scotch tenantry at the mercy of wild, unreasoning 
 destitution in the proprietor. We would ill like to see him 
 vested with the power to decide absolutely in his own case, 
 whether it was his tenant that was to be ruined, or he him- 
 self that was to want an income, knowing well beforehand 
 to which side the balance would incline. Nor would we 
 much like to see our tenantry at the mercy of even an 
 average class of proprietors, by no means in the extreme 
 circumstances of their poorer brethren, but who, with an 
 unimpeachable bond in their hands, that enabled them to 
 say whether it was they themselves or their tenant neigh- 
 
196 THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 
 
 bours who were to be the poorer in consequence of the 
 induced change, would be but too apt, in accordance with 
 the selfish bent of man's common nature, to make a some- 
 what Shylock-like use of it. Stout men who have fallen 
 into reduced circumstances, and stout paw-sucking bears in 
 their winter lodgings, become gradually thin by living on 
 their own fat; and quite right it is that gross men and 
 corpulent bears should live on their own fat, just because 
 the fat is their own. But we would not deem it right that 
 our proprietors should live on their farmers' fats : on the 
 contrary, we would hold it quite wrong, and a calamity to 
 the country; and such, at the present time, is the great 
 danger to which the tenantry of Scotland are exposed. Jus- 
 tice imperatively demands, that if some such change is now 
 to take place in the value of farms, as that which took place 
 on the regulation of the currency in the value of money, 
 the ruinous blunder of 1819 should not be repeated. It 
 demands that their actual rent be not greatly increased 
 through the retention of the merely nominal one ; that the 
 tenant, in short, be not sacrificed to a term wholly un- 
 changed in sound, but altogether altered in value. And 
 such, in reality, is the object for which the farm-holding 
 agriculturists of Scotland have now to contend. It is the 
 only quarrel which they can prosecute with a hope of 
 success. 
 
 We referred, in a recent number, when remarking on the 
 too palpable unpopularity of the Whigs, to questions which, 
 if animated by a really honest regard for the liberties of the 
 subject, they might agitate, and grow strong in agitating, 
 secure of finding a potent ally in the moral sense of the 
 country. One of these would involve the emancipation of 
 the tenantry of England, now sunk, through one of the pro- 
 visions of the Reform Bill, into a state of vassalage and 
 political subserviency without precedent since at least the 
 days of Henry vin. It has been well remarked by Paley, 
 
THE TENANTS TRUE QUARREL. 197 
 
 that the direct consequences of political innovations are 
 often the least important ; and that it is from the silent and 
 unobserved operation of causes set at work for different pur- 
 poses, that the greatest revolutions take their rise. ' Thus,' 
 he says, 'when Elizabeth and her immediate successor 
 applied themselves to the encouragement and regulation of 
 trade by many wise laws, they knew not that, together with 
 wealth and industry, they were diffusing a consciousness of 
 strength and independency which could not long endure, 
 under the forms of a mixed government, the dominion 
 of arbitrary princes.' And again : ' When it was debated 
 whether the Mutiny Act the law by which the army is 
 governed and maintained should be temporal or per- 
 petual, little else probably occurred to the advocates of 
 an annual bill, than the expediency of retaining a control 
 over the most dangerous prerogative of the Crown the 
 direction and command of a standing army ; whereas, in 
 its effect, this single reservation has altered the whole 
 frame and quality of the British constitution. For since, 
 in consequence of the military system which prevails in 
 neighbouring and rival nations, as well as on account of 
 the internal exigencies of Government, a standing army has 
 become essential to the safety and administration of the 
 empire, it enables Parliament, by discontinuing this neces- 
 sary provision, so to enforce its resolutions upon any other 
 subject, as to render the king's dissent to a law which has 
 received the approbation of both Houses, too dangerous an 
 experiment any longer to be advised.' And thus the illus- 
 tration of the principle runs on. We question, however, 
 whether there be any illustration among them more striking 
 than that indirect consequence of the Reform Bill on the 
 tenantry of England to which we refer. The provision 
 which conferred a vote on the tenant-at-will, abrogated 
 leases, and made the tiller of the soil a vassal. The farmer 
 who precariously holds his farm from year to year cannot, 
 
198 THE TENANT'S TRUE QUARREL. 
 
 of course, be expected to sink so much capital in the soil, 
 in the hope of a distant and uncertain return, as the lessee 
 certain of a possession for a specified number of years ; 
 but some capital he must sink in it. It is impossible, 
 according to the modern system, or indeed any system of 
 husbandry, that all the capital committed to the earth in 
 winter and spring should be resumed in the following 
 summer and autumn. A considerable overplus must inevi- 
 tably remain to be gathered up in future seasons ; and this 
 overplus remainder, in the case of the tenant-at-will, is 
 virtually converted into a deposit, lodged in the hands of 
 the landlord, to secure the depositor's political subser- 
 viency and vassalage. Let him but once manifest a will 
 and a mind of his own, and vote, in accordance with his 
 convictions, contrary to the will of the landlord, and 
 straightway the deposit, converted into a penalty, is for- 
 feited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radi- 
 calism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought 
 not to exist that the English tenant should be a freeman, 
 not a serf and that he ought not to be bound down by a 
 weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience 
 of his own. The simple principle of ' No lease, no vote,' 
 would set all right ; and it is a principle which so recom- 
 mends itself to the moral sense as just, that an honest 
 Whiggism would gain, in agitating its recognition and 
 establishment, at once strength and popularity. But there 
 are few Scotch tenants in the circumstances of vassalage 
 so general in England. They are in circumstances in which 
 they at least may act independently ; and the time is fast 
 coming in which they must either make a wise, unbiassed 
 use of their freedom, or be hopelessly crushed for ever. 
 
 January 28, 1846. 
 
CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN 
 AFFGHANISTAN. 
 
 WE trust we may now look back on by far the most disas- 
 trous passage which occurs in the military history of Great 
 Britain, as so definitively concluded, that in the future we 
 shall be unable to trace it as still disadvantageously opera- 
 tive in its effects. A series of decisive victories has neu- 
 tralized, to a considerable extent, the influence of the most 
 fatal campaign in which a British army was ever engaged. 
 But this is all. One of our poets, in placing in a strong 
 light the extreme folly of war, describes 'most Christian 
 kings' with 'honourable ruffians in their hire/ wasting the 
 nations with fire and sword, and then, when fatigued with 
 murder and sated with blood, 'setting them down just 
 where they were before.' It is quite melancholy enough 
 that our most sanguine expectations with regard to the 
 Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair's- 
 breadth than the satiric conception of the poet. We can 
 barely hope, after squandering much treasure, after com- 
 mitting a great deal of crime, after occasioning and endur- 
 ing a vast amount of wretchedness, after a whole country 
 has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants, after 
 a British army has perished miserably, we can barely hope 
 that our later successes may have had so far the effect of 
 effacing the memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall 
 be enabled to sit down under their cover on the eastern 
 bank of the Indus, 'just where we were before.' And even 
 this is much in the circumstances. 
 
 199 
 
2 oo CONCLUSION OF 
 
 We have seen the British in India repeat the same kind 
 of fatal experiment which cost Napoleon his crown, and 
 from which Charles xn. dated his downfall ; and repeat it, 
 in the first instance at least, with a result more disastrous 
 than either the flight from Pultowa or the retreat from 
 Moscow. And though necessarily an expedition on a 
 similar scale, it seemed by no means improbable that its 
 ultimate consequences might bear even more disastrously 
 on British power in the East, than the results of the several 
 expeditions into Russia, under Charles and Napoleon, bore 
 on the respective destinies of Sweden and of France. That 
 substratum of opinion in the minds of an hundred millions 
 of Asiatics, on which British authority in India finds its 
 main foundation, bade fair to be shivered into pieces by the 
 shock. 
 
 There are passages in all our better histories that stand 
 out in high relief, if we may so speak, from the ground- 
 work on which they are based. They appeal to the ima- 
 gination, they fix themselves in the memory ; and after 
 they have got far enough removed into the past to enable 
 men to survey them in all their breadth, we find them 
 caught up and reflected in the fictions of the poet and the 
 novelist. 
 
 But it is wonderful how comparatively slight is the effect 
 which most of them produce at the time of their occur- 
 rence. It would seem as if the great mass of mankind had 
 no ability of seeing them in their real character, except 
 through the medium of some superior mind, skilful enough 
 to portray them in their true colours and proportions. 
 Who, acquainted with the history of the plague in London, 
 for instance, can fail being struck with the horrors of that 
 awful visitation, as described in the graphic pages of Defoe ? 
 Who, that experienced the visitation of similar horrors which 
 swept away in our own times one-tenth part of the human 
 species, could avoid remarking that the reality was less suited 
 
THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN. 201 
 
 to impress by its actual presence, than the record by its 
 touching pictures and its affecting appeals? The reality 
 appealed to but the fears of men through the instinct of self- 
 preservation, and even this languidly in some cases, leaving 
 the imagination unimpressed ; whereas the wild scenes of 
 Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed vividly through 
 the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in some 
 degree at least, all minds are capable of entertaining. 
 
 On a nearly similar principle, the country has not yet 
 been able rightly to appreciate the disasters of Afghanistan. 
 It has been unable to bestow upon them what we shall 
 venture to term the historic prominence. When one after 
 one the messengers reach Job, bearing tidings of fatal 
 disasters, in which all his children and all his domestics 
 have perished, the ever-recurring ' and I only am escaped 
 alone to tell thee,' strikes upon the ear as one of the signs 
 of a dispensation supernatural in its character. The nar- 
 rative has already prepared us for events removed beyond 
 the reach of those common laws which regulate ordinary 
 occurrences. Did we find such a piece of history in any 
 of our older chronicles, we would at once set it down, on 
 Macaulay's principle, as a ballad thrown out of its original 
 verse into prose, and appropriated by the chronicler, in the 
 lack of less questionable materials. But finding it in the 
 Record of eternal truth, we view it differently; for there 
 the supernatural is not dissociated from the true. How 
 very striking, to find in the authentic annals of our own 
 country a somewhat similar incident ; to find the ' I only am 
 escaped alone to tell thee' in the history of a well-equipped 
 British army of the present day ! There occurs no similar 
 incident in all our past history. British armies have capi- 
 tulated not without disgrace. In the hapless American 
 war, Cornwallis surrendered a whole army to Washington, 
 and Burgoyne another whole army to Gates and Arnold. 
 The British have had also their disastrous retreats. 
 
202 CONCLUSION OF 
 
 The retreat from Fontenoy was at least precipitate; and 
 there was much suffered in Sir John Moore's retreat on 
 Corunna. But such retreats have not been wholly without 
 their share of glory, nor have such surrenders been synony- 
 mous with extermination. In the annals of British armies, 
 the ' I only have escaped alone to tell thee' belongs to but 
 the retreat from Cabul. It is a terrible passage in the history 
 of our country terrible in all its circumstances. Some of 
 its earlier scenes are too revolting for the imagination to 
 call up. 
 
 It is all too humiliating to conceive of it in the character 
 of an unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly 
 avenged by infuriated savages. It is a quite melancholy 
 enough object of contemplation, in even its latter stages. A 
 wild scene of rocks and mountains darkened overhead with 
 tempest, beneath covered deep with snow ; a broken and 
 dispirited force, struggling hopelessly through the scarce 
 passable defiles, here thinned by the headlong assaults of 
 howling fanatics, insensible to fear, incapable of remorse, and 
 thirsting for blood, there decoyed to destruction through 
 the promises of cruel and treacherous chiefs, devoid alike 
 of the sense of honour and the feeling of pity ; with no 
 capacity or conduct among its leaders ; full of the frightful 
 recollections of past massacres, hopeless of ultimate escape ; 
 struggling, however, instinctively on amid the unceasing 
 ring of musketry from thicket and crag, exhibiting mile 
 after mile a body less dense and extended, leaving behind 
 it a long unbroken trail of its dead ; at length wholly 
 wasting away, like the upward heave of a wave on a sandy 
 beach, and but one solitary horseman, wounded and faint 
 with loss of blood, holding on his perilous course, to tell the 
 fate of all the others. And then, the long after-season of 
 grief and suspense among anxious and at length despairing 
 relations at home, around many a cheerless hearth, and in 
 many a darkened chamber, and the sadly frequent notice in 
 
THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN. 203 
 
 the obituaries of all our public journals, so significant of 
 the disaster, and which must have rung so heavy a knell to 
 so many affectionate hearts, ' Killed in the Khyber Pass.' 
 To find passages of parallel calamity in the history of at 
 least civilised countries, we have to ascend to the times of 
 the Roman empire during its period of decline and disaster, 
 when one warlike emperor, in battle with the Goth, 
 
 'in that Serbonian bog, 
 Betwixt Damieta and Mount Cassus old, 
 With his whole army sank ;' 
 
 or when another not less warlike monarch was hopelessly 
 overthrown by the Persian, and died a miserable slave, 
 exposed to every indignity which the invention of his un- 
 generous and barbarous conqueror could suggest. 
 
 Britain in this event has received a terrible lesson, which 
 we trust her scarce merited and surely, most revolting suc- 
 cesses in China will not have the effect of wholly neutra- 
 lizing. The Affghan war, regarded as a war of principle, 
 was eminently unjust ; regarded as a war of expediency, it 
 was eminently imprudent. It seems to have originated 
 with men of narrow and defective genius, not over largely 
 gifted with the moral sense. We have had to refer on a 
 former occasion to the policy adopted by Lord Auckland 
 respecting the educational grants to Hindustan. An en- 
 lightened predecessor of his Lordship had decided that the 
 assistance and patronage of the British Government should 
 be extended to the exclusive promotion of European litera- 
 ture and science among the natives of India. His Lord- 
 ship, in the exercise of a miserable liberalism, reversed the 
 resolution, and diverted no inconsiderable portion of the 
 Government patronage to the support of the old Hindus- 
 tanee education, a system puerile in its literature, con- 
 temptible in its science, and false in its religion. Our 
 readers cannot have forgotten the indignant style of Dr. 
 
204 CONCLUSION OF 
 
 Duff's remonstrance. The enlightened and zealous mis- 
 sionary boldly and indignantly characterized the minute of 
 his Lordship, through which this revolution was effected, 
 as 'remarkable chiefly for its omissions and commissions, 
 for its concessions and compromises, for its education 
 without religion, its plans without a Providence, and its 
 ethics without a God.' Such was the liberalism of Lord 
 Auckland ; and of at least one of the leading men whose 
 counsel led to the Affghan expedition, and who perished in 
 it, the liberalism, it is said, was of a still more marked and 
 offensive character. What do we infer from the fact ? 
 
 Not that Providence interfered to avenge upon them the 
 sin of their policy : there would be presumption in the 
 inference. But it may not be unsafe to infer, from the 
 palpable folly of the Affghan expedition, that the liberalism 
 in which Lord Auckland and some one or two of his friends 
 indulged is a liberalism which weak and incompetent men 
 are best fitted to entertain. His scheme of education and 
 his Afghanistan expedition are specimens of mental pro- 
 duction, if we may so speak, that give evidence of exactly 
 the same cast and tendency regarding the order and scope 
 of the genius which originated them. We have been a good 
 deal struck by the shrewdness of one of Prince Eugene 
 of Savoy's remarks, that seems to bear very decidedly on 
 this case. Two generals of his acquaintance had failed 
 miserably in the conduct of some expedition that demanded 
 capacity and skill, and yet both of them were unquestion- 
 ably smart, clever men. ' I always thought it would turn 
 out so,' said the Prince. ' Both these men made open 
 profession of infidelity ; and I formed so low an opinion 
 of their taste and judgment in consequence, that I made 
 myself sure they would sooner or later run their heads into 
 some egregious folly.' 
 
 It is satisfactory in every point of view that Britain should 
 be at peace with China and the Affghans. War is an evil 
 
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN. 205 
 
 in all circumstances.- It is a great evil even when just ; it 
 is a great evil even when carried on against a people who 
 know and respect the laws of nations. But it is peculiarly 
 an evil when palpably not a just war, and when carried on 
 against a barbarous people. It has been stated in private 
 letters, though not officially, that a soldier of the 44th was 
 burned alive by the Ghilzies in sight of the English troops, 
 and that on the approach of the latter the throat of the tor- 
 tured victim was cut to ensure his destruction. And it is the 
 inference of an Indian newspaper from the fact, that such 
 wretches are not the devoted patriots that they have been 
 described by some, and that the war with them cannot, 
 after all, be very unjust. We are inclined to argue some- 
 what differently. We believe the Scotch under Wallace 
 were not at all devoid of patriotism, though they were 
 barbarous enough to flay Cressingham, and to burn the 
 English alive at Ayr. We believe further, that an unjust 
 war is rendered none the less unjust from the circumstance 
 of its being waged with a savage and cruel people. The 
 barbarism of the enemy has but the effect of heightening 
 its horrors, not of modifying its injustice. It is possible 
 for one civilised man to fight with another, and yet retain 
 his proper character as a man notwithstanding. But the 
 civilised man who fights with a wild beast must assume, 
 during the combat, the character of the wild beast. He 
 cannot afford being generous and merciful j his antagonist 
 understands neither generosity nor mercy. The war is of 
 necessity a war of extermination. And such is always the 
 character of a war between wild and civilised men. It 
 takes its tone, not from the civilisation of the one, but from 
 the cruel savageism of the other. 
 
 December 3, 1842. 
 
PERIODICALISM. 
 
 THE poet Gray held that in a neglected country church- 
 yard, appropriated to only the nameless dead, there might 
 lie, notwithstanding, the remains of undeveloped Miltons, 
 Hampdens, and Cromwells, men who, in more favourable 
 circumstances, would have become famous as poets, or 
 great as patriots or statesmen ; and the stanzas in which he 
 has embodied the reflection are perhaps the most popular 
 in the language. One-half the thought is, we doubt not, 
 just. Save for the madness of Charles, Cromwell would 
 have died a devout farmer, and Hampden a most respect- 
 able country gentleman, who would have been gratefully 
 remembered for half an age over half a county, and then 
 consigned to forgetfulness. But the poets rarely die, how- 
 ever disadvantageously placed, without giving some sign. 
 Rob Don, the Sutherlandshire bard, owed much less to 
 nature than Milton did, and so little to learning that he 
 could neither read nor write \ and yet his better songs pro- 
 mise to live as long as the Gaelic language. And though 
 both Burns and Shakespeare had very considerable dis- 
 advantages to struggle against, we know that neither of 
 them remained * mute ' or ' inglorious,' or even less exten- 
 sively known than Milton himself. It is, we believe, no 
 easy matter to smother a true poet. The versifiers, placed 
 in obscure and humble circumstances, who for a time com- 
 plain of neglected merit and untoward fate, and then give up 
 verse-making in despair, are always men who, with all their 
 querulousness, have at least one cause of complaint more 
 
 206 
 
PERIODICALISM. 207 
 
 than they ever seem to be aware of, a cause of complaint 
 against the nature that failed to impart to them * the divine 
 vision and faculty.' There are powers, however, admirably 
 fitted to tell with effect in the literature of the country, for 
 they have served to produce the most influential works 
 which the world ever saw works such as the Essay of 
 Locke, the Peace and War of Grotius, and the Spirit of 
 Laws of Montesquieu which, with all their apparent 
 robustness, are greatly less hardy than the poetic faculty, 
 and which, unless the circumstances favourable to their 
 development and exercise be present, fail to leave behind 
 them any adequate record of their existence. It is difficult 
 to imagine a situation in life in which Burns would not 
 have written his songs, but very easy to imagine situations 
 in which Robertson would not have produced his Scotland 
 or his Charles K, nor Adam Smith his Wealth of Nations. 
 We have no faith whatever in ' mute, inglorious Miltons ;' 
 but we do hold that there may be obscure country church- 
 yards in which untaught Humes, guiltless of the Essay on 
 Miracles, may repose, and undeveloped Bentleys and War- 
 burtons, whose great aptitude for acquiring or capacity for 
 retaining knowledge remained throughout life a mere un- 
 gratified thirst. 
 
 It has remained for the present age to throw one bar 
 more in the way of able men of this special class than our 
 fathers ever dreamed of; and this, curiously enough, just 
 by giving them an opportunity of writing much, and of 
 thinking incessantly. It is not, it would seem, by being 
 born among ploughmen and mechanics, and destined to 
 live by tilling the soil, or by making shoes or hobnails, that 
 the * genial current of the soil is frozen,' and superior talents 
 prevented from accomplishing their proper work : it is by 
 being connected with some cheap weekly periodical, or 
 twice or thrice a week newspaper, and compelled to scribble 
 on almost without pause or intermission for daily bread. 
 
208 PERIODICALISM. 
 
 We have been led to think of this matter by an interesting 
 little volume of poems, chiefly lyrical, which has just issued 
 from the Edinburgh press, the production of Mr. Thomas 
 Smibert, a man who has lived for many years by his pen, and 
 who introduces the volume by a prefatory essay, interesting 
 from the glimpse which it gives of the literary disadvantages 
 with which the professionally literary man who writes for 
 the periodicals has to contend. Periodical literature is, he 
 remarks, ' to all intents and purposes a creation of the 
 nineteenth century, in its principal existing phases, from 
 Quarterly Reviews to Weekly Penny Magazines. News- 
 papers,' he adds, * may justly be accounted the growth of 
 the same recent era, the few previously published having 
 been scarcely more than mere Gazettes, recording less 
 opinions than bare public and business facts.' The number 
 of both classes of periodicals is now immensely great ; and 
 ' equally vast, of necessity, is the amount of literary talent 
 statedly and unremittingly engaged on these journals, while 
 a large additional amount of similar talent finds in them 
 occasional and ready outlets for its working.' l When one 
 or two leading Reviews, Quarterlies, and Monthlies alone 
 existed, they called for no insignificant individual efforts of 
 mind on the part of their chief conductors and supporters, 
 and those parties almost took rank with the authors of single 
 works of importance. But within the last twenty years 
 periodical literature has become extensively hebdomadal, 
 and even diurnal; and, as a necessary consequence, the 
 essays of those sustaining it in this shape have decreased 
 in proportionate value, at once from the larger amount of 
 work demanded, and from the shorter time allowed for its 
 execution. Such essays may serve the hour fairly, but can 
 seldom be of high worth ultroneously.' ' The extent and 
 variety of the labours called for at the hands of those 
 actively engaged on modern cheap periodicals can scarcely 
 be conceived by the uninitiated public. If their eyes were 
 
PERIODICAL1SM. 209 
 
 opened on the subject, they would certainly wonder less 
 why it is that the literary talent of the current generation 
 does not tend to display itself by striking isolated efforts : 
 they would also more readily understand wherefore parties 
 in the situation of the present writer may well experience 
 some unsatisfactory feelings in looking back on the labours 
 of the past. Though years spent in respectable periodical 
 writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a 
 career presents in the retrospect but a multitude of dis- 
 connected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as 
 too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and 
 imperfections.' The consideration of such a state of things 
 ' may furnish a salutary lesson to the many among the 
 young at this day, who, possessing some literary taste, 
 imagine that the engagements of common life alone stand 
 in the way of its successful development, and that to be 
 enabled to pursue a life of professional writing in any shape 
 would secure to them both fame and fortune to the height 
 of their desires. They here err sadly. No doubt super- 
 eminent talents will sooner or later make themselves felt 
 under almost any circumstances ; but the ppsition described 
 assuredly offers no peculiar advantages for the furtherance 
 of that end. Ebenezer Elliot, leaving his forge at eve with 
 a wearied body, could yet bring to his favourite leisure tasks 
 a mind less jaded than that of the litterateur by profession.' 
 'The regular periodicalist, too, of the modern class has 
 usually no more stable interest in his compositions than 
 has the counting-house clerk in the cash-books which he 
 keeps. To publishers and conductors fall the lasting fruits. 
 Let those among the young who feel the ambition to seek 
 fame and fortune in the walks of literature think well of 
 these things, and, above all, ponder seriously ere they quit, 
 with such views, any fixed occupation of another kind.' 
 
 There is certainly food for thought here ; and that, too, 
 thought of a kind in which the public has a direct interest. 
 
 o 
 
210 PERIODICALISM. 
 
 If such be the dissipating effect of writing for newspapers 
 and the lighter periodicals, it is surely natural to infer that 
 the exclusive reading of such works must have a dissipating 
 effect also. It is too obvious that the feverish mediocrity 
 of overwrought brains becomes infectious among the class 
 who place themselves in too constant and unbroken con- 
 nection with it, and that from the closets of over-toiled 
 litterateurs an excited superficiality creeps out upon the age. 
 And hence the necessity to which we have oftener than 
 once referred, that men should keep themselves in whole- 
 some connection with the master minds of the past. Mr. 
 Smibert's remarks preface, as we have said, a volume of 
 sweet and tasteful verse; and we find him saying that, * most 
 of all, the operation of Periodicalism has been unfavour- 
 ably felt in the domain of poetry.' 
 
 ' The position of literature,' he adds, * in the times of the 
 Wordsworths, Crabbes, and Campbells of the age just gone 
 by, was more favourable than at present to the devotion of 
 talent to great undertakings. These men were assuredly 
 not beset by the same seductive facilities as the litterateurs 
 of the current generation for expending their powers on 
 petty objects, facilities all the more fascinating, as com- 
 prising the pleasures of immediate publicity, and perhaps 
 even of repute for a day, if not also of some direct re- 
 muneration. These influences of full-grown Periodicalism 
 extend now to all who can read and write. But it entices 
 most especially within its vortex those who exhibit an 
 unusually large share of early literary promise, involves 
 them in multitudinous and multifarious occupation, and, 
 in short, divides and subdivides the operations of talent, 
 until all prominent identity is destroyed, both in works and 
 workers. To the growth of this modern system, beyond 
 question, is largely to be referred the comparative disappear- 
 ance from among us of great literary individualities ; or, to 
 use other and more accurate words, by that system have 
 
PERIODICALISM. 211 
 
 men of capacity been chiefly diverted from the composition 
 of great individual works, and more particularly great poems.' 
 We are less sure of the justice of this remark of Mr. 
 Smibert's, than of that of many of the others. It is not 
 easy, we have said, to smother a true poet ; and we know 
 that in the present age very genuine poetry has been 
 produced in the offices of very busy newspaper editors. 
 Poor Robert Nicoll never wrote truer poetry than when 
 he produced his ' Puir Folk' and his ' Saxon Chapel,' at 
 a time when he was toiling, as even modern journalist has 
 rarely toiled, for the columns of the Leeds Times; and James 
 Montgomery produced his * World before the Flood,' l Green- 
 land,' and ' The Pelican Island,' with many a sweet lyric of 
 still higher merit, when laboriously editing the Sheffield Iris. 
 The 'Salamandrine' of Mr. Charles Mackay was written 
 when he was conducting the sub-editorial department of a 
 daily London paper; nor did he ever write anything superior 
 to it. And we question whether Mr. Smibert himself, though 
 he might have produced longer poems, would have written 
 better ones than some of those contained in the present 
 volume, even had his life been one of unbroken leisure. It 
 seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their 
 own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to per- 
 form, to cast the blame upon their circumstances. Johnson 
 could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle 
 of the last century, of the ( dreams of a poet doomed at last 
 to wake a lexicographer,' as any literary man of the present 
 time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly 
 to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for 
 the wants of the day that is passing over him. But perhaps 
 the best solace for the dissatisfaction which would thus 
 wreak itself on mere circumstances, is that which Johnson 
 himself supplies. ' To reach below his own aim,' says the 
 moralist, * is incident to every one whose fancy is active, 
 and whose views are comprehensive ; nor is any man satis- 
 
212 PERIODICALISM. 
 
 fied with himself because he has done much, but because 
 he can conceive little.' But to labour and be forgotten is 
 the common lot ; and why should a literary man be more 
 disposed to repine because his productions perish after 
 serving a temporary purpose, than the gardener or farmer, 
 whose vocation it is to supply the people with their daily 
 food ? If the provisions furnished, whether for mind or 
 body, be wholesome, and if they serve their purpose, the 
 producers must learn to be content, even should they 
 serve the purpose only once, and but for a day. The 
 danger of over-cropping, and of consequent exhaustion, is, 
 of course, another and more serious matter ; and of this the 
 mind of the periodicalist is at least as much in danger as 
 either field or garden when unskilfully wrought. But mere 
 rest, which in course of time restores the exhausted earth, 
 is often not equally efficient in restoring the exhausted 
 mind ; nor does mere rest, even were it a specific in the 
 case, lie within the reach of the periodic writer. It is often 
 the luxury for which he pants, but which he cannot com- 
 mand. One of the surest specifics in the case is, the 
 specific of working just a little more, of working for the 
 work's sake, whether at poem or history, or in the prose- 
 cution of some science, or in some antiquarian pursuit. 
 There is an exquisite passage in one of the essays of 
 Washington Irving, in which he compares the great authors 
 Shakespeare, for instance who seem proof against the 
 mutability of language, to ' gigantic trees, that we see some- 
 times on the banks of a stream, which, by their vast and 
 deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and 
 laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve 
 the soil around them from being swept away by the ever- 
 flowing current, and hold up many a neighbouring plant 
 to perpetuity.' And such is the service rendered by some 
 pervading pursuit of an intellectual character, prosecuted 
 for its own sake, to the intellect of the journalist. It is 
 
PERIODICALISM. 2 1 3 
 
 the necessity imposed upon him of taking up subject after 
 subject in the desultory, disconnected form in which they 
 chance to arise, and then, after throwing together a few 
 hastily collected thoughts upon each, of dismissing them 
 from his mind, that induces first a habit of superficiality, 
 and finally leaves him exhausted ; and the counteractive 
 course open to him is just to take up some subject on 
 which the thinking of to-day may assist him in the thinking 
 of to-morrow, and on which he may be as well informed 
 and profound as his native capacity permits. All our really 
 superior newspaper editors have pursued this course more, 
 however, we are disposed to think, from the bent of their 
 nature than from the necessities of their profession; and 
 the poetical volume of Mr. Smibert shows that he too has 
 his engrossing pursuit. We recommend his little work to 
 our readers, as one in which they will find much to interest 
 and amuse. We have left ourselves little room for quota- 
 tion ; but the following stanzas, striking, both from their 
 beauty and from the curious fact which they embody, may 
 be regarded as no unfair specimen of the whole : 
 
 THE VOICE OF WOE. 
 'The language of passion, and more peculiarly that of grief, is ever nearly the same.' 
 
 An Indian chief went forth to fight, 
 
 And bravely met the foe : 
 His eye was keen his step was light 
 His arm was unsurpassed in might ; 
 But on him fell the gloom of night 
 
 An arrow laid him low. ' 
 His widow sang with simple tongue, 
 
 When none could hear or see, 
 Ay, cheray me ! 
 
 A Moorish maiden knelt beside 
 
 Her dying lover's bed : 
 She bade him stay to bless his bride ; 
 She called him oft her lord, her pride ; 
 
2i 4 PERIODICALISM. 
 
 But mortals must their doom abide 
 
 The warrior's spirit fled. 
 With simple tongue the sad one sung, 
 
 When none could hear or see, 
 Ay, di me ! 
 
 An English matron mourned her son, 
 
 The only son she bore : 
 Afar from her his course was run 
 He perished as the fight was done 
 He perished when the fight was won 
 
 Upon a foreign shore. 
 With simple tongue the mother sung, 
 
 When none could hear or see, 
 Ah, dear me ! 
 
 A Highland maiden saw 
 
 A brother's body borne 
 From where, from country, king, and law, 
 He went his gallant sword to draw ; 
 But swept within destruction's maw, 
 
 From her had he been torn. 
 She sat and sung with simple tongue, 
 
 When none could hear or see, 
 O/i, hon-a-ree! 
 
 An infant in untimely hour 
 
 Died in a Lowland cot : 
 The parents own'd the hand of power 
 That bids the storm be still or lour ; 
 They grieved because the cup was sour, 
 
 And yet they murmured not. 
 They only sung with simple tongue, 
 
 When none could hear or see, 
 
 A/i, ivae's me I 
 July 26, 1851. 
 
ANNUS MIRABILIS.' 
 
 WE have now reached the close of the most wonderful year 
 the world ever saw. None of our readers can be unac- 
 quainted with the poem in which Dryden celebrated the 
 marvels of the year 1666, certainly an extraordinary 
 twelvemonth, though the English poet, only partially ac- 
 quainted with the events which rendered it so remarkable, 
 restricts himself, in his long series of vigorous quatrains, to 
 the description of the two naval battles with the Dutch 
 which its summer witnessed, and of the great fire of London 
 which rendered its autumn so remarkable. 
 
 He might also have told that it was a year of great fear 
 and expectation among both Christians and Jews. The 
 Jews held that their Messiah was to come that year; 
 and, in answer of the expectation, the impostor Sabbatei 
 Levi appeared to delude and disappoint the hopes of that 
 unhappy nation. There was an opinion nearly equally 
 general in the Roman Catholic world, that it would usher 
 in the Antichrist of New Testament prophecy; while among 
 English Protestants it was very extensively believed that it 
 was to witness the end of the world and the final judgment. 
 It was remarkable, too, as the year in which oppression 
 first compelled the Scotch Presbyterians of the reign of 
 Charles ii. to assume the attitude of armed resistance, and 
 as forming, in the estimate of Burnet and other intelligent 
 Protestants, the fifth great crisis of the Reformed religion 
 in Europe. And such were the wonders of the Amms 
 
 215 
 
2 1 6 ANN US MIRAB1LIS. 
 
 Mirabilis of Dryden : two bloody naval engagements ; a 
 great fire ; the appearance of a false Messiah ; a widely- 
 spread fear that the end of the world and the coming of 
 Antichrist were at hand ; the revolt from their allegiance to 
 the reigning monarch of a sorely oppressed body of Chris- 
 tians, maddened by persecution ; and a perilous crisis in 
 the general history of Protestantism. 
 
 The year now at its close has been beyond comparison 
 more remarkable. In the earlier twelvemonth, no real 
 change took place in the existing state of things. Its strik- 
 ing events resembled merely the phenomena of a mid-winter 
 storm in Greenland, where, over a frozen ocean, moveless 
 in the hurricane as a floor of rock or of iron, the hail beats, 
 and the thick whirling snows descend, and, high above 
 head, the flashings of aurora borealis lend their many- 
 coloured hues of mystery to the horrors of the tempest. 
 Its transactions, picturesque rather than important, wholly 
 failed to affect the framework of society. That floor of ice 
 which sealed down the wide ocean of opinion retained all 
 its mid-winter solidity, and furnished foundations as firm 
 as before for the old despotic monarchies and the blood- 
 stained persecuting churches. But how immensely different 
 the events of the year now at an end ! Its tempests have 
 been, not those of a Greenland winter, but of a Greenland 
 spring : the depths of society have been stirred to the dark 
 bottom, where all slimy and monstrous things lie hid, and, 
 under the irresistible upheavings of the ground-swell, the 
 ice has broken up ; and amid the wide weltering of a 
 stormy sea, cumbered with the broken ruins of ancient 
 tyrannies, civil and ecclesiastical, the eye can scarce rest 
 upon a single spot on which to base a better order of 
 things. The ' foundations are removed.' A time of great 
 trouble has come suddenly upon the kingdoms of Europe 
 a time of * famines, and pestilences, and fearful sights, 
 and great signs from heaven ;' ' signs in the sun, and in the 
 
ANNUS MIRABILIS. 2 1 7 
 
 moon, and in the stars ; and on the earth distress of nations, 
 with perplexity ; the sea and the waves roaring.' 
 
 The extreme stillness of the calm by which this wide- 
 roaring tempest has been preceded, forms one of not the 
 least extraordinary circumstances which impart to it cha- 
 racter and effect. In the Vision of Don Roderick, the fated 
 monarch is described as pausing for a time amid the deep 
 silence of a vast hall, pannelled and floored with black 
 marble, and sentinelled by two gigantic figures of rigid 
 bronze that stand moveless against the farther wall. The 
 one, bearing a scythe and sand-glass, is the old giant Time ; 
 the other, armed with an iron mace, is the grim angel of 
 Destiny. Not a sound or motion escapes them. In that 
 dim apartment nothing stirs save the sands in the glass, 
 and the inflexible look of the stern mace-bearing sentinel 
 marks how they ebb. The last grains are at length moving 
 downwards they sink, they disappear; and now, raising 
 his ponderous mace, he dashes into fragments the marble 
 wall : a scene of savage warfare gleams livid through the 
 opening, and the wide vault re-echoes to the hollow tread 
 of armies, the shrill notes of warlike trumpets, the rude 
 clash of arms, and the wild shouts of battle. And such, 
 during the last few years, has been the stillness of the pre- 
 liminary pause, and such was the abrupt opening, when the 
 predestined hour at length arrived, of those clamorous 
 scenes of revolution and war which impart so remarkable 
 a character to the year gone by. A twelvemonth has not 
 yet passed since history seemed to want incident. Time 
 and Destiny watched as statue-like sentinels in a quiet 
 hall, walled round by the old rigid conventionalities, and 
 human sagacity failed to see aught beyond them ; the pre- 
 sent so resembled the past, that it seemed over-boldness to 
 anticipate a different complexion for the future. But, amid 
 the unbreathing stillness, the appointed hour arrived. The 
 rigid marble curtain of the old conventionalities was struck 
 
2 1 8 ANN US MIRABILIS. 
 
 asunder by the iron mace of Destiny ; and the silence was 
 straightway broken by a roar as if of many waters, by the 
 wrathful shouts of armed millions the thunderings of 
 cannon, blent with the rattle of musketry the wild shrieks 
 of dismay and suffering the wailings of sorrow and terror 
 the shouts of triumph and exultation the despairing cry 
 of sinking dynasties, and the crash of falling thrones. And 
 with what strange rapidity the visions have since flitted 
 along the opened chasm ! 
 
 A royal proclamation forbids in Paris a political banquet; 
 four short days elapse, and France is proclaimed a Republic, 
 and Louis Philippe and his Ministers have fled. Britain 
 at once recognises the Provisional Government ; but what 
 are the great despotisms of the Continent to do? Six days 
 more pass, and the Canton of Neufchatel declares itself 
 independent of Prussia. In a few days after, the Duke of 
 Saxe-Cobourg Gotha grants to his subjects a representative 
 constitution, freedom of the press, and trial by jury ; the 
 King of Hanover has also to yield, and the King of Ba- 
 varia abdicates. These, however, are comparatively small 
 matters. But still the flame spreads. There is a success- 
 ful insurrection at Vienna, the very stronghold of despotism 
 in central Europe ; and the Prime Minister, Metternich, 
 the grim personification of the old policy, is compelled to 
 resign. Then follows an equally successful insurrection at 
 Berlin ; Milan, Vicenza, and Padua are also in open insur- 
 rection. Venice is proclaimed a Republic. Holstein de- 
 clares itself independent of Denmark, Hungary of Austria, 
 Sicily of Naples. Prague and Cracow have also their for- 
 midable outbreaks. Austria and Prussia proclaim new 
 constitutions. Secondary revolutionary movements in both 
 Paris and Vienna are put down by the military. There are 
 bloody battles fought between the Austrians and the Pied- 
 montese on the one hand, and the Germans and the Danes 
 on the other ; and, in a state of profound peace, the people 
 
ANNUS MIRAB1LIS. 2 1 9 
 
 of a British port hear from their shores the boom of the 
 hostile cannon. The Emperor of Austria abdicates his 
 throne, the Pope flees his dominions, and a nephew of 
 Napoleon Bonaparte is elected President of France. 
 Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the ebullitions of the 
 revolutionary element serve but to demonstrate its own 
 weakness. In both England and Scotland, the moral and 
 physical force of the country in reality but one arrays 
 itself on the side of good order and the established insti- 
 tutions. A few policemen put down, without the assistance 
 of the military, the long-threatened rebellion in Ireland; 
 and the Sovereign Lady of the empire, after journeying 
 among her subjects, attended by a retinue which only a 
 few ages ago would have been deemed slender for a 
 Scotch chieftain or one of the lesser nobility, and without 
 a single soldier to protect her, and needing no such pro- 
 tection, spends her few weeks of autumn leisure in a soli- 
 tary Highland valley, a thousand times more secure in 
 the affections of a devoted and loyal people than any other 
 European monarch could have been in the midst of an 
 army of an hundred thousand men. . Such are some of 
 the wonderful events which have set their stamp on the 
 year now at its close. 
 
 We regard the old state of things as gone for ever. The 
 foundations have broken up on which the ancient despot- 
 isms were founded. It would seem as if ' the stone cut out 
 without hands' had fallen during the past year on the feet 
 of the great image, and ground down into worthless rubbish 
 the 'iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold.' And 
 ' the wind,' though not. yet risen to its height, seems fast 
 rising, which will sweep them all away, ' like the chaff of 
 the summer thrashing-floor;' so that * there shall be no place 
 found for them.' But while we can entertain no hope for 
 the old decrepit despotisms, we cannot see in the infidel 
 liberalism alike unwise and immoral by which they are 
 
220 ANNUS MIRABILIS. 
 
 in the course of being supplanted, other than a disorganiz- 
 ing element, out of which no settled order of things can 
 possibly arise. It takes the character, not of a reforming 
 principle destined to bless, but of an instrument of punish- 
 ment, with which vengeance is to be taken for the crimes 
 and errors of the past ; and, so far at least, a time when we 
 need expect to witness but the struggles of the two prin- 
 ciples the old and the new as they act and react against 
 each other, stronger and weaker by turns, as they disgust 
 and alienate by their atrocities in their hour of power such 
 of the more moderate classes as had taken part with them 
 in their hour of weakness. It is the grand error of our 
 leading statesmen, that they fail to appreciate the real cha- 
 racter of the crisis, and would fain deal with the conse- 
 quent existing difficulties in that petty style of diplomatic 
 manoeuvre with which it was their wont to meet the compa- 
 ratively light demands of the past. It would seem as if we 
 had arrived at a stage in the world's history in which states- 
 manship after this style is to be tolerated no longer. How 
 instructive, for instance, the mode in which, for the present 
 at least, an all-governing Providence has terminated the 
 negotiations of this country with the Pope ! Contrary to 
 the wishes and principles of the sound-hearted portion of 
 the British people, our leading statesmen open up by statute 
 their diplomatic relations with the Pope, palpably with the 
 desire of governing Ireland through the influence of that 
 utterly corrupt religion which has made that unhappy island 
 the miserable lazar-house that it is ; and, lo ! Providence 
 strikes down the ghostly potentate, and virtually, for the 
 present, divests him of that ' property qualification' in virtue 
 of which the relation can alone be maintained. But not 
 less infatuated than our statesmen, and even less excusably 
 so, are those men professedly religious and Protestant, 
 but of narrow views and weak understandings who can 
 identify the cause of Christ with the old tottering despotisms 
 
ANNUS MIRABILIS. 2 2 r 
 
 and the soul-destroying policy of princes such as the late 
 Emperor of Austria, and of ministers such as Metternich. It 
 would not greatly surprise us to see Protestants of this high 
 Tory stamp, who have been zealous against Popery all their 
 lives long, taking part in the ' lament of the merchants and 
 mariners' over the perished Babylon, when they find that 
 the representatives of the Roman Emperors must fall with 
 the Roman See. There are two wild beasts, like those which 
 Daniel saw in vision, contending together in fierce warfare, 
 the old Babylonish beast, horrid with the bood of saints, 
 and its cruel executioner the monster of Atheistic Liberal- 
 ism ; but Christ has identified His cause with neither. No 
 reprieve from the prince awaits the condemned culprit ; and 
 with the disreputable and savage executioner he will hold 
 no intercourse. Destruction, from which there is no escape, 
 awaits equally on both. 
 
 We began with a reference to Dryden's Year of Wonders: 
 we conclude with an anecdote regarding that year, con- 
 nected with the history of one of the most eminent judges 
 and best men England ever produced. It needs no appli- 
 cation, showing as it does, with equal simplicity and force, 
 how and on what principle the terrors of years such as the 
 'Annus Mirabilis' 1 of the seventeenth century, or the ' Annus 
 Mirabilis* of our own, may be encountered with the greatest 
 safety and the truest dignity. We quote from Bishop Burnet's 
 Life of Sir Matthew Hale: 
 
 ' He' (Sir Matthew), says the Bishop, 'had a generous 
 and noble idea of God in his mind ; and this he found, above 
 all other considerations, preserve his quiet. And, indeed, 
 that was so well established in him, that no accidents, how 
 sudden soever, were observed to discompose him, of which 
 an eminent man of that profession gave me this instance : 
 In the year 1666 an opinion did run through the nation that 
 the end of the world would come that year. This, whether 
 set on by astrologers, or advanced by those who thought it 
 
222 ANN US MIRABILIS. 
 
 might have some relation to the number of the beast in the 
 Revelation, or promoted by men of ill designs to disturb the 
 public peace, had spread mightily among the people ; and 
 Judge Hale going that year the Western Circuit, it happened 
 that, as he was on the bench at the assizes, a most terrible 
 storm fell out very unexpectedly, accompanied with such 
 flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, that the like will 
 hardly fall out in an age; upon which a whisper ran through 
 the crowd, " that now was the world to end, and the day 
 of judgment to begin." And at this there followed a general 
 consternation in the whole assembly, and all men forgot the 
 business they were met about, and betook themselves to 
 their prayers. This, added to the horror raised by the storm, 
 looked very dismal, insomuch that my author a man of 
 no ordinary resolution and firmness of mind confessed it 
 made a great impression on himself. But he told me " that 
 he did observe the judge was not a whit affected, and was 
 going on with the business of the court in his ordinary 
 manner;" from which he made this conclusion: "that his 
 thoughts were so well fixed, that he believed, if the world 
 had been really to end, it would have given him no con- 
 siderable disturbance !'" 
 
 December 30, 1848. 
 
EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION 
 ON COLONIZATION. 
 
 IT is well that there should exist amongst the evangelistic 
 churches at least a desire for union. We do not think they 
 will ever be welded into one without much heat and many 
 blows. Popery, with mayhap Infidelity for its assistant, 
 will have first to blow up the coals and ply the hammer ; 
 but it is at least something that the various pieces of the 
 broken and shivered Church catholic should be coming into 
 contact, drawn together as if by some strong attractive in- 
 fluence, and that there should be so many attempts made 
 to fit into each other, though with but indifferent success, 
 the rough-edged inflexible fragments. It is much that the 
 attractive influence should exist. Among the many inven- 
 tions of modern times, a singularly ingenious one has been 
 brought to bear on the smelting of iron. A powerful mag- 
 netic current is made to pass in one direction through the 
 furnace, which imparts to each metallic particle a load- 
 stone-like affinity for all the others ; and no sooner has the 
 heat set them free, than, instead of sinking, as in the old 
 process, through the molten stony mass to the bottom, 
 solely in effect of their superior gravity a tedious, and in 
 some degree uncertain process they at once get into 
 motion in the line of the current, and unite, in less than 
 half the ordinary time under any other circumstances, into 
 a homogeneous, coherent mass. May we not indulge the 
 expectation of similar results from the magnetic current 
 
224 EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION 
 
 of attraction, if we may so speak, which has so decidedly 
 begun to flow through the evangelistic churches ? True, so 
 long as the little bits remain unmolten, however excellent 
 their quality, they but clash and jangle together, if moved 
 by the influence at all ; but should the furnace come to 
 be seven times heated, it will scarce fail to give unity of 
 motion and a prompt coherency to all the genuine metal, 
 however minute, in its present state, the particles into 
 which it is separated, or however stubborn the stony ma- 
 trices which dissociate these from the other particles, one 
 in their origin and nature, that lie locked up in the sullen 
 fragments around. 
 
 Never perhaps was there a time when the great disad- 
 vantages of disunion were so pressed in a practical form 
 on the notice of the churches as at the present. It formed 
 the complaint of one of our better English writers con- 
 siderably more than a century ago, that we had religion 
 enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, 
 one another. At that time, however, sects, to employ 
 one of Bacon's striking phrases, ' had not so grown to 
 equality ' as now ; and storms in the moral world, as in the 
 natural ' at the equinoxia,' when night and day are equal, 
 are commonly greatest, adds the philosopher, * when things 
 do grow to equality.' The unestablished Protestant deno- 
 minations formed in the times of Queen Anne a mere 
 feeble moiety, that could raise no efficient voice against the 
 established religion ; and Popery, newly thrust under feet, 
 after a formidable struggle, that threatened to overturn the 
 constitution of the country, had no voice at all. Matters 
 are very different now : things have grown to an equality ; 
 night and day, as ' at the equinoxia,' have become nearly 
 equal; and society can scarce take one step for the general 
 benefit, without experiencing, as a thwarting and arresting 
 influence, the effects of religious difference. Do we regret 
 that the Government of a country such as ours should be 
 

 ON COLONIZATION. 22$ 
 
 practically irreligious in its character ? Alas ! were every 
 Government functionary in the empire a thoroughly religious 
 man, Government could not act otherwise than it does in 
 not a few instances, just in consequence of our religious 
 differences. Are there millions of the people sinking into 
 brutality and ignorance, and do our rulers originate a 
 scheme of education in their behalf? our religious differ- 
 ences straightway step in to arrest and cripple the design. 
 Are there whole districts of country subjected to famine, 
 and are we roused, both as Britons and as Christians, to 
 contribute of our substance for their relief? our religious 
 differences immediately interfere; and a Church greatly 
 more identified by membership with the sufferers than any 
 other, has to fight a hard battle ere she can be permitted 
 to co-operate in the general cause. Is there a ragged- 
 school scheme originated in the capital, to rescue the 
 neglected perishing young among us from out the very 
 jaws of destruction ? forthwith rival institutions start up, 
 on the ground of religious differences, to dwarf one another 
 into inefficiency, like starveling shrubs in a nursery run 
 wild ; and projected exertions in the cause of degraded 
 and suffering humanity degenerate into an attack on a 
 benevolent Presbyterian minister, who refuses to accept, 
 from conscientious motives, of a directorship in a Popish 
 institution. This is surely a sad state of things, a state 
 grown very general, and which threatens to become more 
 so ; and in a due sense of the weakness for all good which 
 it creates, and of the palpable state of disorganization and 
 decomposition favourable to the growth of every species 
 of evil, physical and moral, which it induces, we recognise 
 at least one of the causes of the general desire for union. 
 To no one circumstance has Rome owed more of its suc- 
 cess than to the divisions of the Protestant Church ; and 
 great as that success has been in our own country, where, 
 as * at the equinoxia,' day and night are fast ' growing to 
 
 p 
 
226 EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION 
 
 equality,' it is but slight compared with what she has expe- 
 rienced in America and the colonies. It is a serious con- 
 sideration in an age like the present, in which the country 
 looks to emigration for relief from the pressure of a super- 
 abundant population, that religion has suffered more in the 
 colonies from its sectarian divisions, than from every other 
 cause put together. 
 
 The way in which the mischief comes to be done is 
 easily conceivable. The Protestant emigrants of the country 
 quit it always, with regard to their churchmanship, as a mere 
 undisciplined rabble. The Episcopalian sets sail in the 
 same vessel, and for the same scene of labour, as the In- 
 dependent the Free Churchman with the Baptist the 
 Methodist with the Original Seceder the Voluntary with 
 the Establishment-man ; and they squat down together on 
 contiguous lots, amid the solitude of the forest. Were they 
 all of one communion, there might be scarce any break 
 created in their old habits of church-going and religious in- 
 struction. The community, considerable as a whole, though 
 very inconsiderable in its parts when broken up into de- 
 nominational septs, would have its minister of religion from 
 its first settlement, or almost so; and, from the rapid increase 
 which takes place in all new colonies in congenial countries 
 and climates, the charge of such a minister wduld be soon 
 a very important one, and adequate to the full development 
 of the energies of a superior man. 
 
 But alas for the numerous denominational septs ! Years 
 must elapse, In some instances many years, ere few and 
 scattered, and necessarily deprived of every advantage of 
 the territorial system they can procure for themselves 
 religious teachers: they fall gradually, in the interim, out 
 of religious habits, or there rises among them a generation 
 in which these were never formed ; and when at length a 
 sept does procure a teacher, generally, from the compara- 
 tive fewness of their numbers, the extent of district over 
 
ON COLONIZATION. 227 
 
 which they are spread, and the lukewarmness induced 
 among them by their years of deprivation circumstances 
 which make the charge of such a people no very desirable 
 one to a man who can procure aught better, and which 
 have some effect also in rendering their choice in such 
 matters not very discriminating he is frequently of a cha- 
 racter little suited to profit them. They succeed too often 
 in procuring not missionaries, nor men such as the mini- 
 sters of higher standing, that divide the word to the con- 
 gregations of the mother country, but the country's mere 
 remainder preachers, who, having failed in making their 
 way into a living at home, seek unwillingly a bit of bread 
 in the unbroken ground of the colonies. The circum- 
 stances of Popery as a colonizing religion are in all re- 
 spects immensely more favourable. For every practical 
 purpose, it is one and united : it is furnished with an army 
 of clergy admirably organized, and set peculiarly loose for 
 movement at the will of the general ecclesiastical body by 
 their law of celibacy. It possesses in prolific Ireland a 
 vast propelling heart, if we may so speak, ever working in 
 sending out the blood of a singularly bigoted Romanism to 
 every quarter of the world. It has already begun to influ- 
 ence the elections of the United States ; and should the 
 Papal superstition be destined to live so long, and should 
 its membership continue to increase at the present ratio, 
 there will be as many Papists a century hence in the great 
 valley of the Mississippi, and the tracts adjacent, as are at 
 present in all Europe. In no field in the present day has 
 . Rome more decidedly the advantage than in that of colo- 
 nization ; and it is surely a serious consideration that it 
 should owe its successes in such large measure to the divi- 
 sions of Protestantism. 
 
 But these divisions exist, and no amount of regret for 
 the mischief which they occasion will serve to lessen them. 
 We are not disposed -to give up a single tenet which we 
 
2 2 8 EFFE CTS OF RELIGIO US DIS UNION 
 
 hold as Free Churchmen ; and our brother Protestants of 
 the other denominations are, we find, quite as tenacious 
 of their distinctive holdings as ourselves. And so the evils 
 consequent on disunion in infant colonies and settlements 
 evils which, when once originated, continue to propagate 
 themselves for ages must continue, in cases of promiscu- 
 ous emigration, to be educed, and Rome to profit by them. 
 We find a vigorous attempt to grapple with the difficulty, 
 by rendering emigration not promiscuous, but select, ori- 
 ginated by a branch of the New Zealand Company, which 
 we deem worthy of notice. It is calculated, from the pro- 
 portion which they bear to the entire population of the 
 country, that from a thousand to fifteen hundred Free 
 Church people emigrate from Scotland every year. A 
 number equal to a large congregation quit it yearly for 
 the colonies; but absorbed among all sorts of people 
 in Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the United 
 States, Australia, and Southern Africa, etc. etc. these 
 never reappear as congregations, but are subjected, in their 
 scattered, atomic state, to the deteriorating process, reli- 
 gious and educational, to which we have referred as in- 
 evitable under that economy of promiscuous emigration 
 unhappily so common in these latter times. In an earlier 
 age the case was different. The Pilgrim Fathers who first 
 planted New England were so much at one in their tenets, 
 that they had no difficulty in making the laws of the colony 
 a foundation on which to erect the platform both of a 
 general church and of an educational institute ; and till 
 this day, the character, moral and intellectual, of that part 
 of the States tells of the wisdom of the arrangement. Now 
 why, argue the Company, might not a similar result be 
 produced in the present age, by directing the Free Church 
 portion of the outward stream of emigration, or at least a 
 sufficient part of it, into one locality? If the disastrous 
 effects of division cannot be prevented by reconciling the 
 
ON COLONIZATION. 229 
 
 disagreements of those who already differ, they may be 
 obviated surely, to a large extent, by bringing into juxta- 
 position those who already agree. And on this simple 
 principle the Company has founded its Free Church colony 
 of Otago. Of course, regarding the secular advantages of 
 the colony, we cannot speak. New Zealand has been long 
 regarded as the Great Britain of the southern hemisphere. 
 It possesses for a European constitution peculiar advan- 
 tages of climate ; the neighbourhood of the settlement, for 
 several hundred miles together, is deserted by the natives ; 
 Government is pledged to the appointment of a Royal 
 Commissioner to watch over the interests of Her Majesty's 
 subjects in connection with the Company, and to afford 
 them protection ; the committee for promoting the settle- 
 ment of the colony includes some of the most respected 
 names in the Free Church; and thus, judged by all the 
 ordinary tests, it seems to promise at least as well as any 
 other resembling field of enterprise open at the present 
 time. But respecting the principles involved in this scheme 
 of colonization, we can speak more directly from the cir- 
 cumstance that we find them recognised as just and good 
 by the General Assembly of our Church. The records of 
 the Assembly of 1845 bear the following deliverance on 
 the subject : * The General Assembly learn with great 
 pleasure the prospect of the speedy establishment of the 
 Scotch colony of New Edinburgh [now Otago] in New 
 Zealand, consisting of members of the Free Church, and 
 with every security for the colonists being provided with 
 the ordinances of religion and the means of education in 
 connection with this Church. Without expressing any 
 opinion regarding the secular advantages or prospects of 
 the proposed undertaking, the General Assembly highly 
 approve of the principles on which the settlement is pro- 
 posed to be conducted, in so far as the religious and 
 educational interests of the colonists are concerned; and 
 
230" EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION 
 
 the Assembly desire to countenance and encourage the 
 association in these respects.' 
 
 We have seen the waste of mind which takes place in 
 the colonies of a very highly civilised country adverted to 
 in a rather fanciful and rationalistic connection with the 
 desponding reply of the captive Jews to their spoilers : 
 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?' 
 Ages, sometimes whole centuries, elapse, remarks the 
 commentator, ere the colonies of even eminently literary 
 nations come to possess poets and fine writers of their 
 own. There is first a struggle for bare existence among 
 the colonists, during which the higher branches of learning 
 are necessarily neglected ; and when a better time at length 
 comes, the general mind is found to have acquired, during 
 the struggle, a homely and utilitarian cast, which militates 
 against the right appreciation, and of course the produc- 
 tion, of what is excellent. And thus the true divinities of 
 song fail to be sung in a foreign land. There is, we doubt 
 not, truth in the remark, though somewhat quaintly ex- 
 pressed, and somewhat doubtfully derived. The necessi- 
 ties of a colony in its youth, and the peculiar cast of mind 
 which they serve to induce, are certainly not favourable to 
 the development of poetic genius. But there is, alas ! another 
 and more scriptural sense in which the ' Lord's song ' too 
 often ceases to be sung in a strange land. We have already 
 adverted to the process of deterioration, moral and religious, 
 through which it comes to be silenced ; and it is one of the 
 advantages of the Otago scheme, that it makes provision in, 
 we believe, the most effectual way possible, in the present 
 divided state of Protestantism, for preventing a result so 
 deplorable. Youth is an important season, as certainly in 
 colonies as in individuals ; and we question whether the 
 characteristic recklessness of Yankeeism in the far west 
 and south may not be legitimately traced to the neglected 
 youthhead of the States in which it is most broadly ap- 
 
ON COLONIZATION. 231 
 
 parent. The deterioration of a single generation left to 
 run wild may influence for the worse, during whole cen- 
 turies, the character of a people ; and who can predicate 
 what these colonies of the southern hemisphere are yet to 
 become ? They may be great nations, influencing for good 
 or evil the destinies of the species in ages of the world when 
 Britain shall have sunk into a subordinate power, or shall 
 have no name save in history. Those records Of the past, 
 from which we learn that states and peoples, as certainly 
 as families and individuals, are born and die, and have 
 their times of birth and of burial, may serve to convince 
 us that the melancholy reflection of one of our later poets 
 on this subject is by no means a fanciful one : 
 
 ' My heart has sighed in secret, when I thought 
 That the dark tide of time might one day close, 
 England, o'er thee, as long since it has closed 
 On Egypt and on Tyre, that ages hence, 
 From the Pacific's billowy loneliness, 
 Whose tract thy daring search revealed, some isle 
 Might rise, in green-haired beauty eminent, 
 And like a goddess glittering from the deep, 
 Hereafter sway the sceptre of domain 
 From pole to pole ; and such as now thou art, 
 Perhaps New Zealand be. For who can say 
 What the Omnipotent Eternal One, 
 That made the world, hath purposed?' 
 
 June 1 6, 1847. 
 
FINE-BODYISM. 
 
 OF all the dangers to which the Free Church is at present 
 exposed, we deem the danger of fine-bodyism at once the 
 least dreaded and the most imminent. And the evil is in 
 itself no light one : it marks, better than any of the other 
 isms even the heresies themselves the sinking of a 
 Church that is never to rise again. Churches have been 
 affected by dangerous heresies both of the hot and the cold 
 kinds, and have yet shaken them off and recovered. The 
 Presbyterians of Ireland, now so sound in their creed, were 
 extensively affected, little more than half a century ago, by 
 Arian error and the semi-infidelity of Socinus ; and the 
 Church that in 1843 ^ ac ^ become vigorous enough to dare 
 the Disruption, recorded in the year 1796 its vote against 
 missions, and framed in the year 1798 its law against 
 church extension. But we know of no Church that ever 
 recovered from fine-bodyism when the disease had once 
 fairly settled into its confirmed and chronic state. In at 
 least this age and country it exists as the atrophy of a 
 cureless decline. It were well, however, that we should 
 say what it is we mean by fine-bodyism ; and we find we can- 
 not do better than quote our definition from the first speech 
 ever delivered by Chalmers in the General Assembly. ' It 
 is quite ridiculous to say,' remarked this most sagacious of 
 men, ' that the worth of the clergy will suffice to keep them 
 up in the estimation of society. This worth must be com- 
 bined with importance. Give both worth and importance 
 to the same individual, and what are the terms employed 
 
 282 
 
FINE-BODYISM. 233 
 
 in describing him ? "A distinguished member of society, 
 the ornament of a most respectable profession, the virtuous 
 companion of the great, and a generous consolation to all 
 the sickness and poverty around him." These, Moderator, 
 appear to me to be the terms peculiarly descriptive of the 
 appropriate character of a clergyman, and they serve to 
 mark the place which he ought to occupy ; but take away 
 the importance and leave only the worth, and what do you 
 make of him ? What is the descriptive term applied to him 
 now? Precisely the term which I often find applied to 
 many of my brethren, and which galls me to the very bone 
 every moment I hear it " a fine body" a being whom you 
 may like, but whom I defy you to esteem a mere object 
 of endearment a being whom the great may at times 
 honour with the condescension of a dinner, but whom they 
 will never admit as a respectable addition to their society. 
 Now, all that I demand from the Court of Teinds is to be 
 raised, and that as speedily as possible, above the imputa- 
 tion of being " a fine body;" that they would add import- 
 ance to my worth, and give splendour and efficacy to those 
 exertions which have for their object the most exalted in- 
 terests of the species.' 
 
 The Free Church has for ever closed her connection 
 with the Court of Teinds ; but her danger iiomfine-bodyism 
 is in consequence all the greater, not the less. The Sus- 
 tentation Fund is her Court of Teinds now; and it is to it 
 that she has in the first instance to look for protection from 
 the all-potent but insidious and vastly under-estimated evil 
 under which no Church ever throve. The outed ministers 
 are comparatively safe. Unless prudence be altogether 
 wanting, and the wolf comes to the door, not, as in the 
 child's story-book, in the disguise of a soft-voiced girl, but 
 in that of a gruff sheriff's officer, they will continue to bear 
 through life the old status of the Establishment, heightened 
 by the eclat of the Disruption. But our younger men of 
 
234 F1NE-BODYISM. 
 
 subsequent appointment stand on no such platform, nor 
 will any of their contemporaries or successors step upon it 
 as a matter of course when the heroes of the conflict have 
 dropped away, and they come to occupy their vacant places. 
 Their status will be found to depend on two circumstances, 
 neither of them derived from the men of a former time on 
 their ability to maintain a respectable place among the 
 middle classes, and on their scholastic acquirements and 
 general manners. A half-paid, half-taught, half-bred mini- 
 ster of religion may be a very excellent man ; we have seen 
 such, both in England and our own country, among the 
 non-Presbyterian Dissenters who laboured to do well, and 
 were exceedingly in earnest ; but no such type of minister 
 will ever be found influential in Scotland, either in extend- 
 ing the limits of a Church, or in benefiting the more intelli- 
 gent classes of the people. And the two circumstances of 
 acquirement and remuneration will be found indissolubly 
 connected. A Church of under-paid ministers, however 
 fairly it may start, will, in the lapse of a generation, become 
 a Church of under-taught and under-bred ministers also. 
 Nor is there any chance that the evil, once begun, will ever 
 cure itself, for the under-bred and the under-taught will be 
 sure to continue the under-paid. That animating spirit of a 
 Church, without which wealth and learning avail but little, 
 money now, as of old, cannot buy ; but the secular will be 
 ever found to depend on the secular, the general rate of 
 secular acquirement on the general rate of secular remunera- 
 tion ; and unless both be pitched at a level very consider- 
 ably above that of the labouring laity, which constitutes the 
 great bulk of congregations, even the better ministers of a 
 Church need not expect to escape fine-bodyism. And once 
 infected with this fatal indisposition, they must be content 
 to suffer, among other evils, the evil of being permitted to 
 lay whatever claim to status they may choose, without 
 challenge or contradiction. ' Oh yes,' it will be said, 
 
FINE-BODYISM. 235 
 
 should they assert that their Church is the Church of the 
 nation, and that it is they themselves, and not the ministers 
 of the Establishment, who are on the true constitutional 
 ground, ' Oh yes, Church of the nation, or, if ye will, 
 Church of the whole world, or, in short, anything you 
 please ; for you zxefine bodies? Chalmers exercised all his 
 sagacity when he demanded of the Court of Teinds * to be 
 raised, and that as speedily as possible, above the imputa- 
 tion of being a fine body? And what Chalmers demanded 
 of the Court of Teinds, every minister of the Free Church 
 ought to ask of the Sustentation Fund. 
 
 But how is the demand to be effectually made ? It is 
 well known to statesmen, who, when they once get a tax 
 imposed by Parliament, can employ all the machinery of 
 the police and the standing army of fines, confiscations, 
 and prisons in exacting it, that yet, notwithstanding, in 
 the arithmetic of finance two and two do not always make 
 four. There are certain pre-existing laws to be studied 
 laws not of man's passing, but which arise out of man's 
 nature and the true bearings and relations of things ; and 
 unless these be studied and conformed to, the Parliament- 
 imposed tax, though backed by the constable and the jail, 
 will realize but little. And if the statesman must study 
 these laws, well may the Church do so, who has no con- 
 stables in her pay, and to whom no jail-keys have been 
 entrusted. It ought, we think, to be regarded as one 
 fundamental law, that whatever has been gained by the 
 seven years' establishment of the Fund, should not be 
 lightly perilled by bold and untried innovations. True, 
 there may, on the one hand, be danger, if let too much 
 alone, that its growth should be arrested, and of its passing 
 into a stunted and hide-bound condition, little capable of 
 increase ; but the danger is at least as great, on the other, 
 that if subjected to fundamental changes, it might lose that 
 advantage of permanency which whatever is established 
 
236 FINE-BODYISM. 
 
 possesses in virtue of its being such; and which has its 
 foundation in habit, and in that vague sense of responsi- 
 bility which leads men to give, year after year, what they 
 had been accustomed to give in the previous years, just 
 because they had given it. Let it not be forgotten, that 
 though much still remains to be done in connection with 
 this Fund, much has been done already that a voluntary 
 tax of about eighty thousand pounds per annum, raised 
 from about one-third, and that by no means the wealthiest 
 third, of the Scottish people, is really not a small, but a 
 great one and that as great, and as worthy of being 
 desired and equalled, do the other non-endowed Churches 
 of the country regard it. No tampering, therefore, with its 
 principle should be attempted : he was an eminently wise 
 man who first devised and instituted it, not once in an 
 age do churches, or even countries, get such men to guide 
 their affairs, and it ought by all means to be permitted to 
 set and consolidate in the mould which he formed for it. 
 We would apply in this case the language of a philosophic 
 writer of the last age, when speaking of government in 
 general : * An established order of things,' he said, * has 
 an infinite advantage, by the very circumstance of its being 
 established. To tamper, therefore, to try experiments upon 
 it, upon the credit of supposed fitness and improvement, 
 can never be the part of a wise man, who will bear a rever- 
 ence for what carries the marks of the stability of age ; and 
 though he may attempt some improvements for the public 
 good, yet will he adjust his innovations as much as possible 
 to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars 
 and supports of the institution.' 
 
 It ought, we hold, to be regarded as another law of the 
 Fund, that the means taken to increase it should be means 
 exclusively fitted to lead the givers to think of their duties, 
 not of their rights. The Sustentation Fund is not the result 
 of a tax properly so called, but an accumulation of free- 
 
PINE-BODYISM. 237 
 
 will offerings rendered to the Church by men who in this 
 matter are responsible to God only. What the Church 
 receives on these terms she can divide ; but what the 
 givers do not place at her disposal what, on the contrary, 
 they reserve for quite another purpose she cannot lay 
 hold of and distribute. It is not hers, but theirs ; and the 
 attempt to appropriate it might be very fatal. Hence the 
 danger of the question regarding the appropriation for 
 general purposes of supplements, which was mooted two 
 years ago, but which was so promptly put down by the 
 good sense of the Church. It would have led men to 
 contend for their rights, and, in the struggle, to forget 
 their duties ; and the battle would have been a losing one 
 for the Fund. We regard it as another law, that the dis- 
 tribution of the sustentation money entrusted to the Church 
 should be a distribution, not discretionary, but fixed by 
 definite enactment. A discretionary licence of distribu- 
 tion, extended to some central board or committee, even 
 though under the general review of the Church, could not 
 be other than imminently dangerous, because opposed in 
 spirit to the very principle of Presbytery. And if Presby- 
 tery and the Sustentation Fund come into collision in the 
 Free Church of Scotland, it is not difficult to say which of 
 the two would go down. It has been shrewdly remarked 
 by Hume, that in monarchies there is room for discre- 
 tionary power the laws under a great and wise prince 
 may in some cases be softened, or partially suspended, 
 and carried into full effect in others ; but republics admit 
 of no such discretionary authority the laws in them must 
 in every instance be thoroughly executed, or set aside 
 altogether. Every act of discretionary authority is treason 
 against the constitution. And so is it with Presbytery. 
 Give to a central board or committee the power of sitting 
 in judgment on the circumstances of ministers of their 
 body, and of apportioning to one some thirty or forty 
 
238 FINE-BODYISM. 
 
 pounds additional, and of cutting down another to the 
 average dividend, and, for a time at least, the Presby- 
 terian independence is gone. But the reaction point once 
 reached and in the Free Church the process would not 
 be a very tedious one the discretionary authority would be 
 swept away in the first instance, and the Sustentation Fund 
 not a little damaged in the second. It is of paramount 
 importance, therefore a law on no account to be neglected 
 or traversed that the distribution of the Fund be regulated 
 by rules so rigid and unbending, and of such general appli- 
 cation, that the manifestation of favour or the exercise of 
 patronage on the part of the board or committee authorized 
 to watch over it may be wholly an impossibility. 
 
 It is, in the next place, of importance carefully to scan 
 the sources whence the expected increase of the Fund is 
 to come. The givers in the Free Church at the present 
 time seem to lie very much in extremes. A considerable 
 number, animated by the Disruption spirit, contribute 
 greatly more to ministerial support, in proportion to their 
 incomes, than the old Dissenters of the kingdom ; but a 
 still larger number, reposing indolently on the exertions 
 of these, and in whom the habit has not been cultivated 
 or formed, give considerably less. It was stated by Mr. 
 Melvin, in the meeting of the United Presbyterian Synod 
 held on Wednesday last, that, * on an average, the members 
 of weak congregations in connection with their body con- 
 tributed to the support of their minister about 145. 6d. per 
 annum, besides about 25. 6d. for missionary purposes, 
 while some of them contributed even as high as 253. to 
 263.' Now, an average rate of contribution liberal as this, 
 among the members of country congregations in the Free 
 Church, would at once place the Fund in flourishing circum- 
 stances, and render it, unless its management was very 
 unwise indeed, sufficient to maintain a ministry high above 
 the dreaded level of fine-bodyism. Nor do we see why, if 
 
FINE-BODYISM. 239 
 
 we except the crushed and poverty-stricken people of some 
 of the poorer Highland districts, Free Church congrega- 
 tions in the country should not contribute as largely to 
 church purposes as United Presbyterian congregations in 
 the same localities. The membership of both belong 
 generally to the same level of society, and, if equally 
 willing, are about equally able to contribute. Here, then, 
 is a field which still remains to be wrought. Something, 
 too, maybe done at the present time, from the circumstance 
 that the last instalment of the Manse Building Fund is just 
 in the act of being paid, and those who have been sub- 
 scribing for five years to this object, and formed a habit 
 of periodic giving in relation to it, may be induced to 
 transfer a portion of what they gave to the permanent 
 fund, and so continue contributing. Ere, however, they 
 can be expected to do so, they must be fairly assured that 
 what they give is to be employed in strengthening and 
 consolidating the Church, and in raising her ministers above 
 the level of fim-bodyism, not in adding to her weakness 
 by adding to her extent. Until a distinct pledge be given 
 that there shall not be so much as a single new charge 
 sanctioned until the yearly dividend amounts to at least a 
 hundred and fifty pounds, we must despair of the Sustenta- 
 tion Fund. One may hopefully attempt the filling up of a 
 tun, however vast its contents ; but there can be no hope 
 whatever in attempting the filling of a sieve. And if what 
 is poured into the Sustentation Fund is to be permitted, 
 instead of rising in the dividend, to dribble out incon- 
 tinently in a feeble extension, it will be all too soon dis- 
 covered that what we have to deal with is not the tun, but 
 the sieve ; and the laity, losing all heart, will cease their 
 exertions, and permit their ministers to sink into poverty 
 and fine-bodyism. 
 
 May 15, 1850. 
 
ORGANSHIP. 
 
 SOME six or eight months after the Disruption there occurred 
 an amusing dispute between two Edinburgh newspapers, 
 each of which aspired to represent the Establishment solely 
 and exclusively, without coadjutor or rival. The one paper 
 asserted that it was the vehicle of the Established Church, 
 the other that it was the Church's organ; and each, in 
 asserting its own claim, challenged that of its neighbour. 
 The organ was sure that the vehicle lacked the true vehi- 
 cular character ; and the vehicle threw grave doubts on the 
 organship of the organ. In somewhat less than half a year, 
 however, the dispute came suddenly to a close : the vehicle 
 like a luckless opposition coach, weak in its proprietor- 
 ship was run off the road, and broke down ; and the 
 triumphant organ, seizing eager hold of the name of its 
 defunct rival as legitimate spoil, hung it up immediately 
 under its own, as a red warrior of the West seizes hold of 
 the scalp of a fallen enemy, and suspends it at his middle 
 by his belt of wampum. The controversy, however, lasted 
 quite long enough to lead curious minds to inquire how or 
 on what principle a body so divided as the Established 
 Church could possibly have either vehicle or organ. 
 
 If the organ, it was said, adequately represent Dr. Muir, 
 it cannot fail very grievously to misrepresent Dr. Bryce ; 
 and if the vehicle be adapted to give public airings to the 
 thoughts and opinions of the bluff old Moderates, those of 
 Dr. Leishman and the Forty must travel out into the wind 
 and the sunlight by an opposition conveyance. One organ 
 
 240 
 
ORGANSHIP. 2 4 r 
 
 or one vehicle will be no more competent to serve a delibe- 
 rative ecclesiastical body, diverse in its components, than 
 one organ or vehicle will be able to serve a deliberative 
 political body broken into factions. Single parties, as such 
 whether secular or ecclesiastical may have their single 
 organ apiece ; but it seems as little possible that a Presby- 
 terian General Assembly should have only one organ repre- 
 sentative of the whole, as that a House of Lords or a House 
 of Commons should have one organ representative of the 
 whole. An organ of the Establishment in its present state 
 of disunion, if at all adequately representative, could not 
 fail to resemble Montgomery's strange personification of 
 war : * A deformed genius, with two heads, which, unlike 
 those of Janus, were placed front to front ; innumerable 
 arms, branching out all around his shoulders, sides, and 
 chest; and with thighs and legs as multitudinous as his 
 arms. His twin faces,' continues the poet, f were frightfully 
 distorted : they glared, they grinned, they spat, they railed, 
 and hissed, and roared ; they gnashed their teeth, and bit, 
 and butted with their foreheads at each other; his arms, 
 wielding swords and spears, were fighting pell-mell together; 
 his legs, in like manner, were indefatigably at variance, 
 striding contrary ways, and trampling on each other's toes, 
 or kicking each other's shins, as if by mutual consent.' 
 Such would be the true representative of an organ that 
 adequately represented the Establishment. 
 
 We are led into this vein on the present occasion by a 
 recent discussion in high quarters on the organship of the 
 Free Church, a Presbyterian body, be it remarked, as 
 purely deliberative in its courts as the Parliament of the 
 country, and at least sufficiently affected by the spirit of the 
 age to include within its pale a considerable diversity of 
 opinion. It is as impossible, from this cause alone, that 
 the Free Church should be represented by a single organ, 
 as that the House of Commons should be represented by a 
 
 Q 
 
242 ORGANSHIP. 
 
 single organ. The organ, for instance, that represented 
 on the education question the Rev. Mr. Moody Stuart, 
 would most miserably misrepresent the party who advocate 
 the views of the great father of the Free Church the late 
 Dr. Chalmers. 
 
 The organ that represented the peculiar beliefs held, re- 
 garding the personal advent, by the party to which Mr. 
 Bonar of Kelso belongs, would greatly misrepresent those 
 of the party to which Mr. David Brown of Glasgow and 
 Mr. Fairbairn of Saltoun belong. The organ that advo- 
 cated Dr. Cunningham's and Dr. James Buchanan's views 
 of the College question, would be diametrically opposed to 
 the view of Dr. Brown of Aberdeen and Mr. Gray of Perth. 
 The organ that contended for an ecclesiastical right to legis- 
 late on the temporalities according to the principle of Mr. 
 Hay of Whiterig, would provoke the determined opposi- 
 tion of Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeillour. The organ 
 that took part with the Evangelical and Sabbath Alliances 
 in the spirit of Dr. Candlish of St. George's, would have to 
 defend its position against Mr. King of St. Stephen's of the 
 Barony; and the organ that espoused the sentiments held 
 on tests by Mr. Wood of Elie, would find itself in hostile 
 antagonism with those entertained on the same subject by 
 Mr. Gibson of Kingston. And such are only a few of the 
 questions, and these of an ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesi- 
 astical character, regarding which a diversity of views, 
 sentiments, and opinions in the Free Church renders it 
 impossible that it can be adequately represented by any 
 one organ, even should that organ be of a purely ecclesi- 
 astical character. But a newspaper is not of a purely eccle- 
 siastical character; and there are subjects on which it may 
 represent a vast majority of the people of a Church, without 
 in the least degree representing the Church itself, simply 
 because they are subjects on which a Church, as such, can 
 hold no opinions whatever. 
 
ORGANSHIP. 243 
 
 It is, for instance, not for a Church to say in what degree 
 she trusts the Whigs or suspects the Tories or whether 
 her suspicion be great and her trust small or whether she 
 deem it more desirable that Edinburgh should be repre- 
 sented by Mr. Cowan, than mis-represented by Mr. Mac- 
 aulay. These, and all cognate matters, are matters on 
 which the Church, as such, has no voice, and regarding 
 which she can therefore have no organ ; and yet these are 
 matters with which a newspaper is necessitated to deal. It 
 would be other than a newspaper if it did not. On these 
 questions, however, which lie so palpably beyond the eccle- 
 siastical pale, though the Church can have no organ, zealous 
 Churchmen may ; and there can be no doubt whatever that 
 they are questions on which zealous Free Churchmen are 
 very thoroughly divided so thoroughly, that any single 
 newspaper could represent, in reference to them, only one 
 class. The late Mr. John Hamilton, for instance a good 
 and honest man, who, in his character as a Free Church- 
 man, determinedly op'posed the return of Mr. Macaulay 
 was wholly at issue regarding some of these points with the 
 Honourable Mr. Fox Maule, who in 1846 mounted the 
 hustings to say that the ( gratitude and honour of the Free 
 Church' was involved in Mr. Macaulay's return. And so 
 the organ that represented the one, could not fail to mis- 
 represent the other. Now, we are aware that on this, and 
 on a few other occasions, the Witness must have given very 
 considerable dissatisfaction in the political department to 
 certain members of the Free Church. It was not at all 
 their organ on these occasions ; nay, at the very outset of 
 its career, it had solemnly pledged itself not to be their 
 organ. 
 
 The following passage was written by its present Editor, 
 ere the first appearance of his paper, and formed a part of 
 its prospectus : ' The Witness] he said, ' will not espouse 
 the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and 
 
244 ORGANSHIP. 
 
 divide the country? ( Public measures, however, will be 
 weighed as they present themselves in an impartial spirit, 
 with care proportioned to their importance, and with refer- 
 ence not to the party with which they may chance to 
 originate, but to the principles which they shall be found 
 to involve.' Such was the pledge given by the Editor of 
 the Witness; and he now challenges his readers to say 
 whether he has not honestly redeemed it. Man is naturally 
 a tool-making animal ; and when he becomes a politician 
 by profession, his ingenuity in this special walk of con- 
 structiveness is, we find, always greatly sharpened by the 
 exigencies of his vocation. 
 
 He makes tools of bishops, tools of sacraments, tools of 
 Confessions of Faith, and tools of Churches and church 
 livings. 
 
 We had just seen, previous to the debut of the Witness, 
 the Church of Scotland converted by Conservatism into a 
 sort of mining tool, half lever, half pickaxe, which it plied 
 hard, with an eye to the prostration and ejection of its 
 political opponents the Whigs, then in office ; and not 
 much pleased to see the Church which we loved and 
 respected so transmuted and so wielded, we solemnly de- 
 termined that, so far at least as our modicum of influence 
 extended, no tool-making politician, whatever his position, 
 should again convert it unchallenged into an ignoble party 
 utensil. With God's help, we have remained true to our 
 determination ; and so assured are we of being supported 
 in this matter by the sound-hearted Presbyterian people of 
 the Free Church, that we have no fear whatever, should 
 either the assertors among us of the unimpeachable con- 
 sistency of the Conservatives, or of the immaculate honesty 
 of the Whigs, start against us an opposition vehicle to- 
 morrow, that in less than a twelvemonth we would run it 
 fairly off the road, and have some little amusement with it 
 to boot, so long as the contest continued. The Witness 
 
ORGANSHIP. 245 
 
 is not, and, as we have shown, cannot be, the organ of 
 the Free Church ; but it is something greatly better : it is 
 the trusted representative against Whig, Tory, Radical, 
 and Chartist against Erastian encroachment and clerical 
 domination of the Free Church people. There lies its 
 strength, a strength which its political Free Church op- 
 ponents are welcome to test when they please. 
 
 We must again express our regret that the article on the 
 Duke of Buccleuch, which has proved the occasion of so 
 much remark, spoken and written, should have ever appeared 
 in our columns ; and this, not, as the agent of the Duke 
 asserts, because it has been exposed, but because of the 
 unhappy unsolidity of its facts, and because of that diversion 
 of the public attention which it has effected from cases such 
 as those of Canobie and Wanlockhead, and from such a 
 death-bed as that of the Rev. Mr. Innes. Our readers are 
 already in possession of our explanation, and have seen it 
 fully borne out by the incidental statement of Mr. Parker. 
 We would crave leave to remind them that the Witness is 
 now in the ninth year o/ its existence ; and that during that 
 time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, 
 connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a 
 similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on 
 bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an 
 oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel ; he sailed in the 
 Free Church yacht the Betsey ', and worshipped among the 
 islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from 
 very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these 
 occasions, nor yet from denouncing the persecution that had 
 thrust out some of the best men and best subjects of the 
 country, to worship unsheltered amid bleak and desert 
 wastes, or on the bare sea-shore. 
 
 And yet, of all the many facts which he thus communicated 
 on his own authority, because resting on his own observa- 
 tion, not one of them has ever yet been disproved ; nay, 
 
246 ORGANSHIP. 
 
 scarce one of them has ever yet been so much as chal- 
 lenged. 
 
 Of course, in reference to the statements which he has 
 had to make on the testimony of others, his position was 
 necessarily different; and a very delicate matter he has 
 sometimes found it to be, to deal with these statements. A 
 desire, on the one hand, to expose to the wholesome breath- 
 ings of public opinion whatever was really oppressive and 
 unjust ; a fear, on the other, lest he should compromise the 
 general cause, or injure the character of his paper, by giving 
 publicity to what either might not be true, or could not be 
 proven to be true, have often led him to retain communica- 
 tions beside him for weeks and months, until some circum- 
 stance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding 
 their real character and value. And such with more, how- 
 ever, than the ordinary misgivings, and with an unfavourable 
 opinion frankly and decidedly expressed was the course 
 which he took with the communicated article on the Duke 
 of Buccleuch. 
 
 That the testing circumstance which did occur in the 
 course of the long period during which it was thus held in 
 retenlis was not communicated to him, or to any other 
 official connected with the Witness, he much regrets, but 
 could not possibly help. 
 
 In the" discussion on the Sites Bill of Wednesday last, the 
 Honourable Fox Maule is made to say, that ' the Witness 
 contained many articles which had been condemned by the 
 Church.' 
 
 Now this must be surely a misreport, as nothing could 
 be more grossly incorrect than such a statement. The 
 voice of the Free Church that by which she condemns or 
 approves can be emitted through but her deliberative 
 courts, and recorded in but the decisions of her solemn 
 Assemblies. On the merits or demerits of the Witness, 
 through these her only legitimate organs, she has not 
 
ORGANSH1P. 247 
 
 yet spoken ; and Mr. Maule is, we are sure, by far too intel- 
 ligent a Churchman to mistake the voice of a mere political 
 coterie, irritated mayhap by the loss of an election, for the 
 solemn deliverance of a Church of Christ. With respect to 
 his reported statement, to the effect that the Witness ' con- 
 tained many articles which had done great harm to the Free 
 Church/ the report may, we think, be quite correct. The 
 Witness contained a good many articles on the special 
 occasion when the Free Churchmen of Edinburgh con- 
 spired 'ungratefully and dishonourably,' as Mr. Maule 
 must have deemed it to eject a Whig Minister, and to 
 place in his seat, as their representative, a shrewd citizen 
 and honest man. 
 
 And these lucubrations accomplished, we daresay, their 
 modicum of harm. With regard, however, to the articles of 
 the Witness in general, we think we can confidently appeal 
 in their behalf to such of our readers as perused them, not 
 as they were garbled, misquoted, interpolated, and mis- 
 represented by unscrupulous enemies, but as they were first 
 given to the public from the pen of the Editor. Among 
 these readers we reckon men of all classes, from the peer 
 to the peasant Conservative landowners, magistrates, mer- 
 chants, ministers of the gospel. Dr. Chalmers was a reader 
 of the Witness from its first commencement to his death ; 
 and he, perusing its editorial articles as they were originally 
 written not as they were garbled or interpolated in other 
 prints saw in them very little to blame. 
 
 Not but that some of our sentences look sufficiently 
 formidable in extracts when twisted from their original 
 meaning ; and this, just as the Decalogue itself might be 
 instanced as a code of licentiousness, violence, and im- 
 morality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, 
 divested of all the nots. In the Edinburgh Advertiser of 
 yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage : * It 
 \The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of 
 
248 ORGANSHIP. 
 
 the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly 
 task, and when the " bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on 
 button-holes in the streets of Paris." It has reminded them 
 of the time when a " grey discrowned head sounded hollow 
 on the scaffold at Whitehall ;" insinuating that, if they per- 
 sisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, a like 
 fate might overtake the reigning dynasty of our time.' 
 
 When, asks the reader, did these most atrocious threats 
 appear in the Witness ? 
 
 They never, we reply, appeared in the Witness as threats at 
 all. The one passage, almost in the language of Chateau- 
 briand, was employed in an article in which we justified the 
 sentence pronounced on the atheist Patterson. The other 
 formed part of a purely historic reference in an article on 
 Puseyism, written ere the Free Church had any existence 
 to the Canterburianism of the times of Charles i., and the 
 fate of that unhappy monarch. We thought not of threaten- 
 ing the aristocracy when quoting the one passage, nor yet 
 of foreboding evil to the existing dynasty when writing the 
 other. On exactly the same principle on which these 
 passages have been instanced to our disadvantage, the 
 description of the Holoptychius Nobilissimns, which appeared 
 a few years ago in the Witness, might be paraded as a 
 personal attack on Sir James Graham ; and the remarks on 
 the construction of the Pterichthys^ as a gross libel on the 
 Duke of Buccleuch. It is, we hold, not a little to the credit 
 of the Witness, that, in order to blacken its character, 
 means should be resorted to of a character so disreputable 
 and dishonest. From truth and fair statement it has all to 
 hope, and nothing to fear. 
 
 June 14, 1848. 
 
BAILLIE'S LETTERS AND 
 JOURNALS. 
 
 THIS is at once the handsomest and one of the best editions 
 of the curious and very interesting class of works to which 
 it belongs, that has yet been given to the public. It is 
 scarce possible to appreciate too highly the tact, judgment, 
 and research displayed by the editor ; and rarely indeed, 
 so far as externals are concerned, has the typography of 
 Scotland appeared to better advantage. It is a book 
 decked out for the drawing-room in a suit of the newest 
 pattern, a tall, modish, well-built book, that has to be 
 fairly set a-talking ere we discover from its tongue and style 
 that it is a production not of our own times, but of the 
 times of Charles and the Commonwealth. The good, 
 simple minister of Kilwinning would fail to recognise him- 
 self in its fair open pages, that more than rival those of his 
 old Elzevirs. For his old-fashioned suit of home-spun 
 grey, we find him sporting here a modern dress-coat of 
 Saxony broadcloth, and a pair of unexceptionable cashmere 
 trousers ; and it is not until we step forward and address 
 the worthy man, and he turns upon us his broad, honest 
 face, that we see the grizzled moustache and peaked beard, 
 and discover that his fears are still actively engaged regard- 
 ing the prelatic leanings of Charles IL, 'now at Breda; 1 
 though perchance not quite without hope that the counsel 
 of the * wise and godly youth ' James Sharpe may have the 
 effect of setting all right again in the royal mind. We 
 
 249 
 
250 BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 address what we take, from the garb, to be a contemporary, 
 and find that we have stumbled on one of the seven 
 sleepers. 
 
 We deem it no slight advantage to the reading public of 
 the present day, that it should have works of this character 
 made so easy of access. It is only a very few years since 
 the student of Scottish ecclesiastical history could not 
 have acquainted himself with the materials on which the 
 historian can alone build, without passing through a course 
 of study at least as prolonged as an ordinary college course, 
 and much more laborious. Let us suppose that he lived 
 in some of the provinces. He would have, in the first 
 place, to come and reside in Edinburgh, and get intro- 
 duced, at no slight expense of trouble, mayhap, to the 
 brown, half-defaced manuscripts of our public libraries. 
 He would require next to study the old hand, with all its 
 baffling contractions. If he succeeded in mastering the 
 difficulties of Melville's Diary after a quarter of a year's 
 hard conning, he might well consider himself a lucky man. 
 Row's History would occupy him during at least another 
 quarter ; Baillie's Letters and Journals would prove work 
 enough for two quarters more. If he succeeded in getting 
 access to the papers of Woodrow, he would find little less 
 than a twelvemonth's hard labour before him ; Calder- 
 wood's large History would furnish employment for at least 
 half that time ; and if curious to peruse it in its best and 
 fullest form, he would find it necessary to quit Edinburgh 
 for London, to pore there over the large manuscript copy 
 stored up in the British Museum. As he proceeded in his 
 course, he would be continually puzzled by references, 
 allusions, initials ; he would have to consult register offices, 
 records of. baptisms and deaths, session books, old and 
 scarce works, hardly less difficult to be procured than even 
 the manuscripts themselves ; and if he at length escaped 
 the fate of the luckless antiquary, who produced the famous 
 
BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 251 
 
 history of the village of Wheatfield, he might deem himself 
 more than ordinarily fortunate. ' When I first engaged in 
 this work,' said the poor man, ' I had eyes of my own ; but 
 now I cannot see even with the assistance of art : I have 
 gone from spectacles of the first sight to spectacles of the 
 third; the Chevalier Taylor gives my eyes over, and my 
 optician writes me word he can grind no higher for me.' 
 It will soon be no such Herculean task to penetrate to the 
 foundations of our national ecclesiastical history. From 
 publications such as those of the Woodrow Club, and of 
 the Letters and Journals, the student will be able to acquire 
 in a few weeks what would have otherwise cost him the 
 painful labour of years. Nor can we point out a more 
 instructive course of reading. In running over our modern 
 histories, however able, we almost always find our point of 
 view fixed down by the historian to the point occupied by 
 himself. We cannot take up another on our own behalf, 
 unless we differ from him altogether, nor select for our- 
 selves the various subjects which we are to survey. We 
 are in leading - strings for the time : the vigour of our 
 author's thinking militates against the exercise of our own ; 
 his philosophy enters our minds in a too perfect form, 
 and lies inert there, just as the condensed extract of some 
 nourishing food often fails to nourish at all, because it 
 gives no employment to the digestive faculty. A survey 
 of the historian's materials has often, on the contrary, the 
 effect of setting the mind free. We see the events of the 
 times which he describes in their own light, and simply as 
 events, we select and arrange for ourselves, they call 
 up novel traits of character, they lead us to draw on our 
 experience of men, they confirm principles, they suggest 
 reflections. 
 
 Some of our readers will perhaps remember that we 
 noticed at considerable length the two first volumes of this 
 beautiful edition of Baillie rather more than a twelvemonth 
 
252 BAILL1ES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 ago. The third and concluding volume has but lately 
 appeared. It embraces a singularly important period, 
 extending from shortly before the rise of the unhappy and 
 ultimately fatal quarrel between the Resolutions and 
 Protesters, till the re-establishment of Episcopacy at the 
 Restoration, when the curtain closes suddenly over the 
 poor chronicler, evidently sinking into the grave at the 
 time, the victim of a broken heart. He sees a stormy 
 night settling dark over the Church, Presbytery pulled 
 down, the bishops set up, persecution already commenced ; 
 and, longing to be released from his troubles, he affectingly 
 assures his correspondent, in the last of his many letters, 
 that ' it was the matter of his daily grief that had brought 
 his bodily trouble upon him,' and that it would be 'a, favour 
 to him to be gone.' From a very learned, concise, and 
 well-written Life, the production of the accomplished editor, 
 which serves as a clue to guide the reader through the 
 mazes of the correspondence, we learn that he died three 
 months after. 
 
 Where there is so much that is interesting, one finds it 
 difficult to select. The light in which the infamous Sharpe 
 is presented in this volume is at least curious. Prelacy, 
 careful of the reputation of her archbishops, makes a great 
 deal indeed of the bloody death of the man, but says as 
 little as possible regarding his life and character. The 
 sentimental Jacobitism of the present day an imaginative 
 principle that feeds on novels, and admires the persecutors 
 because Claverhouse was brave and had an elegant upper 
 lip goes a little further, and speaks of him as the vener- 
 able Archbishop. When the famous picture of his assassi- 
 nation was exhibiting in Edinburgh, some ten or twelve 
 years ago, he rose with the class almost to the dignity of 
 a martyr : there were young ladies that could scarce look 
 at the piece without using their handkerchiefs ; the victim 
 was old, greyhaired, reverend, an archbishop, and emi- 
 
BAILLIE S LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 253 
 
 nently saintly, as a matter of course, whatever the bar- 
 barous fanatics might say ; and all that his figure seemed 
 to want in order to make it complete, was just a halo of 
 yellow ochre round the head. In Baillie's Letters we see him 
 exhibited, though all unwittingly on the part of the writer, in 
 his true character, and find that the yellow ochre would be 
 considerably out of place. Rarely, indeed, does nature, all 
 lost and fallen as it is, produce so consummate a scoundrel. 
 Treachery seems to have existed as so uncontrollable an 
 instinct in the man, that, like the appropriating faculty of 
 the thief, who amused himself by picking the pocket of the 
 clergyman who conducted him to the scaffold, it seems to 
 have been incapable of lying still. He appears never to 
 have had a friend who did not learn to detest and denounce 
 him : his Presbyterian friends, whom he deceived and be- 
 trayed, did so in the first instance ; his Episcopalian friends, 
 whom he at least strove to deceive and betray, did so in the 
 second. We are assured by Burnet, that even Charles, a 
 monarch certainly not over-nice in the moral sense, declared 
 James Sharpe to be one of the worst of men. His life was 
 a continuous lie ; and he has left more proofs of the fact in 
 the form of letters under his own hand, than perhaps any 
 other bad man that ever lived. 
 
 In Baillie he makes his first appearance as the Presby- 
 terian minister of Crail, and as one of the honest chronicler's 
 greatest favourites. The unhappy disputes between the Re- 
 solutioners and Protesters were running high at the time. 
 Baillie was a Resolutioner, Sharpe a zealous Resolutioner 
 too ; and Baillie, naturally unsuspicious, and biassed in his 
 behalf by that spirit of party which can darken the judg- 
 ment of even the most discerning, seems to have regarded 
 him as peculiarly the hope of the Church. He was indis- 
 putably one of its most dexterous negotiators ; and no man 
 of the age made a higher profession of religion. Burnet, 
 who knew him well in his after character as Archbishop of 
 
254 BAILLIE S LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 St. Andrews, tells us that never, save on one solitary occa- 
 sion, did he hear him make the slightest allusion to reli- 
 gion. But in his letters to Baillie, almost every paragraph 
 closes with the aspirations of a well-simulated devotion. 
 They seem as if strewed over with the fragments of broken 
 doxologies. The old man was, as we have said, thoroughly 
 deceived. He assures his continental correspondent, Spang, 
 that ' the great instrument of God to cross the evil designs 
 of the Protesters, was that very worthy, pious, wise, and dili- 
 gent young man, Mr. James Sharpe.' In some of his after 
 epistles we learn that he remembered him in his prayers, 
 no doubt very sincerely, as, under God, one of the main- 
 stays of the Church. What first strikes the reader in the 
 character of Sharpe, as here exhibited, is his exclusively 
 diplomatic cast of talent. Baillie himself was a controver- 
 sialist : he wrote books to influence opinion, and delivered 
 argumentative speeches. He was a man of business too : 
 he drew up remonstrances, petitions, protests, and carried 
 on the war of his party above-board. All his better friends 
 and correspondents, such as Douglas and Dickson, were 
 persons of a resembling cast. But Sharpe's vocation lay in 
 dealing with men in closets and window recesses : he could 
 do nothing until he had procured the private ear of the 
 individual on whom he wished to act. Is he desirous to 
 influence the decisions of the Supreme Civil Court in be- 
 half of his party ? He straightway ingratiates himself with 
 President Broghill, and the court becomes more favourable 
 in consequence. Is he wishful to propitiate the English 
 Government ? He goes up to London, gets closeted with 
 its more influential members. It was this peculiar talent 
 that pointed him out to the Church as so fit a person to 
 treat with Charles at Breda. 
 
 And it is when employed in this mission that we begin 
 truly to see the man, and to discover the sort of ability on 
 which the success of his closetings depended. We find 
 
BAILLIE S LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 255 
 
 Baillie holding, in his simplicity, that in order to draw the 
 heart of the King from Episcopacy, nothing more could 
 be necessary than just fairly to submit to him some sound 
 controversial work, arranged on the plan of the good man's 
 own Ladensium ; and urging on Sharpe, that a few able 
 divines should be employed in getting up a compilation for 
 the express purpose. Sharpe writes in return, in a style 
 sufficiently quiet, that His Majesty, in his very first address, 
 ' has been pleased to ask very graciously about Robert 
 Baillie,' a person for whom he has a particular kindness, 
 and whom, if favours were dealing, he would be sure not to 
 forget. He adds, further, that however matters might turn 
 out in England, the Presbyterian Establishment of Scotland 
 was in no danger of violation ; and lest his Scotch friends 
 should fall into the error of thinking too much about other 
 men's business, he gives fervent expression to the hope 
 * that the Lord would give them to prize their own mercies, 
 and know their own duties.' Even a twelvemonth after, 
 when on the eve of setting out for London to be created 
 a bishop, he writes his old friend, that whatever ' occasion 
 of jealousies and false surmises his journey might give,' 
 of one thing he might be assured, 'it was not in order 
 to a change in the Church,' as he ' would convince his dear 
 friend Mr. Baillie, through the Lord's help, when the Lord 
 would return him.' He has an under-plot of treachery 
 carrying on at the same time, that affects his ' dear friend' 
 personally. In one of his letters to the unsuspecting 
 chronicler, he assures him that he was c doing his best, by 
 the Lord's help,' to get him appointed Principal of the 
 University of Glasgow. In one of his letters to Lauder- 
 dale, after stating that the office, ' in the opinion of many,' 
 would require a man ' of more acrimony and weight' than 
 ' honest Baillie,' he urges that the presentation should be 
 sent him, with a blank space, in which the name of the 
 presentee might be afterwards inserted. 
 
256 BA1LLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 Baillie, naturally slow to suspect, does not come fully to 
 understand the character of the man until a very few months 
 before his death. He then complains bitterly to his conti- 
 nental correspondent, amid the ruin of the Church, and from 
 the gloom of his sick-chamber, that Sharpe was the traitor 
 who, * piece by piece, had so cunningly trepanned them, 
 that the cause had been suffered to sink without even a 
 struggle.' The apostate had gained his object, however, 
 and become * His Grace the Lord Primate.' There were 
 great rejoicings. * The new bishops were magnificklie re- 
 ceived ;' they were feasted by the Lord Commissioner's 
 lady on one night, by the Chancellor on another ; and in 
 especial, ' the Archbishop had bought a new coach at 
 London, at the sides whereof two lakqueys in purple did 
 run.' 
 
 The vanity of Sharpe is well brought out on another 
 occasion by Burner. The main object of one of his jour- 
 neys to London, undertaken a little more than a twelve- 
 month after the death of Baillie, was to urge on the King 
 that, as Primate of Scotland, he should of right take pre- 
 cedence of the Scottish Lord Chancellor, and to crave His 
 Majesty's letter to that effect. In this trait, as in several 
 others, he seems to have resembled Robespierre. His 
 cruelty to his old friends the Presbyterians is well illus- 
 trated by the fact that he could make the comparative 
 leniency of Lauderdale, apostate and persecutor as Lau- 
 derdale was, the subject of an accusation against him to 
 Charles. But there is no lack of still directer instances in 
 the biographies of the worthies whom his malice pursued. 
 His meanness, too, seems to have been equal to his malice 
 and pride. When Lauderdale on one occasion turned 
 fiercely upon him, and threatened to impeach him for 
 leasing-making, he ' straightway fell a-trembling and weep- 
 ing,' and, to avoid the danger, submitted to appear in the 
 royal presence ; and there, in the coarsest terms, to confess 
 
BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 257 
 
 himself a liar. It is a bishop who tells the story, and it is 
 only one of a series. Truly the Primate of all Scotland 
 was fortunate in the death he died. ' The dismal end of 
 this unhappy man,' says Burnet, ' struck all people with 
 horror, and softened his enemies into some tenderness ; so 
 that his memory was treated with decency by those who 
 had very little respect for him during his life.' 
 
 In almost every page in this instructive volume the 
 reader picks up pieces of curious information, or finds 
 matters suggestive of interesting thought. There start up 
 ever and anon valuable hints that germinate and bear fruit 
 in the mind. We would instance, by way of illustration, a 
 hint which occurs in a letter to Lauderdale, written shortly 
 after the Restoration, and which, though apparently slight, 
 leads legitimately into a not unimportant train of thinking. 
 Scotchmen are much in the habit of referring to the political 
 maxim that the king can do no wrong, as a fundamental 
 principle of the constitution, which concerns them as 
 directly as it does their neighbours the English. Dr. Chal- 
 mers alluded to it no later than last week, in his admirable 
 speech in the Commission. The old maxim, that the king 
 could do no wrong, he said, had now, it would seem, de- 
 scended from the throne to the level of courts co-ordinate 
 with the Church. Would it not be a somewhat curious 
 matter to find that this doctrine is one which has in reality 
 not entered Scotland at all? It stands in England, a 
 guardian in front of the throne, transferring every blow 
 which would otherwise fall on the sovereign himself, to the 
 sovereign's ministers : it is ministers, not sovereigns, who 
 are responsible to the people of England. But it would at 
 least seem, that with regard to the people of Scotland the 
 responsibility extends further. At least the English doc- 
 trine was regarded as exclusively an English one in the days 
 of Baillie, nearly half a century prior to the Union, and 
 more than a whole century ahead of those times in which 
 
 R 
 
258 BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 the influence of that event began to have the effect of 
 mixing up in men's minds matters peculiar to England 
 with matters common to Britain. We find Baillie, in his 
 letter written immediately after the passing of the Act 
 Recissory, pronouncing the doctrine that the ' king can do 
 no fault/ as in his judgment ' good and wise/ but referring 
 to it at the same time as a doctrine, not of the Scottish 
 Constitution, but of the ' State of England.' 
 
 The circumstance is of importance chiefly from the light 
 which it serves to cast on an interesting passage in Scottish 
 history. The famous declaration of our Scotch Convention 
 at the Revolution, that James vn. had forfeited the throne, 
 as contrasted with the singularly inadequate though virtually 
 corresponding declaration of the English Convention, that 
 James n. ' had abdicated the government, and that the 
 throne was thereby vacant,' has been often remarked by 
 the historians. Hume indirectly accounts for the employ- 
 ment of the stronger word, by prominently stating that the 
 more zealous among the Scotch Royalists, regarding the 
 assembly as illegal, had forborne to appear at elections, 
 and that the antagonist party commanded a preponderating 
 majority in consequence ; whereas in England the Tories 
 mustered strong, and had to be conciliated by the employ- 
 ment of softer language. Malcolm Laing, in noticing the 
 fact, contents himself by simply contrasting the indignation 
 on the part of the Scotch, which had been aroused by their 
 recent sufferings, with the quieter temper of the English, 
 who had been less tried by the pressure of actual persecu- 
 tion, and who were anxious to impart to Revolution at 
 least the colour of legitimate succession. And Sir James 
 Mackintosh, in his Vindida Gallicce, contents himself with 
 simply remarking that the ' absurd debates in the English 
 Convention were better cut short by the Parliament of 
 Scotland, when they used the correct and manly expression 
 that James vn. had forfeited the throne? We are of opinion 
 
BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 259 
 
 that the very different styles of the two Conventions may 
 be accounted for on the ground that, in the one kingdom, 
 the monarch, according to the genius of the constitution, 
 was regarded as incapable of committing wrong ; whereas, 
 in the other, he was no less constitutionally regarded as 
 equally peccable with any of his subjects. A peccable 
 monarch may forfeit his throne ; an impeccable one can 
 only abdicate it. The argument must of course depend on 
 the soundness of Baillie's statement. Was the doctrine 
 that the king can do no wrong a Scottish doctrine at the 
 time of the Revolution, or was it not ? 
 
 It was at least not a Scottish one in the days of 
 Buchanan, nor for a century after, as we may learn 
 very conclusively, not from Buchanan himself, nor his 
 followers for the political doctrines of a school of 
 writers may be much at variance with those of their 
 country but from the many Scottish controversialists on 
 the antagonist side, who entered the lists against both 
 the master and his disciples. Buchanan maintained, in 
 his philosophical treatise, De Jure Regni apud Scotos, that 
 there are conditions by which the King of Scotland is 
 bound to his people, on the fulfilment of which the allegi- 
 ance of the people depends, and that * it is lawful to depose, 
 and even to punish tyrants.' Knox, with the other worthies 
 of the first Reformation, held exactly the same doctrine. 
 The Lex Rex of Rutherford testifies significantly to the fact 
 that among the worthies of the second Reformation it was 
 not suffered to become obsolete. It takes a prominent 
 place in writings of the later Covenanters, such as the 
 Hind let Loose; and at the Revolution it received the prac- 
 tical concurrence of the National Convention, and of the 
 country generally. Now the doctrine, be it remembered, 
 was an often disputed one. Buchanan's little work was the 
 very butt of controversy for considerably more than an 
 hundred years. It was prohibited by Parliament, de- 
 
260 BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 
 
 nounced by monarchs, condemned to the flames by uni- 
 versities ; great lawyers wrote treatises against it at home, 
 and some of the most celebrated scholars of continental 
 Europe took the field against it abroad. We learn from 
 Dr. Irving, in his Classical Biography, that it was assailed 
 among our own countrymen by Blackwood, Winzet, Bar- 
 clay, Sir Thomas Craig, Sir John Wemyss, Sir Lewis 
 Stewart, Sir James Turner, and last, not least, among the 
 writers who preceded the Revolution, by the meanly 
 obsequious and bloody Sir George Mackenzie. And how 
 did these Scotchmen meet with the grand doctrine which 
 it embodied ? The ' old maxime of the state of England/ 
 had it extended to the sister kingdom, would have at once 
 furnished the materials of reply. If constitutionally the 
 King of Scotland could do no wrong, then constitutionally 
 the King of Scotland could not be deposed. But of an 
 entirely different complexion was the argument of which 
 the Scottish assailants of Buchanan availed themselves. It 
 was an argument subversive to the English maxim. Ad- 
 mitting fully that the king could do wrong, they maintained 
 merely that, for whatever wrong he did, he was responsible, 
 not to his subjects, but to God only. Whatever the amount 
 of wrong he committed, it was the duty of his subjects, they 
 said, passively to submit to it. On came the Revolution. 
 In England, in perfect agreement with the doctrine of the 
 king's impeccability in perfect agreement, at least, so far 
 as words were concerned it was declared that James had 
 abdicated the government, and that the throne was thereby 
 vacant; and certainly it cannot be alleged by even the 
 severest moralist, that in either abdicating a government or 
 vacating a throne, there is the slightest shadow of moral 
 evil involved. In Scotland the decision was different. 
 The battle fought in the Convention was exactly that which 
 had been previously fought between Buchanan and his 
 antagonists. * Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, and Sir 
 
BAILLIES LETTERS AND JOURNALS. 261 
 
 George Mackenzie, asserted,' says Malcolm Laing, 'the 
 doctrine of divine right, or maintained, with more plausi- 
 bility, that every illegal measure of James's government was 
 vindicated by the declaration of the late Parliament, that Jie 
 was an absolute monarch, entitled to unreserved obedience, AND 
 ACCOUNTABLE TO NONE ; while Sir James Montgomery and 
 Sir John Dalrymple, who conducted the debate on the 
 other side, averred that the Parliament was neither com- 
 petent to grant, nor the king to acquire, an absolute power, 
 irreconcilable with] the RECIPROCAL OBLIGATIONS. DUE TO 
 THE PEOPLE.' The doctrines of Buchanan prevailed ; and 
 the estates declared that James vn. having, through ' the 
 advice of evil and wicked councillors, invaded the fundamental 
 constitution of the kingdom, and altered it from a legal 
 limited monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power/ he had 
 thereby l forfaulted his right to the crown.' The terms of 
 the declaration demonstrate that Baillie was quite in the 
 right regarding the ' old maxime, that the king can do no 
 fault,' as exclusively a * maxime of the State of England.' 
 By acting on the advice of ' evil and wicked councillors,' it 
 was declared that a peccable king had forfeited the throne. 
 The fact that there were councillors in the case did not so 
 much even as extenuate the offence : it was the advisers of 
 the King who then, as now, were accountable to the King's 
 English subjects for the advice they gave ; it was the King 
 in person who was accountable to his Scottish subjects for 
 the advice he took. This principle, hitherto little adverted 
 to, throws, as we have said, much light on the history of the 
 Revolution in Scotland. 
 
FIRST PRINCIPLES. 
 
 THERE is a passage in the Life of Sir Matthew Hale which 
 has struck us as not only interesting in itself, from the breadth 
 and rectitude of judgment which it discloses, but also from 
 the very direct bearing of the principle involved in it on 
 some of the recent interdicts of the Supreme Civil Court. 
 It serves to throw a kind of historic light, if we may so 
 speak, on the judicial talent of our country in the present 
 age as exhibited by the majority of our judges of the Court 
 of Session such a light as the ecclesiastical historian of a 
 century hence will be disposed to survey it in, when coolly 
 exercising his judgment on the present eventful struggle. 
 One of not the least prominent nor least remarkable 
 features of the Rebellion of 1745, says a shrewd chronicler 
 of this curious portion of our history, was an utter destitu- 
 tion of military talent among the general officers of the 
 British army. And the time is in all probability not very 
 distant, in which the extreme lack of judicial genius be- 
 trayed by our courts of law in their present collision with 
 the courts ecclesiastical, shall be regarded, in like manner, 
 as one of the more striking characteristics of the Rebellion 
 of the present day. 
 
 Sir Matthew Hale, as most of our readers must be aware, 
 was a devoted Royalist. He was rising in eminence as a 
 barrister at the time the Civil Wars broke out, and during 
 that troublesome period he was employed as counsel for 
 almost all the more eminent men of the King's party who 
 were impeached by the Parliament He was counsel for 
 
 262 
 
FIRST PRINCIPLES. 263 
 
 the Earl of Strafford, for Archbishop Laud, for the Duke of 
 Hamilton, for the Earl of Holland, and for Lords Capel 
 and Craven ; and in every instance he exhibited courage 
 the most unshrinking and devoted, and abilities of the 
 highest order. When threatened in ope"n court on one 
 occasion by the Attorney-General, he replied that the 
 threat might be spared : he was pleading in defence of 
 those laws which the Government had declared it would 
 maintain and preserve, and no fear of personal conse- 
 quences should deter him in such circumstances from doing 
 his duty to his client. When Charles himself was brought 
 to his trial, Sir Matthew came voluntarily forward, and 
 offered to plead for him also ; but as the King declined 
 recognising the competency of his judges, the offer was of 
 course rejected. We all know how Malesherbes fared for 
 acting a similar part in France. The counsel of Louis 
 xvi. closed his honourable career on the scaffold not long 
 after his unfortunate master : his generous advocacy of 
 the devoted monarch cost him his life. But Cromwell, 
 that ' least flagitious of all usurpers,' according to even 
 Clarendon's estimate, was no Robespierre ; and were we 
 called on to illustrate by a single instance from the history 
 of each the very opposite characters of the Puritan Re- 
 publicans of England and the Atheistical Republican of 
 France, we would just set off against one another the fate 
 of Malesherbes and the treatment of Sir Matthew. Crom- 
 well, unequalled in his ability of weighing the capabilities 
 of men, had been carefully scanning the course of the 
 courageous and honest barrister; and, convinced that so 
 able a lawyer and so good and brave a man could scarce 
 fail of making an excellent judge, he determined on raising 
 him to the bench. At this stage, however, a difficulty 
 interposed, not in the liberal and enlightened policy of 
 the Protector, who had no objections whatever to a con- 
 scientious Royalist magistrate, but in the scruples of Sir 
 
2 64 FIRST PRINCIPLES. 
 
 Matthew, who at first doubted the propriety of taking 
 office under what he deemed a usurped power. 
 
 The process of argument by which he overcame the diffi- 
 culty, simple as it may seem, is worthy of all heed. Its 
 very simplicity may be regarded as demonstrating the 
 soundness of the understanding that originated and then 
 acted upon it as a firm first principle, especially when we 
 take into account the exquisitely nice character of the con- 
 science which it had to satisfy. It is absolutely necessary 
 for the wellbeing of society, argued Sir Matthew, that jus- 
 tice be administered between man and man ; and the neces- 
 sity exists altogether independently of the great political 
 events which affect the sources of power, by changing 
 dynasties or revolutionizing governments. The claim of 
 the supreme ruler de facto may be a bad one ; he may owe 
 his power to some act of great political injustice to an 
 iniquitous war to an indefensible revolution to a foul 
 conspiracy ; but the flaw in his title cannot be regarded as 
 weakening in the least the claim of the people under him 
 to the administration of justice among them as the ordi- 
 nance of God. The right of the honest man to be pro- 
 tected by the magistrate from the thief the right of the 
 peaceable man to be protected by the magistrate from the 
 assassin is not a conditional right, dependent on the title 
 of the ruler : it is as clear and certain during those periods 
 so common in history, when the supreme power is illegiti- 
 mately vested, as during the happier periods of undisputed 
 legitimacy. And to be a minister of God for the admini- 
 stration of justice, if the office be attainable without sin, is 
 as certainly right at all times as the just exercise of the 
 magistrate's functions is right at all times. If it be right 
 that society be protected by the magistrate, it is as un- 
 equivocally right in the magistrate to protect. But it is 
 wrong to recognise as legitimate the supreme ruler of a 
 country if his power be palpably usurped. English society, 
 
FIRST PRINCIPLES. 265 
 
 under Cromwell, retains its right to have justice admini- 
 stered, wholly unaffected by the flaw in Cromwell's title ; 
 but it would be wrong to recognise his title, contrary to 
 one's conviction, as void of any flaw. In short, to use the 
 simple language of Burnet, Sir Matthew, ' after mature de- 
 liberation, came to be of opinion, that as it was absolutely 
 necessary to have justice and property kept up at all times, 
 it was no sin to take a commission from usurpers, if there 
 was declaration made of acknowledging their authority.' 
 Cromwell had breadth enough to demand no such decla- 
 ration from Sir Matthew, and so the latter took his place 
 on the bench. Nor is it necessary to say how he adorned 
 it. In agreement with his political views, he declined 
 taking any part in trials for offences against the State ; but 
 in cases of ordinary felonies, no one could act with more 
 vigour and decision. During the trial of a Republican 
 soldier, who had waylaid and murdered a Royalist, the 
 colonel of the soldier came into court to arrest judgment, 
 on the plea that his man had done only his duty, for that 
 the person whom he had killed had been disobeying the 
 Protector's orders at the time ; and to threaten the judge 
 with the vengeance of the supreme authority, if he urged 
 matters to an extremity against him. Sir Matthew listened 
 coolly to his threats and his reasonings, and then, pro- 
 nouncing sentence of death against the felon, agreeably to 
 the finding of the jury, he ordered him out to instant exe- 
 cution, lest the course of justice should be interrupted by 
 any interference on the part of Government. On another 
 occasion, in which he had to preside in a trial in which the 
 Protector was deeply concerned, he found that the jury 
 had been returned, not by the sheriff or his lawful officer, 
 but by order of the Protector himself. He immediately 
 dismissed them, and, refusing to go on with the trial, broke 
 up the court. Cromwell, says Burnet, was highly displeased 
 with him on this occasion, and on his return from the cir- 
 
266 FIRST PRINCIPLES. 
 
 cuit in which it had occurred, told him in great anger that 
 'he was not fit to be a judge.' 'Very true,' replied Sir 
 Matthew, whose ideas of the requirements of the office were 
 of the most exalted character, 'Very true;' and so the 
 matter dropped. 
 
 ' It is absolutely necessary,' argued Sir Matthew, ' to 
 have justice kept up at all times,' whatever flaws may 
 exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority 
 may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler 
 proposition ; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It in- 
 volves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as 
 enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us 
 with no disquisitions on political justice : it does not say 
 whether the title of Domitian to the supreme authority was 
 a good title or no, or whether he should have been suc- 
 ceeded by Caligula, and Caligula by Claudius, or no; or 
 whether or no the fact that Claudius was poisoned by the 
 mother of Nero, derived to Nero any right to Claudius's 
 throne. We hear nothing of these matters. The magis- 
 tracy described by St. Paul is the magistracy conceived of 
 by Sir Matthew Hale 'as necessary to be kept up at all 
 times.' An application of this simple principle to some of 
 the more marked proceedings of our civil courts during 
 the last two years will be found an admirable means of 
 testing their degree of judicial wisdom. ' It is absolutely 
 necessary to have justice kept up at all times,' and this not 
 less necessary surely within than beyond the pale of the 
 Church. It is necessary that a minister of the gospel ' be 
 blameless' no drunkard, no swindler, no thief, no grossly 
 obscene person ; nor can any supposed flaw in the consti- 
 tution of an ecclesiastical court disannul the necessity. A 
 man may sit in that court in a judicial capacity whose com- 
 petency to take his seat there may not have been deter- 
 mined by some civil court that challenges for itself an 
 equivocal and disputed right to decide in the matter. 
 
FIRST PRINCIPLES. 267 
 
 There may exist some supposed, or even some real, flaw 
 in that supreme ecclesiastical authority of the country, 
 through the exertion of which the Church is to be pro- 
 tected from the infection of vice and irreligion ; but this 
 flaw, real or supposed, furnishes no adequate cause why 
 justice in the Church ' should not be kept up.' ' Justice,' 
 said Sir Matthew, l must be kept up at all times,' whatever 
 the irregularities of title which may occur in the supreme 
 authority. The great society of the Church has a right to 
 justice, whether it be decided that the ministers of quoad 
 sacra parishes have what has been termed a legal right to 
 sit in ecclesiastical courts or no. The devout and honest 
 church member has a right to be protected from the blas- 
 phemous profanities of the wretched minister who is a thief 
 or wretched swindler ; the chaste and sober have a right to 
 be protected from the ministrations of the drunken and the 
 obscene wretch, whose preaching is but mockery, and his 
 dispensations of the sacrament sacrilege. The Church has 
 a right to purge itself of such ministers ; and these sacred 
 rights no supposed, even no real, flaw in the constitution 
 of its courts ought to be permitted to affect. 'Justice may 
 be kept up at all times.' We have said that the principle 
 of Sir Matthew Hale serves to throw a kind of historic 
 light on the judicial talent of our country in the present 
 age, as represented by the majority of our Lords of Session. 
 It enables us, in some sort, to anticipate regarding it the 
 decision of posterity. The list of cases of protection 
 afforded by the civil court will of itself form a curious 
 climax in the page of some future historian. Swindling 
 will come after drunkenness in the series, theft will follow 
 after swindling, and the miserable catalogue will be summed 
 up by an offence which we must not name. And it will be 
 remarked that all these gross crimes were fenced round and 
 protected in professed ministers of the gospel by the inter- 
 ference of the civil courts, just because a majority of the 
 
268 FIRST PRINCIPLES. 
 
 judges were men so defective in judicial genius that they 
 lost sight of the very first principles of their profession, and 
 held that 'justice is not to be kept up at all times.' But 
 we leave our readers to follow up the subject. Some of the 
 principles to which we have referred may serve to throw 
 additional light on the remark of Lord Ivory, when recall- 
 ing the interdict in the Southend case. ' Even were the 
 objection against the competency of quoad sacra ministers 
 to be ultimately sustained,' said his Lordship, 'I am disposed 
 to hold that the judicial acts and sentences of the General 
 Assembly and its Commission, bonafide pronounced in the 
 interim, should be given effect to notwithstanding.' 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 WE enjoyed the honour on Wednesday last of being present 
 as a guest at the annual soiree of the Scottish Young Men's 
 Society, and derived much pleasure from the general ap- 
 pearance of the meeting, and the addresses of the members 
 and their friends. The body of the great Waterloo Room 
 was crowded on the occasion with a respectable, intellectual- 
 looking audience, including from about a hundred and fifty to 
 two hundred members of the Society, all of them young men 
 banded together for mutual improvement, and most of them 
 in that important decade of life by far the most important of 
 the appointed seven which intervenes between the fifteenth 
 and the five-and-twentieth year. The platform was equally 
 well filled, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh occupied the chair. 
 We felt a particular interest in the objects of the Society, 
 and a deep sympathy with its members ; for, as we listened 
 to the various speakers, and our eyes glanced over the in- 
 telligent countenances that thronged the area of the apart- 
 ment, we thought of past difficulties encountered in a cause 
 similar to that which formed the uniting bond of the Society, 
 and of not a few wrecks which we had witnessed of men 
 who had set out in life from the humbler levels, with the 
 determination of pressing their way upwards. And feeling 
 somewhat after the manner that an old sailor would feel 
 who saw a crew of young ones setting out to thread their 
 way through some dangerous strait, the perils of which he 
 had already encountered, or to sail round some formidable 
 cape, which, after many an unsuccessful attempt, he had 
 
270 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 doubled, we fancied ourselves in the position of one quali- 
 fied to give them some little advice regarding the navigation 
 of the seas on which they were just entering. But, be the 
 fact of qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after 
 leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few 
 plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and 
 insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men 
 whose words come slowly and painfully when among their 
 fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards 
 without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary 
 assemblage for their audience ; and so our short address 
 went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of 
 ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious prece- 
 dents on record for the printing of unspoken speeches. 
 Rejecting, however, all the higher ones, we shall be quite 
 content to take our precedent from the famous speech which 
 the 'indigent philosopher' addresses, in one of Goldsmith's 
 Essays, to Mr. Bellowsmender and the Cateaton Club. The 
 philosopher begins, it will be remembered, by telling his 
 imaginary audience, that though Nathan Ben Funk, the 
 rich Jew, might feel a natural interest in the state of the 
 stocks, it was nothing to them, who had no money; and 
 concludes by quoting the * famous author called Lilly's 
 Grammar.' 
 
 4 Members of the Scottish Young Men's Society,' we 
 said, * it is rather late in life for the individual who now 
 addresses you to attempt acquiring the art of the public 
 speaker. Those who have been most in the habit of 
 noticing the effect of the several mechanical professions 
 on character and intellect, divide them into two classes 
 the sedentary and the laborious ; and they remark, that 
 while in the sedentary, such as the printing, weaving, tailor- 
 ing, and shoemaking trades, there are usually a considerable 
 proportion of fluent speakers, in the laborious trades, on the 
 other hand, such as those of the mason, ship-carpenter, 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 271 
 
 ploughman, and blacksmith, one generally meets with but 
 taciturn, slow-speaking men. We need scarce say in which 
 of these schools we have been trained. You will at once 
 see to borrow from one of the best and most ancient of 
 writers that we are "not eloquent," but "a man of slow 
 speech, and of a slow tongue." And yet we think we may 
 venture addressing ourselves, in a few plain words, to an 
 association of young men united for the purpose of mutual 
 improvement. We ought and we do sympathize with you 
 in your object; and we congratulate you on the facilities 
 which your numbers, and your library, and your residence 
 in one of the most intellectual cities in the world, cannot 
 fail to afford you in its pursuit. We ourselves have known 
 what it is to prosecute in solitude, with but few books, and 
 encompassed by many difficulties, the search after know- 
 ledge ; and we have seen year after year pass by, and the 
 obstacles in our way remaining apparently as great as at 
 first. And were we to sum up the condensed result of our 
 experience in two brief words of advice, it would amount 
 simply to this, " Never despair." We are told of Com- 
 modore Anson a man whose sense and courage ultimately 
 triumphed over a series of perhaps the most appalling 
 disasters man ever encountered, and who won for himself, 
 by his magnanimity, sagacity, and cool resolution, the 
 applauses of even his enemies, so that Rousseau and 
 Voltaire eulogized him, the one in history, the other in 
 romance, we are told, we say, of this Anson, that when 
 raised to the British peerage, he was permitted to select his 
 own motto, and that he chose an eminently characteristic 
 one "Nil Desperandum" By all means let it be your 
 motto also not as a thing to be paraded on some heraldic 
 label, but to be engraved upon your hearts. We wish that, 
 amid the elegancies of this hall, we could bring up before 
 you some of the scenes of our past life. They would 
 form a curious panorama, and might serve to teach that 
 
272 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 in no circumstances, however apparently desperate, should 
 men lose hope. Never forget that it is not necessary, in 
 order to overcome gigantic difficulties, that one's strength 
 should be gigantic. Persevering exertion is much more 
 than strength. We owe to shovels and wheelbarrows, and 
 human muscles of the average size and vigour, the great 
 railway which connects the capitals of the two kingdoms. 
 And the difficulties which encompass the young man of 
 humble circumstances and imperfect education, must be 
 regarded as coming under the same category as difficulties 
 of the purely physical kind. Interrupted or insulated 
 efforts, however vigorous, will be found to be but of little 
 avail. It is to the element of continuity that you must 
 trust. There is a world of sense in Sir Walter Scott's fa- 
 vourite proverb, " Time and I, gentlemen, against any two." 
 But though it be unnecessary, in order to secure success, 
 that one's efforts in the contest with gigantic difficulties 
 should be themselves gigantic, it is essentially necessary 
 that they should employ one's whole strength. Half efforts 
 never accomplish anything. " No man ever did anything 
 well," says Johnson, " to which he did not apply the whole 
 bent of his mind." And unless a man keep his head cool, 
 and his faculties undissipated, he need not expect that his 
 efforts can ever be other than half efforts, or other than of 
 a desultory, fitful, non-productive kind. We do not stand 
 here in the character of a modern Rechabite. But this we 
 must say : Let no young man ever beguile himself with the 
 hope that he is to make a figure in society, or rise in the 
 world, unless, as the apostle expresses it, he be " temperate 
 in all things." Scotland has produced not a few distin- 
 guished men who were unfortunately not temperate ; but 
 it is well known that of one of the greatest of them all 
 perhaps one of the most vigorous-minded men our country 
 ever produced the intemperate habits were not formed 
 early. Robert Burns, up till his twenty-sixth year, when 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 273 
 
 he had mastered all his powers, and produced some of 
 his finest poems, was an eminently sober man. Climbing 
 requires not only a steady foot, but a strong head; and 
 we question whether any one ever climbed the perilous 
 steep, where, according to Beattie, " Fame's proud temple 
 shines afar," who did not keep his head cool during the 
 process.. So far as our own experience goes, we can truly 
 state, that though we have known not a few working men, 
 possessed some of them of strong intellects, and some of 
 them of fine taste, and even of genius, not one have we 
 ever known who rose either to eminence or a competency 
 under early formed habits of intemperance. These indeed 
 are the difficulties that cannot be surmounted, and the 
 only ones. Rather more than thirty years ago, the drinking 
 usages of the country were more numerous than they are 
 now. In the mechanical profession in which we laboured 
 they were many : when a foundation was laid, the work- 
 men were treated to drink; they were treated to drink 
 when the walls were levelled ; they were treated to drink 
 when the building was finished ; they were treated to drink 
 when an apprentice joined the squad ; treated to drink 
 when his apron was washed ; treated to drink when his 
 "time was out;" and occasionally they learned to treat 
 one another to drink. At the first house upon which we 
 were engaged as a slim apprentice boy, the workmen had 
 a royal founding-pint, and two whole glasses of whisky 
 came to our share. A full-grown man might not deem a 
 gill of usquebhae an over-dose, but it was too much for a 
 boy unaccustomed to strong drink ; and when the party 
 broke up, and we got home to our few books few, but 
 good, and which we had learned at even an earlier period 
 to pore over with delight we found, as we opened the 
 page of a favourite author, the letters dancing before our 
 eyes, and that we could no longer master his sense. The 
 state was perhaps a not very favourable one for forming a 
 
 s 
 
274 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 resolution in, but we believe the effort served to sober us. 
 We determined in that hour that never more would we 
 sacrifice our capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drink- 
 ing usage ; and during the fifteen years which we spent as 
 an operative mason, we held, through God's help, by the 
 determination. We are not sure whether, save for that de- 
 termination, we would have had the honour of a place on 
 this platform to-night. But there are other kinds of intoxi- 
 cation than that which it is the nature of strong drink or of 
 drugs to produce. Bacon speaks of a "natural drunken- 
 ness." And the hallucinations of this natural drunkenness 
 must be avoided if you would prosper. Let us specify one 
 of these. Never let yourselves be beguiled by the idea 
 that fate has misplaced you in life, and that were you in 
 some other sphere you would rise. It is true that some 
 men are greatly misplaced ; but to brood over the idea is 
 not the best way of getting the necessary exchange effected. 
 It is not the way at all. Often the best policy in the case 
 is just to forget the misplacement. We remember once 
 deeming ourselves misplaced, when, in a season of bad 
 health and consequent despondency, we had to work 
 among labourers in a quarry. But the feeling soon passed, 
 and we set ourselves carefully to examine the quarry. 
 Cowper describes a prisoner of the Bastile beguiling his 
 weary hours by counting the nail-studs on the door of his 
 cell, upwards, downwards, and across, 
 
 " Wearing out time in numbering to and fro, 
 The studs that thick emboss his iron door ; 
 Then downward and then upwards, then aslant 
 And then alternate ; with a sickly hope 
 By dint of change to give his tasteless task 
 Some relish ; till, the sum exactly found 
 In all directions, he begins again." 
 
 It was idle work ; for to reckon up the door-studs never so 
 often was not the way of opening up the door. But in care- 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 275 
 
 fully examining and recording for our own use the appear- 
 ances of the stony bars of our prison, we were greatly more 
 profitably employed. Nay, we had stumbled on one of the 
 best possible modes of escaping from our prison. We were 
 in reality getting hold of its bolts and its stancheons, and 
 converting them into tools in the work of breaking out, 
 We remember once passing a whole season in one of the 
 dreariest districts of the north-western Highlands, a dis- 
 trict included in that unhappy tract of country, doomed, 
 we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked 
 in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of black- 
 ness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during 
 the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in 
 which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded 
 no light by which to read. Nor even ere the year got 
 into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light 
 had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or 
 scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We re- 
 member at another time living in an agricultural district 
 in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the 
 ridge of the roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay 
 a-bed we could tell the hours of the night by the stars 
 that were passing overhead across the chasm. There were 
 about half-a-dozen farm -servants, victims to the bothie 
 system, that ate and slept in the same place ; and often, 
 long after midnight, a disreputable poacher used to come 
 stealthily in, and fling himself down on a lair of straw that 
 he had prepared for himself in a corner. Now, both the 
 Highland hut and the Lowland hovel, with their accom- 
 paniments of protracted and uncongenial labour, might be 
 regarded as dreary prisons ; and yet we found them to be 
 in reality useful schools, very necessary to our education. 
 And now, when we hear about the state of the Highlands, 
 and the character of our poor Highlanders, and of the 
 influence of the bothie system and of the game-laws, we 
 
276 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 feel that we know considerably more about such matters 
 than if our experience had been of a more limited or more 
 pleasant kind. There are few such prisons in which a 
 young man of energy and a brave heart can be placed, in 
 which he will not gain more by taking kindly to his work, 
 and looking well about him, than by wasting himself in 
 convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but learn to think 
 of his prison as a school, there is good hope of his ulti- 
 mately getting out of it. Were a butcher's boy to ask us 
 you will not deem the illustration too low, for you will 
 remember that Henry Kirke White was once a butcher's 
 boy were he to ask us how we thought he could best 
 escape from his miserable employment, we would at once 
 say, You have rare opportunities of observation ; you may 
 be a butcher's boy in body, but in mind you may become 
 an adept in one of the profoundest of the sciences, that 
 of comparative anatomy; think of yourself as not in a 
 prison, but in a school, and there is no fear but you will 
 rise. There is another delusion of that " natural drunken- 
 ness " referred to, against which you must also be warned. 
 Never sacrifice your independence to a phantom. We 
 have seen young men utterly ruin themselves* through the 
 vain belief that they were too good for their work. They 
 were mostly lads of a literary turn, who had got a knack 
 of versifying, and who, in the fond belief that they were 
 poets arid men of genius, and that poets and men of genius 
 should be above the soil and drudgery of mechanical labour, 
 gave up the profession by which they had lived, poorly 
 mayhap, but independently, and got none other to set in 
 its place. A mistake of this character is always a fatal 
 one ; and we trust all of you will ever remember, that 
 though a man may think himself above his work, no man 
 is, or no man ought to think himself, above the high dignity 
 of being independent. In truth, he is but a sorry, weak 
 fellow who measures himself by the conventional status of 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 2 7 7 
 
 the labour by which he lives. Our great poet formed a 
 correcter estimate : 
 
 " What though on hamely fare we dine, 
 
 Wear hodden grey, and a' that ? 
 Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, 
 A man's a man for a' that." 
 
 There is another advice which we would fain give you, 
 though it may be regarded as of a somewhat equivocal 
 kind : Rely upon yourselves. The man who sets his hopes 
 upon patronage, or the exertions of others in his behalf, is 
 never so respectable a man, and, save in very occasional 
 instances, rarely so lucky a man, as he who bends his exer- 
 tions to compel fortune in his behalf, by making himself 
 worthy of her favours. Some of the greatest wrecks we 
 have seen in life have been those of waiters on patronage ; 
 and the greatest discontents which we have seen in corpo- 
 rations, churches, and states, have arisen from the exercise 
 of patronage. Shakespeare tells us, in his exquisite vein, 
 of a virtue that is twice blessed, blessed in those who 
 give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice 
 cursed, cursed in the incompetency which it places where 
 merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates 
 among the class who make it their trust. But the curse 
 which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls 
 on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to 
 evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We 
 therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One other 
 on whom you must rely; and implicit reliance on Him, 
 instead of inducing weakness, infinitely increases strength. 
 Bacon has well said, that a dog is brave and generous 
 when he believes himself backed by his master, but timid 
 and crouching, especially in a strange place, when he is 
 alone and his master away. And a human master, says 
 the philosopher, is as a god to the dog. It certainly does 
 inspire a man with strength to believe that his great Master 
 
278 AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 
 
 is behind him, invigorating him in his struggles, and pro- 
 tecting him against every danger. We knew in early life 
 a few smart infidels smart but shallow ; but not one of 
 them ever found their way into notice ; and though we 
 have not yet lived out our half century, they have in that 
 space all disappeared. There are various causes which 
 conspire to write it down as fate, that the humble infidel 
 should be unsuccessful in life. In the first place, infidelity 
 is not a mark of good sense, but very much the reverse. 
 We have been much struck by a passage which occurs in 
 the autobiography of a great general of the early part of 
 the last century. In relating the disasters and defeats 
 experienced in a certain campaign by two subordinate 
 general officers, chiefly through misconduct, and a lack 
 of the necessary shrewdness, he adds, " I ever suspected 
 the judgment of these men since I found that they pro- 
 fessed themselves infidels." The sagacious general had 
 inferred that their profession of infidelity augured a lack 
 of sense ; and that, when they got into command, the same 
 lack of sense which led them to glory in their shame would 
 be productive, as its necessary results, of misfortune and 
 disaster. There is a shrewd lesson here to the class who 
 doubt and cavil simply to show their parts. In the second 
 place, infidelity, on the principle of Bacon, is a weak, 
 tottering thing, unbuttressed by that support which gives 
 to poor human nature half its strength and all its dignity. 
 But, above all, in the third and last place, the humble 
 infidel, unballasted by right principle, sets out on the 
 perilous voyage of life without chart or compass, and, 
 drifting from off the safe course, gets among rocks and 
 breakers, and there perishes. But we must not trespass 
 on your time. With regard to the conduct of your studies, 
 we simply say, Strive to be catholic in your tastes. Some 
 of you will have a leaning to science ; some to literature. 
 To the one class we would say, Your literature will be all 
 
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH. 279 
 
 the more solid if you can get a vein of true science to run 
 through it ; and to the other, Your science will be all the 
 more fascinating if you temper and garnish it with literature. 
 In truth, almost all the greater subjects of man's contem- 
 plation belong to both fields. Of subjects such as astro- 
 nomy and geology, for instance, the poetry is as sublime 
 as the science is profound. As a pretty general rule, you 
 will perhaps find literature most engaging in youth, and 
 science as you grow in years. But faculties for both have 
 been given you by the great Taskmaster, and it is your 
 bounden duty that these be exercised aright. And so let 
 us urge you, in conclusion, in the words of Coleridge : 
 
 " Therefore to go and join head, heart, and hand, 
 Active and firm to fight the bloodless fight 
 Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ." ' 
 
DISRUPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 ONE of the many dangers to which the members of a dis- 
 established Church just escaped from State control and the 
 turmoil of an exciting struggle are liable, is the danger of 
 getting just a little wild on minute semi-metaphysical points, 
 and of either quarrelling regarding them with their neigh- 
 bours, or of falling out among themselves. Great contro- 
 versies, involving broad principles, have in the history of 
 the Church not unfrequently broken into small contro- 
 versies, involving narrow principles ; just as in the history 
 of the world mighty empires like that of Alexander the 
 Great have broken up into petty provinces, headed by mere 
 satraps and captains, when the master-mind that formed 
 their uniting bond has been removed. Independently of 
 that stability which the legalized framework of a rightly- 
 constituted Establishment is almost sure to impart to its 
 distinctive doctrines, the influence of its temporalities has 
 in one special direction a sobering and wholesome effect. 
 Men carefully weigh principles for the assertion of which 
 they may be called on to sacrifice or to suffer, and are 
 usually little in danger, in such circumstances, of becoming 
 martyrs to a mere crotchet. The first beginnings of notions 
 that, if suffered to grow in the mind, may at length tyran- 
 nize over it, and lead even the moral sense captive, are 
 often exceedingly minute. 
 
 They start up in the form of, mayhap, solitary ideas, 
 chance-derived from some unexpected association, or picked 
 up in conversation or reading ; the attention gradually 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 281 
 
 concentrates upon them ; auxiliary ideas, in consequence, 
 spring up around them ; they assume a logical form con- 
 nect themselves, on the one hand, with certain revealed 
 injunctions of wide meaning lay hold, on the other, on a 
 previously developed devotional spirit or well-trained con- 
 scientiousness ; and, in the end, if the minds in which they 
 have arisen be influential ones, they alter the aspects and 
 names of religious bodies, and place in a state of insulation 
 and schism churches and congregations. 
 
 Their rise somewhat resembles that of the waves, as 
 described by Franklin in his paper on the effects of oil in 
 inducing a calm, or in preserving one. 'The first-raised 
 waves,' he says, * are mere wrinkles ; but being continually 
 acted upon by the wind, they are, though the gale does not 
 increase in strength, continually increased in magnitude, 
 rising higher, and extending their bases so as to include 
 in each wave vast masses, and to act with great momentum. 
 The wind, however,' continues the philosopher, ' blowing 
 over water covered with oil, cannot catch upon it so as to 
 raise the first or elementary wrinkles, but slides over it, and 
 leaves it smooth as it finds it; and being thus prevented 
 from producing these first elements of waves, it of course 
 cannot produce the waves themselves.' In applying the 
 illustration just a little further, we would remark, that within 
 a wholesomely-constituted religious Establishment, the in- 
 fluence of the temporalities acts in preventing the rise of 
 new notions, like the smoothing oil. If it does not wholly 
 prevent the formation of the first wrinkles of novel opinion, 
 it at least prevents their heightening into wavelets or seas. 
 If the billows rise within so as to disrupt the framework of 
 the Establishment, and make wreck of its temporalities, it 
 may be fairly premised that they have risen not from any 
 impulsion of the light winds of uncertain doctrine, but, as 
 in the Canton de Vaud and the Church of Scotland, in 
 obedience to the strong ground-swell of sterling principle. 
 
282 DISH UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 Now we deem it a mighty advantage, and one which 
 should not be wilfully neutralized by any after act of the 
 body, that the distinctive principles of the Free Church 
 bear the stamp and pressure of sacrifice. The temporalities 
 resigned for their sake do not adequately measure their 
 value ; but they at least demonstrate that, in the estimate 
 of those who resigned them, the principles did of a certainty 
 possess value up to the amount resigned. The Disruption 
 forms a guarantee for the stamina of our Church's peculiar 
 tenets, and impresses upon them, in relation to the con- 
 science of the Church, the stamp of reality and genuineness. 
 And that influence of the temporalities to which we refer, 
 and under which the controversy grew, had yet another 
 wholesome influence. It prevented the wrinklings of new, 
 untried notions from gathering momentum, and rising into 
 waves. The great billows, influential in producing so 
 much, were the result of ancient, well-tested realities : they 
 had rolled downwards, fully formed, as a portion of the 
 great ground-swell of the Reformation. The Headship of 
 the adorable Redeemer the spiritual independence of the 
 Church the rights of the Christian people : these were not 
 crotchets based on foundations of bad metaphysics ; they 
 were vital, all-important principles, worthy of being main- 
 tained and asserted at any cost. It is indeed wonderful 
 how entirely, immediately previous to the Disruption, the 
 Church of Scotland assumed all the lineaments of her 
 former self, as she existed in the days of Knox and his 
 brethren. Once more, after the lapse of many years, she 
 stood on broad anti-patronage ground. Once more, after 
 having been swaddled up for an age in the narrow exclu- 
 . siveness of the Act of 1799, that had placed her in a 
 state of non-communion with the whole Christian world, she 
 occupied, through its repeal, the -truly liberal position with 
 regard to the other evangelistic churches of her early fathers. 
 Once more her discipline, awakened from its long slumber, 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 2 83 
 
 had become efficient, as in her best days, for every purpose 
 of purity. She had become, on the eve of her disestablish- 
 ment, after many an intervening metamorphosis, exactly, in 
 character and lineament, the Church which had been estab- 
 lished by the State nearly three centuries before. She went 
 out as she had come in. There was a peculiar sobriety, 
 too, in all her actings. Her sufferings and sacrifices were 
 direct consequents of the invasion of her province by the 
 civil magistrate. 
 
 But she did not on that account cease to recognise the 
 magistrate in his own proper walk as the minister of God. 
 
 Her aggrieved members never once forgot that they were 
 Scotchmen and Britons as certainly as Presbyterians, and 
 that they had a country as certainly as a Church to which 
 they owed service, and which it was unequivocally their 
 duty to defend. 
 
 They retreated from the Establishment, and gave up all 
 its advantages when the post had become so untenable that 
 these could be no longer retained with honour or we 
 should perhaps rather say, retained compatibly with right 
 principle ; but they did not in wholesale desperation give 
 up other posts which could still be conscientiously main- 
 tained. 
 
 The educational establishment of the country, for instance, 
 was not abandoned, though the ecclesiastical one was. 
 
 The Principal of the United College of Saint Salvador 
 and Saint Leonard's signed the Deed of Demission in his 
 capacity as an elder of the Church, but in his capacity of 
 Principal he returned to his College, and in that post 
 fought what was virtually the battle of his country, and 
 fought it so bravely and well that he is Principal of the 
 College still. And the parish schoolmasters who adhered 
 to the Free Church fought an exactly similar battle, though 
 unfortunately with a less happy issue ; but that issue gives 
 at least prominence to the fact that they did not resign 
 
284 D2SJR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 their charges, but were thrust from them. The other 
 functionaries of the Assembly, uninfluenced by any wild 
 Cameronian notion, held by their various secular offices, 
 civil and military. Soldiers retained their commissions 
 magistrates their seats on the bench members of Parlia- 
 ment their representative status. Nor did a single member 
 of the Protesting Church possessed of the franchise resign, 
 in consequence of the Disruption, a single political right 
 or privilege. The entire transaction bore, we repeat, the 
 stamp of perfect sobriety. It was in all its details the act 
 of men in their right minds. 
 
 Now the principles held by the Church at the Disruption, 
 and none other, whether Voluntary or Cameronian, are the 
 principles of the Free Church. A powerful majority in a 
 Presbyterian body, or in a country possessed of a repre- 
 sentative government, are vested in at least the power of 
 making whatever laws they will to make, for not only 
 themselves, but for the minority also. But power is not 
 right; and we would at once question the right of even a 
 preponderating majority in a Church such as ours to intro- 
 duce new principles into her framework, and to impose 
 them on the minority. We question, on this principle, the 
 right of that act of discipline which was exercised in the 
 present century by a preponderating majority of the Anti- 
 burgher body in Scotland, when they deposed and excom- 
 municated the late Dr. M'Crie for the ecclesiastical offence 
 of holding in every particular by the original tenets of the 
 fathers of the Secession. 
 
 The overt act in the case manifested their power, but the 
 various attempts made to manifest their right we regard as 
 mere abortions. They had no right to do what they did. 
 The questions on which the majority differed from their 
 fathers ought in justice, instead of being made a subject of 
 legislation, to be left an open question. And we hold, on 
 a similar principle, that whatever questions of conduct or 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 285 
 
 polity may arise in the Free Church, which, though new to 
 it, yet come to be adopted by a majority, should be left 
 open questions also. Of course, of novelties in doctrine 
 we do not speak, we trust that within the Free Church 
 none such will ever arise ; we refer rather to those semi- 
 metaphysical points of casuistry, and nice questions of 
 conduct, in which the differences that perplex non-estab- 
 lished Churches are most liable to originate, matters in 
 which one man sees after one way, and another man after 
 another, and which, until heaped up into importance, 
 wave-like, as if by the wind, pertain not to the province 
 of solid demonstrable truth, but to the province of loose 
 fluctuating opinion. And be it remarked, that non-estab- 
 lished Churches are very apt to be disturbed by such 
 questions. 
 
 They are in circumstances in which the ripple passes into 
 the wavelet, and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, 
 as on all others, there is great value in the teachings of 
 history; and the Free Church might be worse employed 
 than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty years 
 of the last century and half has been marked by its own 
 special questions of the kind among the non-established 
 Churches of Scotland. 
 
 The question of the last fifty years has been that Voluntary 
 one which virtually led to the striking off the roll of the 
 Antiburgher Secession Church, those protesting ministers 
 who formed the nucleus of the Original Secession, and to 
 the excommunication and deposition of Dr. M'Crie. The 
 question of the preceding fifty years was that connected 
 with the burghal oath, which had the effect of splitting into 
 two antagonist sections the religious body of which the 
 Burgher Secession formed but one of the fragments, a 
 body fast rising at the time into a position of importance, 
 which the split prevented it from ever fully realizing. The 
 question of the fifty years with which the period began was 
 
286 DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 that which fixed the Cameronian body, not merely in a 
 condition of unsocial seclusion in its relation with all other 
 churches, but even detached it from its allegiance to the 
 State, and placed it in circumstances of positive rebellion. 
 Perhaps the history of this latter body, as embodied in its 
 older testimony, and the controversial writings of its Fairlys 
 and Thorburns, is that from the study of which the Free 
 Church might derive most profit at the present time. We 
 live in so late an age of the world, that we have little chance 
 of finding much which is positively new in the writings or 
 speeches of our casuists. When we detect, in consequence, 
 some of our ministers or office-bearers sporting principles 
 that do not distinctively belong to the Church of the 
 Disruption, we may be pretty sure, if we but search well, 
 of discovering these principles existing as the distinctive 
 tenets of some other Church ; and the present tendency of 
 a most small but most respectable minority in our body is 
 decidedly Cameronian. 
 
 The passages of Scripture on which the Cameronians 
 chiefly dwelt in their testimony and controversial writings, 
 were those discussed by the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh 
 on Wednesday last. As condemnatory of what is designated 
 the great national sin of the Union, for instance, the testi- 
 mony adduces, among other texts, Isa. viii. 12, ' Say ye not, 
 A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, 
 A confederacy ;' Hos. vii. 8, 9, ' Ephraim hath mixed himself 
 among the people ; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers 
 have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not ; yea, 
 grey hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it 
 not;' and above all, 2 Cor. vi. 14, 15, 'Be ye not unequally 
 yoked together with unbelievers for what fellowship hath 
 righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion 
 hath light with darkness, and what concord hath Christ 
 with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an 
 infidel?' And let the reader mark how logically these 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 287 
 
 Scriptures are applied. ' All associations and confederacies 
 with the enemies of true religion and godliness,' says the 
 Testimony, * are thus expressly condemned in Scripture, 
 and represented as dangerous to the true Israel of God. 
 And if simple confederacies with malignants and enemies 
 to the cause of Christ are condemned, much more is an 
 incorporation with them, which is an embodying of two 
 into one, and therefore a straiter conjunction. And, taking 
 the definition of malignants given by the declarations of 
 both kingdoms, joined in arms anno 1643, to be just, which 
 says, " Such as would not take the Covenant were to be 
 declared to be public enemies to religion and their country, 
 and that they are to be censured and punished as pro- 
 fessed adversaries and malignants," it cannot be refused but 
 that the prelatic party in England now joined with are 
 such. Further, by this incorporating union this nation is 
 obliged to support the idolatrous Church of England.' And 
 thus the argument runs on irrefragable in its logic, if we 
 but grant the premises. But to what, we ask, did it lead, 
 assisted, of course, by other arguments of a similar character, 
 in the body with whom it originated? To their withdrawal, 
 from the times of the Revolution till now, from every 
 national movement in the cause of Christ and His gospel ; 
 nay, most consistently, we must add' for we have ever 
 failed to see the sense or logic of acting a public and 
 political part in our own or our neighbour's behalf, and 
 declining on principle to act it in behalf of Christianity or 
 its institutions not only have they withdrawn themselves 
 from all political exertion in behalf of religion, but in 
 behalf of their country also. A Cameronian holding firm 
 by his principles of non-incorporation with idolaters, cannot 
 be a magistrate nor a member of Parliament ; he cannot 
 vote in an election, nor serve in the army. 
 
 It is one of the grand evils of questions of casuistry of 
 this kind, that men, instead of looking at things and esti- 
 
288 DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 mating them as they really exist, are contented to play games 
 at logic chopping with but the imperfect signs of things 
 mere verbal counters, twisted from their original meanings 
 by the influence of delusive metaphors and false associations. 
 
 Let us just see, in reference not to mere words, but to 
 things, what can be truly meant by the terms ' apostate or 
 apostatizing Government,' as applied to the Government 
 of Great Britain. The words can have of course no just 
 application, in a personal bearing, to present members of 
 Government, as distinguished from the members of previous 
 Governments, seeing that the functionaries now in office are 
 just as much, or rather as little religious, as any other 
 functionaries in office since the times of the Revolution or 
 before. In a personal sense, England's last religious govern- 
 ment was that of Cromwell. The term apostate, or aposta- 
 tizing, can have only an official meaning. What, then, in 
 its official meaning, does it in reality express ? The govern- 
 ment of the United Kingdom is representative ; and it is 
 one of the great blessings which we enjoy as citizens that it is 
 so, one of those blessings for which we may now, as when 
 we were younger, express ourselves thankful in the words of 
 honest Isaac Watts, * that we were born on British ground.' 
 At any rate, this fact of representation is a fact a thing, 
 not a mere word. There is another fact in the case equally 
 solid and certain. This representation of the empire is 
 based on a population of about twenty-six millions of people ; 
 twelve millions of whom are Episcopalian, eight millions 
 Roman Catholic, three millions Presbyterian, and three 
 millions more divided among the various other Protestant 
 sects of the country. And this also is zfact a thing, not a 
 mere word. 
 
 In the good providence of God we were born the citizens 
 of an empire thus representative in its government, and 
 thus ecclesiastically constituted in its population. 
 
 And it would be a further fact consequent on the other 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 289 
 
 two, that the aggregate character of the Government would 
 represent the aggregate moral and ecclesiastical character 
 of the people, were every distinct portion into which the 
 people are parcelled to exert itself in proportion to its share 
 of political influence. But from the yet further fact, that 
 the portions have not always exerted themselves in equal 
 ratios, and from other causes, political and providential, the 
 character of the Government has considerably fluctuated 
 now representing one portion more in proportion to its 
 amount than its mere bulk warranted, anon another. Thus, 
 in the days of the Commonwealth, what are now the six 
 million Presbyterians and Independents, etc., had a British 
 Government wholly representative of themselves ; while 
 what are now the twelve million Episcopalians and the 
 eight million Papists had none. 
 
 England at the time produced one of those men, of a 
 type surpassingly great, that the world fails to see once in 
 centuries ; and, like Brennus of old, he flung his sword into 
 the lighter scale, and it straightway outweighed the other. 
 There then ensued a period of twenty-eight years, in which 
 Government represented only the Episcopalians and Papists; 
 and then a period of a hundred and forty years more, in 
 which it represented only the Episcopalians and Presby- 
 terians. And now for Popery, growing strong in the in- 
 terval, had been using all appliances in its own behalf, and 
 had not been met in the proper spiritual field it repre- 
 sents Episcopacy, Roman Catholicism, and a minute, unin- 
 fluential portion of the Presbyterian and other evangelistic 
 bodies. But how, it may be asked, has this result taken 
 place ? 
 
 How is it only a moiety of these bodies that is repre- 
 sented ? Mainly, we unhesitatingly reply, through the influ- 
 ence exerted by certain crotchets entertained by the bodies 
 themselves on their political standing. When Government 
 at the Revolution, instead of being as formerly representa- 
 
2 90 D1SR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 tive of Episcopacy and Popery, became representative of 
 Episcopacy and Presbytery, Cameronianism broke off, on 
 the plea that the governing power ought to be representa- 
 tive of Presbytery only, and that it was apostate because it 
 was not ; and the political influence of the body has been 
 ever since lost to the Protestant cause. Voluntaryism, on 
 the other hand, neutralized its influence, by holding that, 
 though quite at freedom to exert itself in the political walk 
 in attaining secular objects, religious objects are in that walk 
 unattainable, or at least not to be attained ; and so it also 
 has been virtually lost to the Protestant cause. And now 
 a cloud like a man's hand arises in our own Church, to 
 threaten a further secession from the ranks of the remaining 
 class, who strive to stamp upon the Government, through 
 the operation of the representative principle, at least a 
 modicum of the evangelistic character. And all this is 
 taking place in an age in which the battle for the integrity 
 of the Sabbath as a national institute, and other similar 
 battles, shall soon have to be decided on political ground. 
 If 'apostate' or 'apostatizing' be at all proper words in 
 reference to the things which we have here described, what, 
 we ask, save the want either of weight or of exertion on the 
 part of the represented bodies who complain of it, can be 
 properly regarded as the cause of that apostasy ? A repre- 
 sentative Government, if the represented be Episcopalian, 
 will itself be officially Episcopalian ; if the represented be 
 Papist, it will itself be officially Papist ; if the represented 
 be Presbyterian, it will itself be officially Presbyterian ; if 
 composed of all three together, the Government will bear 
 an aggregate average character ; but if, on some crotchet, 
 the Presbyterians withdraw from the political field, while the 
 others exert themselves in that field to the utmost, it will 
 be Popish and Episcopalian exclusively. But for a result 
 so undesirable a result which, if Presbytery had been 
 formerly in the ascendant, might of course be called official 
 
DISR UPTION PRINCIPLES. 2 9 1 
 
 apostasy it would be the Presbyterian constituency that 
 would be to blame, not the Government. 
 
 It will be seen that this view of the real state of things 
 was that of Knox and Chalmers, and that they acted in due 
 accordance with it. We are told by the younger M'Crie, 
 in his admirable Sketches of Scottish Church History, ' that 
 Knox and his brethren, perceiving that the whole ecclesias- 
 tical property of the kingdom bade fair to be soon swallowed 
 up by the rapacity of the nobles, insisted that a consider- 
 able portion of it should be reserved for the support of 
 the poor, the founding of universities and schools, and the 
 maintenance of an efficient ministry throughout the country. 
 At last/ continues the historian, * after great difficulty, the 
 Privy Council came to the determination that the eccle- 
 siastical revenues should be divided into three parts, 
 that two of them should be given to the ejected prelates 
 during their lives, which afterwards reverted to the nobility, 
 and that the third part should be divided between the 
 Court and the Protestant ministry.' 
 
 ' Well,' exclaimed Knox on hearing of this arrangement, 
 'if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me. 
 I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must 
 be divided between God and the devil.' Strong words 
 these. Here is a Government, according to Knox's own 
 statement of the case, giving five-sixths to the devil, and 
 but a remaining sixth to God. But does Knox on that 
 account refuse God's moiety? Does he set himself to 
 reason metaphysically regarding his degree of responsibility 
 for either what the devil got, or what the Government gave 
 the devil. Not he. He received God's part, and in 
 applying it wisely and honestly to God's service, wished it 
 more ; but as for the rest, like a man of broad strong sense 
 as he assuredly was, he left the devil and the Privy Council 
 to divide the responsibility between them. And the large- 
 minded Chalmers entertained exactly the same views, 
 
2 9 2 DISH UPTION PRINCIPLES. 
 
 views which, if not in thorough harmony with the idle 
 fictions which dialecticians employ when they treat of 
 Governments, at least entirely accord with the real con- 
 dition of things. The official character of a representative 
 Legislature must, as we have shown, resemble that of the 
 constituency which it represents. In order to alter it per- 
 manently for the better, it is essentially necessary, as a 
 first step in the process, that the worse parts of the con- 
 stituencies on which it rests be so altered. 
 
 Now, for altering constituencies for the better, schools 
 and churches were the machinery of Knox and of Chalmers ; 
 and if the funds for the support of either came honestly to 
 them, unclogged with conditions unworthy of the object, 
 they at once received them as given on God's behalf, how- 
 ever idolatrously the givers whether individuals or Govern- 
 ments might be employing money drawn from the same 
 purse in other directions. ' Ought I,' said Chalmers in 
 reference to the Educational question, ' ought I not to use, 
 on teetotal principles, the water of the public pump, be- 
 cause another man mixes it with his toddy ? ' It was not 
 because Popery was established in the colonies, or seemed 
 in danger of being established in Ireland, that the Free 
 Church resigned its hold of the temporalities of the Scottish 
 Establishment. Such endowment, instead of forming an 
 argument for resignation, would form, on the contrary, an 
 argument for keeping faster hold, in behalf of Protestantism, 
 of the fortalice of the Establishment ; just as if an invading 
 army had possessed itself of the Castle of Dumbarton, with 
 the strongholds of Fort-Augustus and Fort-William, the 
 argument would be all the stronger for the national forces 
 defending with renewed determination the Castles of Stir- 
 ling and of Edinburgh, and the magnificent defences of 
 Fort-George. 
 
 February 9, 1848. 
 
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 
 CRIMEAN WAR. 
 
 THE war now happily concluded was characterized by 
 some very remarkable features. It was on the part of 
 Britain the war of a highly civilised country, in a pre- 
 eminently mechanical, and, with all its faults, singularly 
 humane age, in an age, too, remarkable for the diffusion 
 of its literature ; and hence certain conspicuous traits 
 which belonged to none of the other wars in which our 
 country had been previously engaged. Never before did 
 such completely equipped fleets and armies quit our shores. 
 The navies with which we covered the Black Sea and the 
 Baltic were not at all what they would have been had the 
 war lasted for one other campaign, but they mightily ex- 
 ceeded anything of the kind that Britain or the world had 
 ever seen before. The fleets of Copenhagen, Trafalgar, 
 and the Nile would have cut but a sorry figure beside them ; 
 and there was more of the materiel of war concentrated on 
 that one siege of Sebastopol than on any half-dozen other 
 sieges recorded in British history. In all that mechanical 
 art could accomplish, the late war with Russia was by far 
 the most considerable in which our country was ever en- 
 gaged. It was, in respect of materiel, a war of the world's 
 pre-eminently mechanical people in the world's pre- 
 eminently mechanical age. With this strong leading 
 feature, however, there mingled another, equally marked, 
 in which the element was weakness, not strength. The 
 men who beat all the world in heading pins are unable 
 often to do anything else; for usually, in proportion as 
 
 293 
 
294 CHARACTERISTICS OF 
 
 mechanical skill becomes intense, does it also become 
 narrow; and the history of the two campaigns before Se- 
 bastopol brought out very strikingly a certain helplessness 
 on the part of the British army, part of which at least must 
 be attributed to this cause. It is surely a remarkable fact, 
 that in an army never more than seven miles removed from 
 the base line of its operations, the distress suffered was so 
 great, that nearly five times the number of men sank under 
 it that perished in battle. There was no want among them 
 of pinheading and pinheaded martinets. The errors of 
 officers such as Lucan and Cardigan are understood to be 
 all on the side of severity ; but in heading their pin, they 
 wholly exhaust their art ; and under their surveillance and 
 direction a great army became a small one, with the sea 
 covered by a British fleet only a few miles away. So far as 
 the statistics of the British portion of this greatest of sieges 
 have yet been ascertained, rather more than three thousand 
 men perished in battle by the shot or steel of the enemy, 
 or afterwards of their wounds, and rather more than fiftccji 
 thousand men of privation and disease. As for the poor 
 soldiers themselves, they could do but little in even more 
 favourable circumstances under the pinheading martinets ; 
 and yet at least such of them as were drawn from the more 
 thoroughly artificial districts of the country must, we sus- 
 pect, have fared all the worse in consequence of that sub- 
 division of labour which has so mightily improved the 
 mechanical standing of Britain in the aggregate, and so 
 restricted and lowered the general ability in individuals. 
 We cannot help thinking that an army of backwoodsmen 
 of the present day, or of Scotch Highlanders marked by the 
 prevailing traits of the last century, would have fared better 
 and suffered less. 
 
 Another remarkable feature of the war arose out of the 
 singularly ready and wonderfully diffused literature of the 
 day. Like those self-registering machines that keep a strict 
 
THE CRIMEAN WAR. 295 
 
 account of their own workings, it seemed to be engaged, 
 as it went on, in writing, stage after stage, its own history. 
 The acting never got a single day ahead of the writing, 
 and never a single week ahead of the publishing; and, 
 in consequence, the whole civilised world became the inte- 
 rested witnesses of what was going on. The war became a 
 great game at chess, with a critical public looking over the 
 shoulders of the players. It was a peculiar feature, too, that 
 the public should have been so critical. As the literature of 
 a people becomes old, it weakens in the power of originating, 
 and strengthens in the power of criticising. Reviews and 
 critiques become the master efforts of a learned and in- 
 genious people, whose literature has passed its full blow ; 
 and the criticism extends always, in countries in which the 
 press is free from the productions of men who write in their 
 closets, to the actings of men who conduct the political 
 business of the country, or who direct its fleets and armies. 
 And with regard to them also it may be safely affirmed, that 
 the critical ability overshoots and excels the originating 
 ability. There seems to have been no remarkably good 
 generalship manifested by Britain in the Crimea : all the 
 leading generalship appears, on the contrary, to have been 
 very mediocre generalship indeed. The common men and 
 subordinate officers did their duty nobly ; and there have 
 been such splendid examples of skilful generalship in fourth 
 and fifth-rate commands commands such as that of Sir 
 Colin Campbell and Sir George Brown that it has been 
 not unfrequently asked, whether we had in reality the ' right 
 men in the right places,' and whether there might not, after 
 all, have been generalship enough in the Crimea had it been 
 but rightly arranged. But the leading generalship was cer- 
 tainly not brilliant. The criticism upon it, on the other 
 hand, has been singularly so. The ages of Marlborough 
 and Wellington did not produce a tithe of the brilliant 
 military criticism which has appeared in England in news- 
 
296 CHARACTERISTICS OF 
 
 papers, magazines, and reviews during the last two years. 
 And yet it is possible that, had the very cleverest of these 
 critics been appointed to the chief command, he would 
 have got on as ill as any of his predecessors. In truth, the 
 power of originating and the power of criticising are essen- 
 tially different powers in the worlds both of thought and of 
 action. Talent accumulates the materials of criticism from 
 the experience of the past; and thus, as the world gets 
 older, the critical ability grows, and becomes at length 
 formidably complete ; whereas the power of originating, 
 or, what is the same thing, of acting wisely, and on the 
 spur of the moment, in new and untried circumstances, is 
 an incommunicable faculty, which genius, and genius only, 
 can possess. And genius is as rare now as it ever was. 
 Any man of talent can be converted, by dint of study and 
 painstaking, into a good military critic ; but a Wellington 
 or a Napoleon had as certainly to be born what they were, 
 as a Dante or a Milton. 
 
 But by far the most pleasing feature of the war of at 
 least the part taken in it by Britain is to be found in that 
 humanity, the best evidence of a civilisation truly Christian, 
 which has characterized it in all its stages. Generous re- 
 gard for the safety and respect for the feelings of a brave 
 enemy, when conquered, have marked our countrymen for 
 centuries. But we owe it to the peculiar philanthropy of the 
 time, that, in the midst of much official neglect, our own sick 
 and wounded soldiers have been cared for after a fashion in 
 which British soldiers were never cared for before. The 'lady 
 nurses,' with Miss Nightingale at their head, imparted its 
 most distinctive character to the war. We have now before 
 us a deeply interesting volume, 1 the production of one of 
 these devoted females, a native of the north country, or, as 
 she was introduced by an old French officer to some Zouaves, 
 
 1 Is nicer, or Smyrna and its British Hospital in 1855. By a Lady. 
 London : James Madder, 8, Leadenhall Street. 
 
THE CRIMEAN WAR. 
 
 297 
 
 her fellow-passengers to the East, whom she had wished to 
 see, a true ' Moutagnarde de Ecossaise? The name of the 
 authoress is not given ; but it will, we daresay, be recog- 
 nised in the neighbourhood of the ' capital of the High- 
 lands' as that of a delicately nurtured lady, the daughter of 
 a late distinguished physician, well known to the north of 
 the Grampians as an able and upright man, who, had he 
 not so sedulously devoted himself to the profession which 
 he adorned, might have excelled in almost any department 
 of science. And in strong sound sense and genial feeling, 
 we find the daughter worthy of such a father. Some of 
 our more zealous Protestants professed at one time not a 
 little alarm lest the lady nurses might be Papists in dis- 
 guise ; and certainly their ' regulation dresses,' all cut after 
 one fashion, and of one sombre hue, did seem a little nun- 
 like, and perhaps rather alarming. But the following pas- 
 sage which, from the amusing mixture which it exhibits 
 of strong good sense and half-indignant womanly feeling, 
 our readers will, we are sure, relish may serve to show 
 that some of the ladies who wore the questionable dress, 
 liked it quite as ill as the most zealous member of the 
 Reformation Society could have done, and were very excel- 
 lent Protestants under its cover. The authoress of the 
 volume before us is a Presbyterian \ and the occasion of 
 the following remarks was the meeting of the British Consul 
 at Marseilles, and the necessity that herself and her com- 
 panions felt of getting head-dresses for themselves, that 
 could be looked at ere entertaining him at dinner. ' Per- 
 haps it may be thought,' says our authoress, ' that all this 
 solicitude about our caps was unsuitable in persons going 
 out as what is called " Sisters of Mercy ;" but I must once 
 for all say that, as far as I was concerned, I neither pro- 
 fessed to be a "Sister of Charity," a "Sister of Mercy," 
 nor anything of the kind. I was, as I told a poissarde of 
 Boulogne, a British woman who had little to do at home, 
 
298 CHARACTERISTICS OF 
 
 and wished to help our poor soldiers, if I could, abroad. 
 The reason given to me for the peculiarity and uniformity 
 of our dress was, that the soldiers might know and respect 
 their nurses. It seems a sensible reason, and one which 
 I could not object to, even disliking, as I did, all pecu- 
 liarity of attire that seemed to advertise the nurses only as 
 serving God, or serving Him pre-eminently, and thus con- 
 veying a tacit reproach to the rest of the world ; for the 
 obligation lies on all the same. I did not feel then, nor do 
 I now, that we were doing anything better or more praise- 
 worthy than is done in a quiet, unostentatious way at home 
 every day. On the contrary, to many temperaments, my 
 own among the number, it is far less difficult to engage in 
 a new and exciting work like the one we were then enter- 
 ing on there, than to pursue the uneventful monotony of 
 daily doing good at home. As for the dress itself, I have 
 nothing to say against it. Although not perhaps of the 
 material or texture I should have preferred, still the colour, 
 grey, was one I generally wore from choice. But I must 
 confess, that when I found myself restricted to it, without 
 what seemed a good reason, an intense desire for blue, 
 green, red, and yellow, with all their combinations, took 
 possession of me ; though, now that I may wear what I 
 please, I find my former favour for grey has returned in 
 full force. However, allowing that it was desirable we 
 should have had some uniform costume, it certainly was 
 unnecessary that ladies, nurses, and washerwomen should 
 have been dressed alike, as we were. That was part of the 
 mistake I have already adverted to, and was productive of 
 confusion and bad feeling.' 
 
 Despite of the uniform dresses, however, the sick and 
 wounded soldiers soon learned to distinguish between the 
 paid nurses and the ladies who had left their comfortable 
 British homes to lavish upon them their gratuitous, price- 
 less labours. 
 
THE CRIMEAN WAR. 299 
 
 There is no assumption in this volume. Its authoress 
 writes as if she had done only her duty, and as if the task 
 had not been an exceedingly hard or difficult one ; but the 
 simple facts related show how very much was accomplished 
 and endured. Every chapter justifies the judgment pro- 
 nounced by the tall Irish sergeant. This lady nurse is a 
 1 real fine woman,' a noble specimen of the class whose 
 disinterested and self-sacrificing exertions gave to the late 
 war its most distinctive and brilliant feature. The bravery 
 of British men had been long established ; the superadded 
 trait is the heroism of British women. In what circum- 
 stances of peril and suffering that heroism was exerted, the 
 following extract, with which we conclude, may serve to 
 show. It is the funeral of one of the lady nurses, who 
 sank under an attack of malignant fever, that the following 
 striking passage records : 
 
 ' The Protestant burial-ground is a dismal-looking, ne- 
 glected spot. It was chosen from an idea that Drusilla's 
 friends at home might prefer it to the open hill where the 
 soldiers lay ; but if there had been time for consideration 
 and inspection, it would have been otherwise arranged : for 
 the appearance of the place struck a chill to our hearts it 
 looked so dark and dreary, with the grass more than a foot 
 high, and the weeds towering above it ; and from its being 
 close to the bay, and the porous nature of the soil, the 
 grave which had been dug on the forenoon was almost 
 filled by water ; and on the words, " Forasmuch as it hath 
 pleased Almighty God," we heard the coffin splash into the 
 half-full grave. There was a general regret afterwards that 
 this burial-ground had been chosen, but poor Drusilla will 
 not sleep the less soundly ; and we all agreed, on leaving 
 her grave, that whoever of us was next called to die, should 
 be buried on the hill, in the spot allotted to the poor 
 soldiers, open and unprotected as it was. Death seemed 
 
300 CHARACTERISTICS OF 
 
 very near to us then ; we had already lost two orderlies, 
 and many of the nurses were lying at the gates of death. 
 
 Miss A had made an almost miraculous escape, and 
 
 was not yet out of danger from relapse. The first gap had 
 been made in our immediate party, and who of us could tell 
 whether she herself was not to be the next? 
 
 * The evening was fast closing as we returned, some in 
 caiques, and others walking solemnly and sadly ; for, besides 
 the feelings naturally attending such a scene, we all regretted 
 poor Drusilla, who, although she had not been long among 
 us, was so obliging and anxious to be of use. She was a 
 good-looking young woman, and immediately on her arrival 
 had become the object of attraction to one of the clerks, 
 whose attentions, however, she most steadily declined. He 
 still persisted in showing the most extraordinary attachment 
 to her, and during her illness was in such a state of excite- 
 ment and distress as to be utterly incapacitated for attend- 
 ing to his duties properly. He used to sit on the stairs 
 leading to her room, in the hopes of seeing some one who 
 could tell him how she was, and went perpetually to the 
 passage outside her room, entreating of the Misses Le 
 
 M , who generally sat up with her, to let him in to 
 
 see her. This they refused till the night of her death, 
 when she was quite insensible, and past all hope of re- 
 covery ; so that his visit could do her no harm. He stayed 
 a few minutes, and looked his last on her ; for in the morn- 
 ing at seven o'clock she died. I shall never forget his face 
 when he came to my store-room, in accordance with his 
 duty, to correct some inaccuracy in the diet-roll. He 
 
 seemed utterly bewildered with sorrow; and Miss S , 
 
 who had also occasion to speak to him, said she never saw 
 grief so strongly marked in a human face. He insisted on 
 following her remains to the grave as chief mourner, and 
 wearied himself with carrying the coffin. No one inter- 
 fered with him ; for all seemed to think he had acquired 
 
THE CRIMEAN WAR. 301 
 
 the right, by his unmistakeable affection, to perform these 
 sad offices j and the lady superintendent, moved by his 
 sorrow, allowed him to retain a ring of some small value 
 which the deceased had been accustomed to wear.' 
 
 June 14, 1856. 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 IT is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of 
 certain branches of poetry and the belles lettres in their 
 connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by 
 which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies 
 can be determined ; and the degree of success with which 
 they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, 
 throws at times very striking lights on its condition and 
 history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals 
 of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its litera- 
 ture alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth 
 century, during which the literature of England rose to its 
 highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, 
 in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles 
 flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, 
 on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even 
 mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its 
 full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of 
 Churches ; but it is a means, though not an end. And it 
 will be found that all the better Churches have been as 
 literary as they could ; and that, if at any time the literature 
 has been defective, it has been rather their circumstances 
 that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. 
 Their enemies have delighted to represent the case dif- 
 ferently. Our readers must remember the famous instance 
 in Old Mortality, so happily exposed by the elder M'Crie, 
 in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell 
 a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse- 
 hater, and 'puts into his mouth that condemnation of 
 
 302 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 303 
 
 elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party ;' 
 'overlooking or suppressing the fact/ says the Doctor, 
 * that there was at that very time in the camp of the Cove- 
 nanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, 
 was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.' It is 
 equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the 
 mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated 
 by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland 
 had properly no literature after the extinction of its old 
 classical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of 
 Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of 
 Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a 
 poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own 
 generation. For even the greater part of the popular 
 version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the 
 English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it 
 the remains of an earlier and more classical time : its ver- 
 sion of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly- 
 turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly 
 a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William 
 Keith, a- Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and 
 one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find 
 little else that is Scotch in it ; the Church to which, in the 
 previous age, the author of the mosjt elegant version of the 
 Psalms ever given to the world had belonged, had now not- 
 withstanding the exertions of its Zachary Boyds to import 
 its poetry. In the following century, the Church shared in 
 the general literature of the time. She missed, and but 
 barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to herself 
 the poet Thomson who at least carried on his studies so 
 far with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering 
 his probationary discourses. We fear, however, he would 
 have made but an indolent minister ; and that, though his 
 occasional sermons, judging from the hymn which concludes 
 
3 o 4 THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 the Seasons, might have been singularly fine ones, they 
 would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. 
 The greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church 
 during the century was Thomson's contemporary, Robert 
 Blair, a man who was not an idle minister, and who, 
 unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the evangelical side. 
 The author of the Grave was one of the bosom friends of 
 Colonel Gardiner, and a valued correspondent of Doddridge 
 and Watts. Curiously enough, though the great merit of 
 his piece has been acknowledged by critics such as Southey, 
 it has been regarded as an imitation of the Night Thoughts 
 of Young. * Blair's Grave] says Southey in his Life of 
 Cowper, l is the only poem I can call to mind which has 
 been composed in imitation of the Night Thoughts /' and 
 though Campbell himself steered clear of the error, we find 
 it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information 
 regarding Blair given in his Essay on English Poetry by his 
 editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, 
 that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As 
 shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears 
 date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the 
 publication of even the first book of the Night Thoughts, 
 Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of 
 Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two 
 London publishers, states further, that the greater part of it 
 had been written previous to the year 1731, ere he had yet 
 entered the ministry ; whereas the first book of Young's 
 poem was not published until the year 1744. Poetry such as 
 that of Blair is never the result of imitation : its verbal hap- 
 pinesses are at least as great as those of the Night Thoughts 
 themselves, and its power and earnestness considerably 
 greater. * The eighteenth century,' says Thomas Campbell, 
 1 has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful 
 and simple a character as that of the Grave. It is a popular 
 poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 305 
 
 language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. 
 The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, 
 noted some of the author's most nervous and expressive 
 phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of 
 friendship, the " solder of society." Blair may be a homely, 
 and even a gloomy poet, in the eye of fastidious criticism ; 
 but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in 
 his gloom and homeliness, that keeps it most distinctly apart 
 from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like 
 the powerful expression of a countenance without regular 
 beauty.' Such is the judgment on Blair destined, in all 
 appearance, to be a final one of a writer who was at once 
 the most catholic of critics and the most polished of poets. 
 There succeeded to the author of the Grave, a group of 
 poets of the Church, of whom the Church has not been 
 greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a curious 
 chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be 
 said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad 
 ones ; and his connection with the Church was very much an 
 accident, and soon dissolved. Blacklock, too, was as much 
 a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his blindness, would 
 scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day. Nor 
 was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson 
 than most of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a 
 mediocre poet. He is the author, however, of a very respect- 
 able paraphrase the sixty-second of all his works the one 
 that promises to live longest : and we find the productions 
 of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved, 
 whose other writings have died. And yet the group of 
 Scottish literati that produced our paraphrases, if looking 
 simply to literary accomplishment we do not demand 
 genius must be regarded as a very remarkable one, when 
 we consider that the greater number of the individuals 
 which composed it were all at one time the ministers of 
 a single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know 
 
 u 
 
306 1HE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 of no Church, either in Britain or elsewhere, that could 
 now command such a committee as that which sat, at the 
 bidding of the General Assembly, considerably more than 
 sixty years ago, to prepare the * Translations and Para- 
 phrases.' Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection 
 is composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers ; and 
 the groundwork of most of the others, furnished in large 
 part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Dod- 
 dridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the com- 
 position, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. 
 With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal 
 to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and 
 Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later 
 Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy 
 enough in the pieces given to him to render more so 
 than in his prose ; though, even when first introduced to 
 that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of 
 those who regarded it as perfection of writing : * Oh, the 
 sterility of that man's fancy ! if, indeed, he has any such 
 faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as 
 Shakespeare somewhere describes, " dry as the remainder 
 biscuit after a voyage." ' But the fancy that Blair wanted, 
 poor Logan had ; and the man who too severely criticises 
 his flowing and elegant paraphrases would do well to beware 
 of the memories of his children. A poet whose pieces 
 cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, 
 our 'Translations and Paraphrases' are highly creditable 
 to the literary taste and ability of the Church during the 
 latter half of the last century ; and it serves to show how 
 very much matters changed in this respect in about forty 
 years, that while in the earlier period the men fitted for 
 such work were all to be found within the pale of the 
 Church's ministry, at a later time, when the late Principal 
 Baird set himself, with the sanction of the General As- 
 sembly, to devise means for adding to the collection, and 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 307 
 
 for revising our metrical version of the Psalms, he had to 
 look for assistance almost exclusively to poets outside the 
 precincts of even its membership. 
 
 And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true 
 poets poets who, though, according to Wordsworth, they 
 ' wanted the accomplishment of verse,' were of larger calibre 
 and greater depth than their predecessors. Chalmers had 
 already produced his Astronomical Discourses, and poor 
 Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London audiences 
 with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of 
 his singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, 
 though but comparatively little known, was rising, in his 
 quiet parish church, into flights of genuine though un- 
 measured poetry, of an altitude to which minor poets, in 
 their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor is the race 
 yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more 
 true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works 
 of all the second-class British poets put together ; and those 
 who would now wish to acquaint themselves with the higher 
 and more spirit-rousing poetry of our Church, would have 
 to seek it within earshot of the pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, 
 and of James Hamilton. Still, however, it ever affords us 
 pleasure to find it in the more conventional form of classic 
 and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets 
 gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling 
 beneath the literature of her age ; and much on this ac- 
 count, but more, we think, from their great intrinsic merit, 
 have we been gratified by the perusal of a volume of poems 
 which has just issued from the press under the name of 
 one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev. James 
 D. Burns. We are greatly mistaken if Mr. Burns be not 
 a genuine poet, skilled, as becomes a scholar and a student 
 of classic lore, in giving to his verse the true artistic form, 
 but not the less born to inherit the ' vision and the faculty ' 
 which cannot be acquired. Most men of great talent have 
 
3o8 THE POETS OF THE CHURCfT. 
 
 their poetic age : it is very much restricted, however, to 
 the first five years of full bodily development, also particu- 
 larly the season of love and of love-like friendships ; and 
 then a sterner and more prosaic mood follows. But re- 
 collections of the time survive ; and it is mainly through 
 the medium of these recollections that in the colder periods 
 the feelings and visions of the poets continue to be appre- 
 ciated and felt. It was said of Thomson the poet by 
 Samuel Johnson, that he could not look at two candles 
 burning other than poetically. The phrase was employed 
 in conversation by old Johnson ; but it must have been the 
 experience of young Johnson, derived from a time long 
 gone by, that suggested it. It is characteristic of the poetic 
 age, that objects which in later life become commonplace 
 in the mind, are then surrounded as if by a halo of poetic 
 feeling. The candles were, no doubt, an extreme illustra- 
 tion ; but there is scarce any object in nature, and there 
 are very few in art, especially if etherealized by the adjuncts 
 of antiquity or association, that are not capable of being 
 thus, as it were, embathed in sentiment. With the true 
 poet, the ability of investing every object with a poetic 
 atmosphere remains undiminished throughout life ; and we 
 find it strikingly manifested in the volume before us. In 
 almost every line in some of the pieces we find a distinct 
 bit of picture steeped in poetic feeling. The following 
 piece, peculiarly appropriate to the present time, we adduce 
 as an illustration of our meaning : 
 
 DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 
 ' Strait of 111 Hope ! thy frozen lips at last 
 Unclose, to teach our seamen how to sift 
 A passage -where blue icebergs clash and drift, 
 And the shore loosely rattles in the blast. 
 We hold the secret thou hast clench'd so fast 
 For ages, our best blood has eanied the gift. 
 Blood spilt, or hoarded up in patient thrift, 
 Through sunless months in ceaseless peril passed. 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 309 
 
 But what of daring Franklin ? who may know 
 
 The pangs that wrung that heart so proud and brave, 
 
 In secret wrestling with its deadly woe, 
 
 And no kind voice to reach him o'er the wave ? 
 
 Now he sleeps fast beneath his shroud of snow, 
 And the cold pole-star only knows his grave. 
 
 ' Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain, 
 
 O'er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye, 
 
 Or scan the signs of the snow-muffled sky, 
 In hope of quick deliverance but in vain ; 
 Then, faring to his icy tent again, 
 
 To cheer his mates with a familiar smile, 
 . And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguile 
 
 Slow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain. 
 Long let our hero's memory be enshrined 
 
 In all true British hearts ! He calmly stood 
 In danger's foremost rank, nor looked behind. 
 
 lie did his work, not with the fever'd blood 
 
 Of battle, but with hard-tried fortitude ; 
 In peril dauntless, and in death resigned. 
 
 ' Despond not, Britain ! Should this sacred hold 
 
 Of freedom, still inviolate, be assailed, 
 
 The high, unblenching spirit which prevailed 
 In ancient days, is neither dead nor cold. 
 Men are still in thee of heroic mould 
 
 Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailed 
 
 As worthy peers, invulnerably mailed, 
 Because by Duty's sternest law controlled. 
 Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voice 
 
 Among the nations battling for the right, 
 
 In the unrusted armour of thy youth ; 
 And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice : 
 
 For on thy side is the resistless might 
 
 Of Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth ! ' 
 
 This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter ; 
 as just in its thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and classic 
 in its language. The vein of strong sense which runs 
 through all the poetry of Mr. Burns, and imparts to it 
 
310 THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 solidity and coherency, is, we think, not less admirable 
 than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as little 
 common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts 
 arise in the following very exquisite little piece, written in 
 Madeira, and suggested by the distant view of the neigh- 
 bouring island of Porto Santo, one of the first colonized 
 by the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century. 
 Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrillo, 
 the first governor of the island, and after his marriage 
 lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on 
 this foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem : 
 
 PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA. 
 
 ' Glance northward through the haze, and mark 
 That shadowy island floating dark 
 
 Amidst the seas serene : 
 It seems some fair enchanted isle, 
 
 Like that which saw Miranda's smile 
 When Ariel sang unseen. 
 
 ' Oh happy, after all their fears, 
 .Were those old Lusian mariners 
 
 Who hailed that land the first, 
 Upon whose seared and aching eyes, 
 With an enrapturing surprise, 
 
 Its bloom of verdure burst. 
 
 * Their anchor in a creek, shell-paven, 
 They dropped, and hence "The Holy Haven 
 
 They named the welcome land : 
 The breezes strained their masts no more, 
 And all around the sunny shore 
 Was summer, laughing bland. 
 
 ' They wandered on through green arcade 
 Where fruits were hanging in the shades, 
 
 And blossoms clustering fair ; 
 Strange gorgeous insects shimmered 
 And from the brakes sweet minstrelsy 
 
 Entranced the woodland air. 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 311 
 
 ' Years passed, and to the island came 
 A mariner of unknown name, 
 
 And grave Castilian speech : 
 The spirit of a great emprise 
 Aroused him, and with flashing eyes 
 
 He paced the pebbled beach. 
 
 ' What time the sun was sinking slow, 
 And twilight spread a rosy glow 
 
 Around its single star, 
 His eye the western sea's expanse 
 Would search, creating by its glance 
 
 Some cloudy land afar. 
 
 ' He saw it when translucent even 
 Shed mystic light o'er earth and heaven, 
 
 Dim shadowed on the deep ; 
 His fancy tinged each passing cloud 
 With the fine phantom, and he bowed 
 
 Before it in his sleep. 
 
 * He hears grey-bearded sailors tell 
 How the discoveries befell 
 
 That glorify their time ; 
 " And forth I go, my friends," he cries, 
 " To a severer enterprise 
 
 Than tasked your glorious prime. 
 
 * " Time was when these green isles that stud 
 The expanse of this familiar flood, 
 
 Lived but in fancy fond. 
 Earth's limits think you here they are ? 
 Here has the Almighty fixed His bar, 
 
 Forbidding glance beyond ? 
 
 ' " Each shell is murmuring on the shore, 
 And wild sea-voices evermore 
 
 Are sounding in my ear : 
 I long to meet the eastern gale, 
 And with a free and stretching sail 
 
 Through virgin seas to steer. 
 
312 THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 ' " Two galleys trim, some comrades stanch, 
 And I with hopeful heart would launch 
 
 Upon this shoreless sea. 
 Till I have searched it through and through, 
 And seen some far land looming blue, 
 
 My heart will not play free." 
 
 ' Forth fared he through the deep to rove : 
 For months with angry winds he strove, 
 
 And passions fiercer still ; 
 Until he found the long-sought land, 
 And leaped upon the savage strand 
 
 With an exulting thrill. 
 
 ' The tide of life now eddies strong 
 Through that broad wilderness, where long 
 
 The eagle fearless flew; 
 Where forests waved, fair cities rise, 
 And science, art, and enterprise 
 
 Their restless aim pursue. 
 
 ' There dwells a people, at whose birth 
 The shout of Freedom shook the eartli, 
 
 Whose frame through all the lands 
 lias travelled, and before whose eyes, 
 Bright with their glorious destinies, 
 A proud career expands. 
 
 ' I see their life by passion wrought 
 To intense endeavour, and my thought 
 
 Stoops backwards in its reach 
 To him who, in that early time, 
 Resolved his enterprise sublime 
 
 On Porto Sauto's beach. 
 
 * Methinks that solitary soul 
 Held in its ark this radiant roll 
 
 Of human hopes upfurled, 
 That there in germ this vigorous life 
 Was sheathed, which now in earnest strife 
 
 Is working through the world. 
 
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 313 
 
 * Still on our way, with careworn face, 
 Abstracted eye, and sauntering pace, 
 
 May pass one such as he, 
 Whose mind heaves with a secret force, 
 That shall be felt along the course 
 
 Of far Futurity. 
 
 * Call him not fanatic or fool, 
 Thou Stoic of the modern school ; 
 
 Columbus-like, his aim 
 Points forward with a true presage, 
 And nations of a later age 
 
 May rise to bless his name.' 
 
 There runs throughout Mr. Burns's volume a rich vein 
 of scriptural imagery and allusion, and much oriental de 
 scription rather quiet, however, than gorgeous that bears 
 in its unexaggerated sobriety the impress of truth. From 
 a weakness of chest and general delicate health, Mr. Burns 
 has had to spend not a few of his winters abroad, under 
 climatal influences of a more genial character than those 
 of his own country ; and hence the truthfulness of his 
 descriptions of scenes which few of our native poets ever 
 see, and a corresponding amount of variety in his verse. 
 But we have exhausted our space, and have given only 
 very meagre samples of this delightful volume, and a very 
 inadequate judgment on its merits. But we refer our 
 readers to the volume itself, as one well fitted to grow upon 
 their regards ; and meanwhile conclude with the following 
 exquisite landscape, no bad specimen of that ability of 
 word-painting which is ever so certain a mark of the true 
 poet : 
 
 ' Below me spread a wide and lonely beach, 
 The ripple washing higher on the sands : 
 A river that has come from far-off lands 
 Is coiled behind in many a shining reach ; 
 But now it widens, and its banks are bare 
 
3 i4 THE POETS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 It settles as it nears the moaning sea ; 
 An inward eddy checks the current free, 
 
 And breathes a briny dampness through the air 
 Beyond, the waves' low vapours through the skies 
 
 Were trailing, like a battle's broken rear ; 
 But smitten by pursuing winds, they rise, 
 
 And the blue slopes of a far coast appear, 
 With shadowy peaks on which the sunlight lies, 
 
 Uplifted in aerial distance clear. 
 
 November 8, 1854. 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 AFTER the labour of years, the seventh edition of the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica has been at length completed. 
 It is in every respect a great work great even as a com- 
 mercial speculation. We have been assured the money 
 expended on this edition alone would be more than suffi- 
 cient to build three such monuments as that now in the 
 course of erection in Edinburgh to the memory of Sir 
 Walter Scott. And containing, as it does, all the more 
 valuable matter of former editions all that the advancing 
 tide of knowledge has not obliterated or covered up, and 
 which at one time must have represented in the commercial 
 point of view a large amount of capital it must be obvious 
 that, great as the cost of the present edition has been, it 
 bears merely some such relation to the accumulated cost 
 of the whole, as that borne by the expense of partial reno- 
 vations and repairs in a vast edifice to the sum originally 
 expended on the entire erection. 
 
 It is a great work, too, regarded as a trophy of the united 
 science and literature of Britain. Like a lofty obelisk, 
 raised to mark the spot where some important expedition 
 terminated, it stands as it were to indicate the line at which 
 the march of human knowledge has now arrived. We see 
 it rising on the extreme verge of the boundary which 
 separates the clear and the palpable from the indistinct 
 and the obscure. The explored province of past research, 
 with all its many party-coloured fields, stretches out from 
 it in long perspective on the one hand, luminous, well- 
 
 315 
 
316 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BR1TANNICA. 
 
 defined, rejoicing in the light. The terra incognita of future 
 discovery lies enveloped in cloud on the other an untried 
 region of fogs and darkness. 
 
 The history of this publication for the last seventy years 
 for so slow has been its growth, that rather more than 
 seventy years have now elapsed since its first appearance 
 in the world of letters would serve curiously to illustrate 
 the literary and scientific history of Scotland - during that 
 period. The naturalist, by observing the rings of annual 
 growth in a tree newly cut down, can not only tell what its 
 exact bulk had been at certain determinate dates in the 
 past from its first existence as a tiny sapling of a single 
 twelvemonth, till the axe had fallen on the huge circum- 
 ference of perchance its hundredth ring but he can also 
 form from them a shrewd guess of the various characters 
 of the seasons that have passed over it. Is the ring of 
 wide development ? it speaks of genial warmth and kindly 
 showers. Is it narrow and contracted ? it tells of scorch- 
 ing droughts or of biting cold. Now the succeeding edi- 
 tions of this great work narrate a somewhat similar story, 
 in a somewhat similar manner. They speak of the growth 
 of science and the arts during the various succeeding 
 periods in which they appeared. The great increase, too, 
 at certain times, in particular departments of knowledge, 
 is curiously connected with peculiar circumstances in the 
 history of our country. In the present edition, for instance, 
 almost all the geography is new. The age has been pecu- 
 liarly an age of exploration a locomotive age : commerce, 
 curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the desire of escaping 
 from the tedium of inactive life, these, and other motives 
 besides, have scattered travellers by hundreds, during the 
 period of our long European peace, over almost every 
 country of the world. And hence so mighty an increase 
 of knowledge in this department, that what the last age 
 knew of the subject has been altogether overgrown. Vast 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 317 
 
 additions, too, have been made to the province of me- 
 chanical contrivance : the constructive faculties of the 
 country, stimulated apparently by the demands of com- 
 merce and the influence of competition both at home and 
 abroad, have performed in well-nigh a single generation 
 the work of centuries. 
 
 Even the Encyclopedia itself, regarded in a literary point 
 of view, is strikingly illustrative of a change which has 
 taken place chiefly within the present century in the republic 
 of letters. 
 
 We enjoyed a very ample opportunity of acquainting 
 ourselves with it in its infancy. More years have passed 
 away than we at present feel quite inclined to specify, since 
 our attention was attracted at a very early age to an Ency- 
 clopedia, the first we had ever seen, that formed one work 
 of a dozen or so stored on the upper shelf of a press to 
 which we were permitted access. It consisted of three 
 quarto volumes sprinkled over with what seventy years ago 
 must have been deemed very respectable copperplates, and 
 remarkable, chiefly in the arrangement of its contents, for 
 the inequality of the portions, if we may so speak, into 
 which the knowledge it contained was broken up. As 
 might be anticipated from its comparatively small size, 
 most of the articles were exceedingly meagre. There were 
 pages after pages in which some eight or ten lines, some- 
 times a single line, comprised all that the writers had 
 deemed it necessary to communicate on the subjects on 
 which they touched. And yet, set full in the middle of 
 these brief sentences these mere skeletons of informa- 
 tion there were complete and elaborate treatises, whales 
 among the minnows. Some of these extended over ten, 
 twenty, thirty, fifty pages of the work. We remember 
 there was an old-fashioned but not ill-written treatise on 
 Chemistry among the number, quite bulky enough of itself 
 to fill a small volume. There was a sensibly written treatise 
 
3 i8 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 on Law, too ; a treatise on Anatomy not quite unworthy 
 of the Edinburgh school ; a treatise on Botany, of which at 
 this distance of time we remember little else than that it 
 rejected the sexual system of Linnaeus, then newly promul- 
 gated ; a treatise on Architecture, sufficiently incorrect, as 
 we afterwards found, in some of its minor details, but which 
 we still remember with the kindly feeling of the pupil for 
 his first master; a treatise on Fortification, that at least 
 taught us how to make model forts in sand ; treatises on 
 Arithmetic, Astronomy, Bookkeeping, Grammar, Language, 
 Theology, Metaphysics, and a great many other treatises 
 besides. The least interesting portion of the work was 
 the portion devoted to Natural History : it named and 
 numbered species and varieties, instead of describing 
 instincts and habits, and afforded little else to the reader 
 than lists of hard words, and lines of uninteresting numerals. 
 But our appetite for books was keen and but ill supplied at 
 the time, and so we read all of the work that would read, 
 some of it oftener than once. The character of the whole 
 reminded us somewhat of that style of building common in 
 some of the older ruins of the north country, in which \ve 
 find layers of huge stones surrounded by strips and patches 
 of a minute pinned work composed of splinters and frag- 
 ments. 
 
 This Dictionary of the three quarto volumes was the 
 first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the identical 
 work in its first beginnings, of which the seventh edition 
 has been so recently completed. It was published in 1771 
 in the days of Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and 
 David Hume several years ere Adam Smith had given 
 his Wealth of Nations or Robertson his History oj America 
 to the public, and ere the names of Burns or Cowper had 
 any place in BRITISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The world has grown greatly in knowledge since that 
 period, and the Encyclopedia Britannica has done much 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 319 
 
 more than kept pace with it in its merits of acquirement. 
 The three volumes have swelled into twenty-one ; and each 
 of the twenty-one contains at least one-third more of matter 
 than each of the three. The growth and proportions of a 
 work of genius seem to be very little dependent on the 
 period of its production. Shakespeare may be regarded as 
 the founder of the English drama. He wrote at a time 
 when art was rude, and science comparatively low. All 
 agree, at least, that the subjects of Queen Victoria know a 
 very great deal which was not known by the subjects of 
 Queen Elizabeth. There was no gas burned in front of 
 the Globe Theatre, nor was the distant roar of a locomotive 
 ever heard within its dingy recesses ; nor did ever adven- 
 turous aeronaut look down from his dizzy elevation of miles 
 on its tub-like proportions, or its gay flag of motley. And 
 yet we question whether even Mr. Wakley himself, with all 
 his advantages, would venture to do more than assert his 
 equality with the Swan of Avon. Homer, too, wrote in a 
 very remote period, so very remote and so very uncertain, 
 that the critics have begun seriously to doubt whether the 
 huge figure of the blind old man, as it looms through the 
 grey obscure of ages, be in reality the figure of one poet, or of 
 a whole school of poets rolled up into a bundle. But though 
 men fight much more scientifically now than they did at 
 Troy, and know much more about the taking and defending 
 of walled towns, no poet of the present day greatly excels 
 Homer, no, not the Scotch schoolmaster even who wrote 
 Wolfe's Ode, or the gentleman who sends us abstruse verses 
 which we unluckily cannot understand, and then scolds us 
 in perspicuous prose for not giving them a place in our 
 columns. 
 
 Works of genius bear no reference in their bulk and pro- 
 portions, if we may so speak, to the period at which they 
 are produced ; but it is far otherwise with works of science 
 and general information : they grow with the world's growth 
 
320 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 the tomes from which the father derived his acquaintance 
 with facts and principles, prove all inadequate to satisfy the 
 curiosity of the son : almost every season adds its ring to 
 the * tree of knowledge ; ' and the measuring line which 
 girthed and registered its bulk in one age, fails to embrace 
 it in the succeeding one. And hence one element at least 
 in the superiority of this edition of the Encyclopedia Britan- 
 nica to every other edition, and every other Encyclopaedia. 
 
 It appears at the period of the world's greatest experi- 
 ence. But there are other very important elements, charac- 
 teristic, as we have said, of a peculiarity in the literature of 
 the age, which have tended also to this result. We have 
 remarked that the first edition appeared in the days of 
 Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith. None of these men 
 wrote for it, however. 
 
 In France the first intellects of the country were engaged 
 on their National Encyclopaedia, and mighty was the mis- 
 chief which they accomplished through its means ; but 
 works of this character in Britain were left to authors of a 
 lower standing. Smollett once conducted a critical review ; 
 Gilbert Stuart an Edinburgh magazine ; Dr. Johnson drew 
 up parliamentary debates for two years together ; Edmund 
 Burke toiled at the pages of an Annual Register; and 
 Goldsmith, early in his career, wrote letters for the news- 
 papers. But, like the apothecary in Shakespeare, it was 
 their ' poverty, not their will, that consented ; ' and when 
 their fortunes brightened, these walks of obscure labori- 
 ousness were left to what were deemed their legitimate 
 denizens mere mediocritists and compilers. A similar 
 feeling seems to have obtained regarding works of an ency- 
 clopaediacal character. The authors of the first edition of 
 the Encyclopedia Britannica were merely respectable com- 
 pilers, we know not that any of their names would now 
 sound familiar to the reader, with perhaps the exception of 
 that ot Smellie, an Edinburgh writer of the last century, 
 
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. 321 
 
 whose philosophical essays one sometimes meets with on our 
 bookstalls. 
 
 But among the other great changes produced by the 
 French Revolution, there was a striking and very important 
 change effected in our periodical literature. The old founda- 
 tions of society seemed breaking up, and the true nature 
 of that basis of opinion on which they had so long rested 
 came to be everywhere practically understood. 
 
 Minds of the larger order found it necessary to address 
 themselves direct to the people ; and the newspaper, the 
 review, the magazine, the pamphlet, furnished them with 
 ready vehicles of conveyance. Archimedes, during the 
 siege of Syracuse, had to quit the sober quiet of his study, 
 and to mix with the armed defenders of his native city, 
 amid the wild confusion of sallies and assaults, the rocking 
 of beleaguered towers, the creaking of engines, and the 
 hurtling of missiles. It was thus with some of the greatest 
 minds of the country during the distraction and alarm of 
 the French Revolution. Coleridge conducted a newspaper ; 
 Sir James Mackintosh wrote for one ; Canning contributed 
 to the Anti-Jacobin; Robert Hall of. Leicester became a 
 reviewer; Southey, Jeffrey, Brougham, Scott, Giffard, all 
 men in the first rank, appeared in the character of con- 
 tributors to the periodicals. 
 
 The aspect of this department of literature suddenly 
 changed, and the influence of that change survives to this 
 day. Even now, some of our first literary names are known 
 chiefly in their connection with magazines and reviews. 
 Men such as Macaulay and Sidney Smith have scarce any 
 place as authors dissociated from the Edinburgh; and 
 Lockhart and Wilson are most felt in the world of letters 
 in their connection with Blackwood and the Quarterly. 
 And this change affected more than the periodicals. Its 
 influence extended to works of the encyclopaediacal cha- 
 racter. The two great Encyclopaedias of Edinburgh that 
 
 x 
 
322 THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 which bears the name of the city, and that whose name we 
 have placed at the head of this article came to reckon 
 among their contributors the first men of the kingdom, 
 both in science and literature : they benefited as greatly 
 by the change we describe as the periodicals themselves. 
 The Revolution, in its reflex influence, seems to have drawn 
 a line in the British encyclopaediacal field between the 
 labours of mere compilers and the achievements of original 
 authorship ; and the peculiarity of plan in the Encyclopedia 
 Urifannica, to which we have already referred that pecu- 
 liarity which gives an art or science entire as a treatise, 
 instead of breaking it down into as many separate articles 
 as it possesses technical terms enabled this work to avail 
 itself to the fullest extent of the improvement. No author, 
 however great his powers, can be profound in the compass 
 of a few paragraphs. 
 
 Goldsmith could assert that in an essay of a page or two 
 it is even a merit to be superficial ; and few there are who 
 possess, with Goldsmith, the pure literary ability of being 
 superficial with good effect. 
 
 But it is not enough to say of this work that it is enriched 
 by contributions from not a few of the ablest writers which 
 the present century has produced. It should be added, 
 further, that it contains some of the masterpieces of these 
 men. No one ever excelled Sir James Mackintosh in philo- 
 sophical criticism. It was peculiarly his forte. He was 
 rather a great judge of metaphysical power than a meta- 
 physician. And yet it is this admirable critic who decides 
 that the exquisitely classical dissertation of Dugald Stewart, 
 written for this Encyclopedia, is the most magnificent of 
 that philosopher's works ; and remarks, in accounting for 
 the fact, that the * memorable instances of Cicero and 
 Milton, and still more those of Dryden and Burke, seem 
 to show that there is some natural tendency in the fire of 
 genius to burn more brightly, or to blaze more fiercely, in 
 
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. 323 
 
 the evening than in the morning of human life.' We are 
 mistaken if Sir James's own contribution to this work does 
 not take decidedly a first place among his productions. 
 The present age has not produced a piece of more exqui- 
 sitely polished English, or of more tasteful or more nicely 
 discriminating criticism. 
 
 There is an occult beauty and elegance in some of his 
 thoughts and expressions, on which it is no small luxury 
 to repose, lines of reflection, too, along which one must 
 feel as well as think one's way. 
 
 What can be finer, for instance, than his remarks on the 
 poetry of Dr. Thomas Brown, or what more thoroughly 
 removed from commonplace ? He tells us how the philo- 
 sophic poet ' observed man and his wider world with the 
 eye of a metaphysician ;' that ( the dark results of such con- 
 templations, when he reviewed them, often filled his soul 
 with feelings which, being both grand and melancholy, 
 were truly poetical ;' that ' unfortunately, however, few 
 readers can be touched with fellow-feeling;' for that 'he 
 sings to few, and must be content with sometimes moving a 
 string in the soul of the lonely visionary ', who, in the day- 
 dreams of youth, has felt as well as meditated on the mysteries 
 of nature? The dissertation of Playfair is also pitched on 
 the highest key to which that elegant writer ever attained. 
 If we except the unjust and offensive estimate of the powers 
 of Franklin, a similar judgment may be passed on the pre- 
 liminary dissertation of Sir John Leslie. Jeffrey's famous 
 theory of beauty is, of all the philosophic pieces of that 
 accomplished writer, by far the most widely known ; and 
 Sir Walter Scott's essay on the drama is at least equal to 
 any of the serious prose compositions of its great author. 
 There is something peculiarly fascinating in the natural 
 history of this edition, a department wholly rewritten, and 
 furnished chiefly by the singularly pleasing pen -of Mr. James 
 Wilson. It is not yet twenty years since Constable's sup- 
 
3 2 4 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 plement to the last edition appeared ; and yet in this pro- 
 vince, so mightily has the tide risen, that well-nigh all the 
 old lines of classification have been obliterated or covered 
 up. Vast additions have been also made. At no former 
 time was there half the amount of actual observation in 
 this field which exists in it now \ and it is well that there 
 should be so skilful a workman as Mr. Wilson to avail him- 
 self of the accumulating materials. His treatises show how 
 very just is the estimate of his powers given to the public 
 in Peter's Letters considerably more than twenty years ago, 
 at a time when he was comparatively little known. But we 
 cannot enumerate a tithe of the masterpieces of the British 
 Encyclopaedia. 
 
 Judging from the list of contributors' names attached to 
 the index, we must hold that Moderatism in the field of 
 literature and science is very much at a discount. But 
 there is no lack of data of very various kinds to force upon 
 us this conclusion. Among our sound non-intrusionists we 
 find the names of Lord Jeffrey, Sir David Brewster, Professor 
 John Fleming, Professor David Welsh, Professor Anderson, 
 Dr. Irvine, the Rev. Mr. Hetherington, the Rev. Mr. 
 Omond, Mr. Alexander Dunlop, and Mr. Cowan ; whereas 
 of all the opposite party who record their votes in our 
 church courts, we have succeeded in finding the name of 
 but a single individual, Dr. John Lee. 
 
 Why has Dr. Bryce thus left the field to the fanatics ? had 
 he nothing to insert on missions ? Or could not Mr. Ro- 
 bertson of Ellon have been great on the article Beza ? 
 
 Was there no exertion demanded of them to save the 
 credit of the Earl of Aberdeen's learned clergy ? One of 
 the main defects of omission in the work (of course we 
 merely mention the circumstance) is the omission of the 
 name of one very great non-intrusionist. Ethical and meta- 
 physical philosophy are represented by Dugald Stewart and 
 Sir James Mackintosh ; mathematical and physical science 
 
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 325 
 
 by Sir David Brewster, Sir John Leslie, Playfair, and Robin- 
 son ; political economy by Ricardo, M'Culloch, and Mal- 
 thus ; natural history by James Wilson and Dr. Fleming ; 
 Hazlitt and Haydon discourse on painting and the fine 
 arts j Jeffrey on the beautiful ; Sir Walter Scott on chivalry, 
 the drama, and romance ; the classical pen of Dr. Irvine 
 has illustrated what may be termed the biographical history 
 of Scotland ; physiology finds a meet expounder in Dr. 
 Roget ; geology in Mr. Phillips ; medical jurisprudence in 
 Dr. Traill. But in whom does theology find an illustrator ? 
 Does our country boast in the present age of no very emi- 
 nent name in this noble department of knowledge no 
 name known all over Scotland, Britain, Europe, Christen- 
 dom a name whom we may associate with that of Dugald 
 Stewart in ethical, or that of Sir David Brewster in physical 
 science ? In utter ignorance of the facts, we can, as we 
 have said, but merely refer to the omission as one which 
 will be assuredly marked in the future, when the din and 
 dust of our existing controversies shall be laid, and when 
 all now engaged in them who are tall enough to catch the 
 eye of posterity, will be seen in their genuine colours and 
 their true proportions. The article Theology in the Encyclo- 
 pedia Britannica is written, not by Dr. Chalmers, but new- 
 modelled from an old article by the minister of an Inde- 
 pendent congregation in Edinburgh, Mr. Lindsay Alexander 
 we doubt not an able arid good man, but not super- 
 eminently the one theologian of Scotland. 
 
 We mark, besides, a few faults of commission in the work, 
 apparently of a sub-editorial character, but which, unlike 
 the defect just pointed out, the editor of some future edition 
 will find little difficulty in amending. Works the produc- 
 tion of a single mind, bear generally an individual character ; 
 works the productions of many minds, are marked rather 
 by the character of the age to which they belong. We find 
 occasional evidence in the Encyclopedia that it belongs to 
 
326 THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. 
 
 the age of Catholic Emancipation, an age in which the irue 
 in science was deemed a very great matter by men to whom 
 the true in religion seemed a much less one. One at least 
 of the minds employed on the minor articles of the work 
 had palpably a papistical leaning. 
 
 A blaze of eulogium, which contrasts ludicrously enough 
 with the well-toned sobriety of what we may term its staple 
 style, is made to surround, like the halo in old paintings, 
 some of the men who were happy enough to be distinguished 
 assertors of the Romish Church. We would instance, as a 
 specimen, the biographical sketches of Bossuet and the 
 Jesuit Bourdaloue, written by the late Dr. James Browne. 
 These, however, are but comparatively minute flaws in a 
 work so truly great, and of such immense multiplicity. 
 They are some of the imperfections of a work to which 
 imperfection is inevitable, and which, after all such deduc- 
 tions have been made, must be recognised as by much the 
 least faulty and most complete of its class which the world 
 has yet seen. 
 
 April 30, 1842. 
 
A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 [Private.] , ISLE OF SKYE. 
 
 . . . . I KNOW not when this may reach you. We are 
 much shut out from the world at this dead season of the 
 year, especially in those wilder solitudes of the island that 
 extend their long slopes of moor to the west. The vast 
 Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by tempest, a 
 solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off 
 from the land by an impassable line of breakers. Even 
 from the elevation where I now write for my little cottage 
 stands high on the hill-side I can hear the measured 
 boom of the waves, swelling like the roar of distant artillery, 
 above the melancholy moanings of the wind among the 
 nearer crags, and the hoarser dash of the stream in the 
 hollow below. We are in a state of siege : the isle is be- 
 leaguered on its rugged line of western coast, and all com- 
 munication within that quarter cut off; while in the opposite 
 direction the broken and precarious footways that wind 
 across the hills to our more accessible eastern shores, are 
 still drifted over in the deeper hollows of the snow of the 
 last great storm. It was only yester-evening that my cousin 
 Eachen, with whom I share your newspaper, succeeded in 
 bringing me the number published early in the present 
 month, in which you furnish your readers with a report of 
 the great railway meeting at Glasgow. 
 
 My cousin and I live on opposite sides of the island. 
 We met at our tryst among the hills, not half an hour 
 before sunset ; and as each had far to walk back, and as a 
 storm seemed brewing for the wind had suddenly lowered, 
 
 327 
 
328 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 and the thick mists came creeping down the hill-sides, all 
 dank and chill, and laden with frost-rime, that settled crisp 
 and white on our hair we deemed it scarce prudent to 
 indulge in our usual long conversation together. 
 
 'You will find,' said Eachen, as he handed me the 
 paper, ' that things are looking no better. The old Tories 
 are going on in the old way, bitterer against the gospel than 
 ever. They will not leave us in all Skye a minister that 
 has ever been the means of converting a soul ; and what 
 looks as ill, our great Scotch railway, that broke the Sabbath 
 last year, in the vain hope of making money by it, is to 
 break it this year at a dead loss. And this for no other 
 purpose that people can see, than just that an Edinburgh 
 writer may advertise his business by making smart speeches 
 about it. Depend on't, Allister, the country's/^.' 
 
 * The old way of advertising,' said I, ' before it became 
 necessary that an elder should have at least some show of 
 religion about him, was to get into the General Assembly, 
 and make speeches there. If the crisis comes, we shall see 
 the practice in full blow again. We shall see our anti- 
 Sabbatarian gentlemen transmuted into voluble Moderate 
 elders, talking hard for clients without subjecting them- 
 selves to the advertisement duty, and the railway mayhap 
 keeping its Sabbaths.' 
 
 * Keeping its Sabbaths,' replied Eachen ; * ay, but the 
 shareholders, perhaps, have little choice in the matter. I 
 wish you heard our catechist on that. Depend on't, 
 Allister, the country's fey. 1 
 
 ' Keeping its Sabbaths ? Yes,' said I, catching at his 
 meaning, 'if we are to be visited by a permanent com- 
 mercial depression and there are many things less likely 
 at the present time the railway may keep its Sabbaths, 
 and keep them as the land of Judea did of old. It would 
 be all too easy, in a period of general distress, to touch that 
 line of necessarily high expenditure below which it would 
 
A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 329 
 
 be ruin for the returns of the undertaking to fall. Let but 
 the invariably great outlay continue to exceed the income 
 for any considerable time, and the railway must keep its 
 Sabbaths.' 
 
 'Just the catechist's idea,' rejoined my cousin. 'He 
 spoke on the subject at our last meeting. " Eachen," he 
 said, "Eachen, the thing lies so much in the ordinary 
 course of providence, that our blinded Sabbath-breakers, 
 were it to happen, would recognise only disaster in it, not 
 judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my 
 father would have called the second sight, that long weary 
 line of rail, with its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and 
 business speeding over it, and a crowd of wretched wit- 
 nesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly on their own 
 parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at both 
 its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into 
 which it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed 
 artisans ; and that the lanes and alleys of the other number 
 by thousands and tens of thousands their pale and hunger- 
 bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. They testify 
 all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let 
 but the evil continue to grow nay, let but one of our 
 Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade, 
 sink into the circumstances of its manufacturing neighbour 
 Paisley and the railway must keep its Sabbaths. But alas! 
 there would be no triumph for party in the case. Great, 
 ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country 
 be, and they would be sufferings that would extend to all." 
 What think you, Allister, of the catechist's note?' 
 
 'Almost worth throwing into English,' I said. 'But 
 the fog still thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach 
 home.' And so we parted. 
 
 Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it 
 was pleasant, when I had reached my little cottage, to pile 
 high the fire on the hearth, and to hear the blast roaring 
 
330 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 outside, and shaking the window-boards, as if some rude 
 hand were striving to unfasten them. I lighted my little 
 heap of moss fir on the projecting stone that serves the 
 poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and 
 bent me over your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns 
 of a Scottish railroad. But my rugged journey and the 
 beating of the storm had induced a degree of lassitude; 
 the wind outside, too, had forced back the smoke, until it 
 had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere, the whole of 
 my dingy little apartment : Mr. M'Neill seemed consider- 
 ably less smart than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, 
 and in the middle of his speech I fell fast asleep. The 
 scene changed, and I found myself still engaged in my late 
 journey, coming down over the hill, just as the sun was 
 setting red and lightless through the haze behind the dark 
 Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so 
 shortly before was restored in all its features : there was the 
 blank, leaden-coloured sea, that seemed to mix all around 
 with the blank, leaden-coloured sky ; the moors spread out 
 around me, brown and barren, and studded with rock and 
 stone; the fogs, as they crept downwards, were lowering 
 the overtopping screen of hills behind to one dead level. 
 Through the landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre, 
 there ran one long line of somewhat brighter hue : it was 
 a long line of breakers tumbling against the coast far as 
 the eye could reach, and that seemed interposed as a sort 
 of selvage between the blank, leaden sea, and the deep, 
 melancholy russet of the land. Through one of those 
 changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf 
 seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no 
 longer round headland and bay, but stretched out through 
 the centre of the landscape, straight as an extended cord, 
 and the bright white saddened down to the fainter hue of 
 decaying vegetation. The entire landscape underwent a 
 change. Under the gloomy sky of a stormy evening, I 
 
A VISION OF THE KAILROAD. 331 
 
 could mark on the one hand the dark blue of the Pent- 
 lands, and on the other the lower slopes of Corstorphine. 
 Arthur's Seat rose dim in the* distance behind ; and in 
 front, the pastoral valley of Wester Lothian stretched away 
 mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear mound running 
 through the midst, from where I stood beside one of the 
 massier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till 
 where the huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread 
 on the far edge of the horizon. 
 
 It seemed as if years had passed many years. I had an 
 indistinct recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, 
 of the shouts of maddened multitudes engaged in frightful 
 warfare, of the cries of famishing women and children, 
 of streets and lanes flooded with blood, of raging flames 
 enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, of the flashing 
 of arms and the roaring of artillery j but all was dimness 
 and confusion. The recollection was that of a dream re- 
 membered in a dream. The solemn text was in my mind, 
 'Voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and a great earth- 
 quake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so 
 mighty an earthquake and so great ;' and I now felt as if 
 the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered 
 around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. 
 All around was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The 
 long rectilinear mound seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, 
 that rose against the sides, and intertwisted their prickly 
 branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the furze, and the 
 bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the 
 brake ; and where his track had opened up a way through 
 the fern, I could see the red and corroded, bars stretching 
 idly across. There was a viaduct beside me : the flawed 
 and shattered masonry had exchanged its raw hues for a 
 crust of lichens ; one of the taller piers, undermined by 
 the stream, had drawn two of the arches along with it, 
 and lay adown the water-course a shapeless mass of ruin, 
 
332 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 o'ermasted by flags and rushes. A huge ivy, that had 
 taken root under a neighbouring pier, threw up its long 
 pendulous shoots over the "summit. I ascended to the top. 
 Half-buried in furze and sloe-thorn, there rested on the rails 
 what had once been a train of carriages ; the engine ahead 
 lay scattered in fragments, the effect of some disastrous 
 explosion, and damp, and mould, and rottenness had done 
 their work on the vehicles behind. Some had already 
 fallen to pieces, so that their places could be no longer 
 traced in the thicket that had grown up around them ; 
 others stood comparatively entire, but their bleached and 
 shrivelled panels rattled to the wind, and the mushroom 
 and the fungus sprouted from between their joints. The 
 scene bore all too palpably the marks of violence and 
 bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where the 
 shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered ; and here 
 the rails had been torn up by violence, and there stretched 
 across, breast-high, a rudely piled rampart of stone. A 
 human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the winds ; there 
 was a broken pike beside it ; and, stuck fast in the naked 
 skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the 
 rusty fragment of a sword. The space behind resembled 
 the floor of a charnel-house bindwood and ground-ivy lay 
 matted over heaps of bones ; and on the top of the hugest 
 heap of all, a skull seemed as if grinning at the sky from 
 amid the tattered fragments of a cap of liberty. Bones lay 
 thick around the shattered vehicles ; a trail of skeletons 
 dotted the descending bank, and stretched far into a neigh- 
 bouring field j and from amid the green rankness that shot 
 up around them, I could see soiled and tattered patches of 
 the British scarlet. A little farther on there was another 
 wide gap in the rails. I marked beside the ruins of a 
 neighbouring hovel a huge pile of rusty bars, and there lay 
 inside the fragment of an uncouth cannon marred in the 
 casting. 
 
A VISION OP THR RAILROAD. 333 
 
 I wandered on in imhappiness, oppressed by that feeling 
 of terror and disconsolateness so peculiar to one's more 
 frightful dreams. The country seemed everywhere a desert. 
 The fields were roughened with tufts of furze and broom ; 
 hedgerows had shot up into lines of stunted trees, with 
 wide gaps interposed ; cottage and manor-house had alike 
 sunk into ruins ; here the windows still retained their 
 shattered frames, and the roof-tree lay rotting amid the 
 dank vegetation of the floor ; yonder the blackness of fire 
 had left its mark, and there remained but reddened and 
 mouldering stone. Wild animals and doleful creatures had 
 everywhere increased. The toad puffed out his freckled 
 sides on hearths whose fires had been long extinguished, 
 the fox rustled among its bushes, the masterless dog howled 
 from the thicket, the hawk screamed shrill and sharp as it 
 fluttered overhead. I passed what had been once the 
 policies of a titled proprietor. The trees lay rotting and 
 blackened among the damp grass all except one huge 
 giant of the forest, that, girdled by the axe half a man's 
 height from the ground, and scorched by fire, stretched 
 out its long dead arms towards the sky. In the midst of 
 this wilderness of desolation lay broken masses, widely 
 scattered, of what had been once the mansion-house. A 
 shapeless hollow, half filled with stagnant water, occu- 
 pied its immediate site ; and the earth was all around 
 torn up, as if battered with cannon. The building had 
 too obviously owed its destruction to the irresistible force 
 of gunpowder. 
 
 There was a parish church on the neighbouring emi- 
 nence, and it, too, was roofless and a ruin. Alas ! I ex- 
 claimed, as I drew aside the rank stalks of nightshade and 
 hemlock that hedged up the breach in the wall through 
 which I passed into the interior alas ! have the churches 
 of Scotland also perished ? The inscription of a mutilated 
 tombstone that lay outside caught my eye, and I paused 
 
334 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 for a moment's space in the gap to peruse it. It was an 
 old memorial of the times of the Covenant, and the legend 
 was more than half defaced. I succeeded in decipher- 
 ing merely a few half sentences ' killing-time,' * faithful 
 martyr,' < bloody Prelates j' and beneath there was a frag- 
 mentary portion of the solemn text, * How long, O Lord, 
 holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood?' 
 I stepped into the interior : the scattered remains of an 
 altar rested against the eastern gable. There was a crack- 
 ling as of broken glass under my feet, and stooping down 
 I picked up a richly-stained fragment : it bore a portion of 
 that much-revered sign, the pelican giving her young to eat 
 of her own flesh and blood the sign which Puseyism and 
 Popery equally agree in regarding as adequately expressive 
 of their doctrine of the real presence, and which our Scot- 
 tish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the charac- 
 teristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the 
 newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of 
 brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had 
 run riot along the walls of this parish church. There were 
 carvings chipped and mutilated, as if in sport, less appa- 
 rently with the intention of defacing, than rendering them 
 contemptible and grotesque. A huge cross of stone had 
 been reared over the altar, and both the top and one of the 
 arms had been struck away, and from the surviving arm 
 there dangled a noose. The cross had been transformed 
 into a gibbet. Nor were there darker indications wanting. 
 In a recess set apart as a cabinet for relics, there were 
 human bones all too fresh to belong to a remote antiquity ; 
 and in a niche under the gibbet lay the tattered remains of 
 a surplice dabbled in blood. I stood amid the ruins, and 
 felt a sense of fear and horror creeping over me : the air 
 darkened under the scowl of the coming tempest and the 
 closing night, and the wind shrieked more mournfully amid 
 the shattered and dismantled walls. 
 
A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 335 
 
 There came another change over my dream. I found 
 myself wandering in darkness, I knew not whither, among 
 bushes and broken ground ; there was the roar of a large 
 stream in my ear, and the savage howl of the storm. I 
 retain a confused, imperfect recollection of a light streaming 
 upon broken water of a hard struggle in a deep ford and 
 of at length sharing in the repose and safety of a cottage, 
 solitary and humble almost as my own. The vision again 
 strengthened, and I found myself seated beside a fire, and 
 engaged with a few grave and serious men in singing the 
 evening psalm, with which they closed for the time their 
 services of social devotion. 
 
 ' The period of trial wears fast away,' said one of the 
 number, when all was over a grey-haired, patriarchal- 
 looking old man ' The period of trial is well-nigh over, 
 the storms of our long winter are past, and we have survived 
 them all. Patience ! a little more patience, and we shall see 
 the glorious spring-time of the world begin ! The vial is at 
 length exhausted.' 
 
 ' How very simple,' said one of the others, as if giving ex- 
 pression rather to the reflection that the remark suggested, 
 than speaking in reply, * how exceedingly simple now it 
 seems to trace to their causes the decline and fall of Britain ! 
 The ignorance and the irreligion of the land have fully 
 avenged themselves, and have been consumed in turn in 
 fires of their own kindling. How could even mere men of 
 the world have missed seeing the great moral evil that lay 
 at the root of 
 
 ' Ay,' said a well-known voice that half mingled with 
 my dreaming fancies, half recalled me to consciousness ; 
 1 nothing can be plainer, Donald. That lawyer-man is 
 evidently not making his smart speeches or writing his 
 clever circulars with an eye to the pecuniary interests of 
 the railroad. No person can know better than he knows 
 that the company are running their Sabbath trains at a 
 
336 A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 
 
 sacrifice of some four or five thousand a year. Were there 
 not a hundred thousand that took the pledge ? and can it 
 be held by any one that knows Scotland, that they aren't 
 worth over-head a shilling a year to the railway ? No, no ; 
 depend on't, the man is guiltless of any design of making 
 the shareholders rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is 
 merely supporting a desperate case in the eye of the 
 country, and getting into all the newspapers, that people 
 may see how clever a fellow he is. He is availing himself 
 of the principle that makes men in our great towns go 
 about with placards set up on poles, and with bills printed 
 large stuck round their hats.' 
 
 Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long 
 mile through the storm to see whether I had got my news- 
 paper, had taken their seats beside me when I was engaged 
 with my dream ; and after reading your railway report, they 
 were now busied in discussing the various speeches and 
 their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite unsuited 
 for your columns, and yet I send it to you. There are 
 none of its pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of 
 possibility nay, there are perhaps few of them that at this 
 stage may not actually be feared ; but if so, it is at least 
 equally sure that there can be none of them that at this 
 stage might not be averted. 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 AMONG the some six or eight and twenty volumes of 
 pamphlets which have been already produced by our 
 Church controversy, and which bid fair to compose but a 
 part of the whole, there is one pamphlet, in the form of a 
 Sermon, which bears date January 1840, and two other 
 pamphlets, in the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 
 1843. The Sermon and the Dialogues discuss exactly the 
 same topics. They are written in exactly the same style. 
 They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large 
 amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They 
 are equally strong in the same confidence of representing, 
 on their respective subjects, the true mind of Deity. They 
 solicit the same circle of readers ; they seem to have em- 
 ployed the same fount of types ; they have emanated from 
 the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the 
 twin brothers in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors ; and the 
 only material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to 
 discover is, that whereas the Sermon is a thorough -going 
 and uncompromising defence of our Evangelical majority 
 in the Church, the Dialogues form an equally thorough- 
 going and uncompromising attack upon them. This, how- 
 ever, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, 
 the reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially 
 when he has learned further that they represent the same 
 mind, and have employed the same pen that the Sermon 
 was published by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 
 
 Y 
 
333 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander Clark of 
 Inverness in 1843. 
 
 We spent an hour at the close of twilight a few evenings 
 ago, in running over the Sermon and the Dialogues, and in 
 comparing them, as we went along, paragraph by paragraph, 
 and sentence by sentence. We had before us also one of 
 Mr. Clark's earlier publications, his Rights of Members of the 
 Church of Scotland, and a complete collection of his anti- 
 patronage speeches for a series of years, as recorded in The 
 Church Patronage Reporter, with his speech * anent lay 
 patronage' in the General Assembly, when in 1833 he led 
 the debate on the popular side. The publications, in all, 
 extended over a period of fourteen years. They exhibited 
 Mr. Clark, and what Mr. Clark had held, in 1829, in 1831, 
 in 1832, in 1836, in 1840, and in 1843. We found that we 
 could dip down upon him, as we went along, like a sailor 
 taking soundings in the reaches of some inland frith or some 
 navigable river, and ascertain by year and day the exact 
 state of his opinions, and whether they were rising or falling 
 at the time. And our task, if a melancholy, was certainly 
 no uninteresting one. We succeeded in bringing to the 
 surface, from out of the oblivion that had closed over them, 
 many a curious, glittering, useless little thing, somewhat 
 resembling the decayed shells and phosphoric jellies that 
 attach themselves to the bottom of the deep-sea lead. Here 
 we found the tale of a peroration, set as if on joints, that 
 clattered husky and dry like the rattles of a snake ; there an 
 argument sprouting into green declamation, like a damaged 
 ear of corn in a wet harvest ; yonder a piece of delightful 
 egotism, set full in sentiment like a miniature of Mr. Clark 
 in a tinsel frame. What seemed most remarkable, however, 
 in at least his earlier productions, was their ceaseless glitter 
 of surface, if we may so speak. We found them literally 
 sprinkled over with little bits of broken figures, as if the 
 reverend gentleman had pounded his metaphors and com- 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 339 
 
 parisons in a mortar, and then dusted them over his style. 
 It is thus, thought we, that our manufacturers of fancy wax 
 deal by their mica. In his Rights of Members, for instance, 
 we found in one page that ' the gross errors of Romanism 
 had risen in successive tides, until the light of tnith suffered a 
 fearful eclipse during a long period of darkness ;' and we had 
 scarce sufficiently admired the sublime height of tides that 
 occasion eclipses, when we were further informed, in the 
 page immediately following, that the god of this world was 
 mustering his multifarious hosts for the battle, hoping, amidst 
 the waves of popular commotion, 'to blot out the name of God 
 from the British Constitution.' Assuredly, thought we, we 
 have the elements of no commonplace engagement here. 
 ' Multifarious hosts,' fairly mustered, and ' battling ' amid 
 ' waves ' in * commotion ' to * blot out a name,' would be a 
 sight worth looking at, even though, like the old shepherd 
 in the Winter's Tale, their zeal should lack footing amid the 
 waters. But though detained in the course of our search 
 by the happinesses of the reverend gentleman, we felt that it 
 was not with the genius of Mr. Clark that we had specially 
 to do, but with his consistency. 
 
 For eleven of the fourteen years over which our materials 
 extended, we found the Rev. Mr. Clark one of the most 
 consistent of men. From his appearance on the platform 
 at Aberdeen in 1829, when he besought his audience not to 
 deem it obtrusive in a stranger that he ventured to address 
 them, and then elicited their loud applauses by soliciting 
 their prayers for ' one minister labouring in northern parts,' 
 who 4 aspired to no higher distinction on earth than that he 
 should spend and be spent in the service of his dear Lord 
 and Master,' down to 1840, when he published his sermon 
 on the * Present Position of the Church, and the Duty of 
 its Members,' and urged, with the solemnity of an oath, that 
 ' the Church of Scotland was engaged in asserting principles 
 which the allegiance it owes to Christ would never permit 
 
340 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 it to desert,' Mr. Clark stood forward on every occasion the 
 uncompromising champion of spiritual independence, and 
 of the rights of the Christian people. He took his place far 
 in the van. He was no mere half-and-half non-intrusionist, 
 no complaisant eulogist of the Veto, no timid doubter 
 that the Church in behalf of her people might possibly 
 stretch her powers too far, and thus separate her temporali- 
 ties from her cures. Nothing could be more absurd, he 
 asserted, than to imagine such a thing. On parade day, 
 when she stood resting on her arms in the sunshine, Mr. 
 Clark was fugleman to his party, not merely a front man 
 in the front rank, but a man far in advance of the front 
 rank. Nay, even after the collision had taken place, Mr. 
 Clark could urge on his brethren that all that was necessary 
 to secure them the victory was just to go a little further 
 ahead, and deprive their refractory licentiates of their 
 licences. We found that for eleven of the fourteen years, 
 as we have said, Mr. Clark was uniformly consistent. But 
 in the twelfth year the conflict became actually dangerous, 
 and Mr. Clark all at once dropped his consistency. The 
 great suddenness the extreme abruptness of the change, 
 gave to it the effect of a trick of legerdemain. The con- 
 jurer puts a pigeon into an earthen pipkin, gives the vessel 
 a shake, and then turns it up, and lo ! out leaps the little 
 incarcerated animal, no longer a pigeon, but a rat. It was 
 thus with the Rev. Mr. Clark. Adversity, like Vice in the 
 fable, took upon herself the character of a juggler, and 
 stepping full into the middle of the Church question, began 
 to play at cup and ball. Nothing, certainly, could be more 
 wonderful than the transformations she effected ; and the 
 special transformation effected on the Rev. Mr. Clark sur- 
 passed in the marvellous all the others. She threw the 
 reverend gentleman into a box, gave him a smart shake, 
 and then flung him out again, and lo ! to the astonishment 
 of all men, what went in Mr. Clark, came out Mr. Bisset of 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 341 
 
 Bourtie. In order, apparently, that so great a marvel should 
 not be lost to the world, Mr. Clark has been at no little 
 trouble in showing himself, both before he went in and 
 since he came out. His pamphlet of 1840 and his pam- 
 phlets of 1843 represent him in the two states : we see him 
 going about in them, all over the country, to the extent of 
 their circulation, like the mendicant piper in his go-cart, 
 making open proclamation everywhere, ' I am the man wot 
 changed ;* and the only uncomfortable feeling one has in 
 contemplating them as curiosities, arises solely from the air 
 of heavy sanctity that pervades equally all their diametri- 
 cally opposed doctrines, contradictory assertions, and con- 
 tending views, as if Deity could declare equally for truth 
 and error, just as truth and error chanced to be held by Mr. 
 Clark. Of so solemn a cast are the reverend gentleman's 
 belligerent pamphlets, that they serve to remind one of 
 antagonist witnesses swearing point blank in one another's 
 faces at the Old Bailey. 
 
 Such were some of the thoughts which arose in our mind 
 when spending an hour all alone with the Rev. Mr Clark's 
 pamphlets. We bethought us of an Eastern story about a 
 very wicked prince who ruined the fair fame of his brother, 
 by assuming his body just as he might his greatcoat, and 
 then doing a world of mischief under the cover of his name 
 and appearance. What, thought we, if this, after all, be 
 but a trick of a similar character? Dr. Bryce has been 
 long in Eastern parts, and knows doubtless a great deal 
 about the occult^ sciences. We would not be much sur- 
 prised should it turn out, that having injected himself into 
 the framework of the Rev. Mr. Clark, he is now making 
 the poor man appear grossly inconsistent, and both an 
 Erastian and an Intrusionist, simply by acting through the 
 insensate carcase. The veritable Mr. Clark may be lying 
 in deep slumber all this while in the ghost cave of Mun- 
 lochy, like one of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, or stand- 
 
342 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 ing entranced, under the inflences of fairy-land, in some 
 bosky recess of the haunted Tomnahurich. We must just 
 glance over these Dialogues again, and see whether we 
 cannot detect Dr. Bryce in them. 
 
 And glance over them we did. There could be no 
 denying that the Doctor was there, and this in a much 
 more extreme shape than he ever yet wore in his own 
 proper person. Dr. Bryce asserts, for instance, in his 
 speeches and pamphlets, that the liberty for which the 
 Church has been contending is a liberty incompatible with 
 her place and standing as an Establishment and there he 
 stops ; but we found him asserting in Mr. Clark's Dia- 
 logues, that it is a liberty at once so dangerous and illegal, 
 that Voluntaries must not be permitted to enjoy it either. 
 We saw various other points equally striking as we went 
 along. Our attention, however, was gradually drawn to 
 another matter. The dramatis persona to which the reader 
 is introduced are a minister and two of his parishioners, 
 the one a Moderate, the other a Convocationist. It is 
 intended, of course, that the clerical gentleman should 
 carry the argument all his own way ; and we could not help 
 admiring how, with an eye to this result, the writer had 
 succeeded in making the parishioners so amazingly super- 
 ficial in their information, and so ingeniously obtuse in 
 their intellects. They had both been called into existence 
 with the intention of being baffled and beaten, and made, 
 with a wise adaptation of means to the desired end, con- 
 summate blockheads for the express purpose. ' A man is a 
 much nobler animal than a lion,' said the woodman in the 
 fable to the shaggy king of the forest; 'and if you but 
 come to yonder temple with me, I will show you, in proof 
 of the fact, the statue of a man lording it over the statue 
 of a prostrate lion.' 'Aha !' said the shaggy king of the 
 forest in reply, 'but was the sculptor a lion? Let us 
 lions become sculptors, and then we will show you lions 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 343 
 
 lording it over prostrate men.' In Mr. Clark's argumen- 
 tative Dialogues, Mr. Clark is the sculptor. It is really 
 refreshing, however, in these days of cold ingratitude, to see 
 how the creatures called into existence by his pen draw 
 round him, and sing lo -Pceans in his praise. A brace of 
 Master Slenders attend the great Justice Shallow, who has 
 been literally the making of them ; and when at his bid- 
 ding they engage with him in mimic warfare, they but pelt 
 him with roses, or sprinkle him over with eau de Cologne. 
 'Ah,' thought we, 'had we but the true Mr. Clark here 
 to take a part in this fray the Mr. Clark who published 
 the great non-intrusion sermon, and wrote the Rights of 
 Members, and spoke all the long anti-patronage speeches, 
 and led the debate in the Assembly anent the rights of the 
 people, and declared it clear as day that the Church had 
 power to enact the Veto, had we but him here, he would 
 be the man to fight this battle. It would be no such 
 child's play to grapple with him. Unaccustomed as we are 
 to lay wagers, we would stake a hundred pounds to a groat 
 on the true Mr. Clark !' 
 
 The twilight had fallen, the flames rose blue and lan- 
 guid in the grate, the deep shadows flickered heavily on 
 the walls and ceiling ; there was a drowsy influence in the 
 hour, and a still drowsier influence in the Dialogues, and 
 we think for what followed could have been only a dream 
 we think we must have fallen asleep. At all events, the 
 scene changed without any exertion on our part, and we 
 found ourselves in a quiet retired spot in the vicinity of 
 Inverness. The * hill of the ship,' that monarch of Fairy 
 Tomhans, rose immediately in front, gaily feathered over 
 with larch and forest trees ; and, terminating a long vista 
 in the background, we saw Mr. Clark's West Kirk, sur- 
 mounted by a vast weathercock of gilded tin. Ever and 
 anon the bauble turned its huge side to the sun, and the 
 reflected light went dancing far and wide athwart the land- 
 
344 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 scape. Immediately beneath the weathercock there flared 
 an immense tablet, surmounted by a leaden Fame, and 
 bordered by a row of gongs and trumpets, which bore, 
 in three-feet letters, that, ' in order to secure so valuable 
 an addition to the church accommodation of the parish, 
 the Rev. Mr. Clark had not hesitated, on his own personal 
 risk, to guarantee the payment of three thousand pounds.' 
 Our eyes were at first so dazzled by the blaze of the lacker- 
 ing for the characters shone to the sun as if on fire that 
 we could see nothing else. As we gazed more attentively, 
 however, we could perceive that every stone and slate of 
 the building bore, like the tablet, the name of Mr. Clark. 
 The endless repetition presented the appearance of a church- 
 yard inscription viewed through a multiplying glass ; but 
 what most astonished us was that the Gothic heads, carved 
 by pairs beside the labelled windows, opened wide their 
 stony lips from time to time, and shouted aloud, in a voice 
 somewhat resembling that of the domestic duck when she 
 breaks out into sudden clamour in a hot, dry day, * Clark, 
 Clark, Clark !' We stood not a little appalled at these 
 wonders, marvelling what was to come next, when lo ! one 
 of the thickets of the Tomhan beside us opened its inter- 
 laced and twisted branches, and out stepped the likeness 
 of Mr. Clark, attired like a conjurer, and armed with a rod. 
 His portly bulk was enwrapped in a voluminous scarf of 
 changing-coloured silk, that, when it caught the light in 
 one direction, exhibited the deep scarlet of a cardinal's 
 mantle, and presented, when it caught it in another, the 
 sober tinge of our Presbyterian blue. Like the cloak of 
 Asmodeus, it was covered over with figures. In one corner 
 we could see the General Assembly done in miniature, and 
 Mr. Clark rising among the members like Gulliver in Lilli- 
 put, to move against the deposition of the seven ministers 
 of Strathbogie. In another the same reverend gentleman, 
 drawn on the same large scale, was just getting on his legs 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 345 
 
 at a political dinner, to denounce his old friends and allies 
 the Evangelicals, as wild destructives, ' engaged in urging 
 on the fall of the Establishment, in the desperation of 
 human pride.' Here we could see him baptizing the child 
 of a person who, as he had fallen out of church-going 
 habits, could get it baptized nowhere else ; there examined 
 in his presbytery for the offence with closed doors ; yonder 
 writing letters to the newspapers on the subject, to say 
 that, if he had baptized the man's child, it was all because 
 the man was, like himself, a good hater of forced settle- 
 ments. There were a great many other vignettes besides ; 
 and the last in the series was the scene enacted at the late 
 Inverness Presbytery, when Mr. Clark rose to congratulate 
 his old associates, in all the stern severity of consistent 
 virtue, on the facile and 'squeezable* character of their 
 representative for the Assembly. 
 
 The conjurer came out into an open space, drew a circle 
 around him, and then began to build up on the sward two 
 little human figures about three feet high, as boys build 
 up figures of snow at the commencement of a thaw. Har- 
 lequin performs a somewhat similar feat in one of the 
 pantomimes. He first sets up two carrots on end, to serve 
 for legs ; balances on them the head of a large cabbage, to 
 serve for a body ; sticks on two other carrots, to serve for 
 arms ; places a round turnip between them, to serve for a 
 head ; gives the crazy erection a blow with his lath sword, 
 and straightway off it stalks, a vegetable man. Mr. Clark 
 had, in like manner, no sooner built up his figures, than, 
 with a peculiarly bland air, and in tones of the softest 
 liquidity, he whispered into the ear of the one, Be you a 
 Convocationist, and into that of the other, Be you a Mode- 
 rate ; and then with his charmed rod he tapped them across 
 the shoulders, and set them a-walking. The creatures 
 straightway jerked up their little heads to the angle of his 
 face, bowed like a brace of automaton dancing-masters, 
 
346 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 and after pacing round his knees for a few seconds, began 
 Dialogue the first, in just the set terms in which we had 
 been reading it beside our own fire not half an hour before. 
 It seemed, for a few seconds, as if the conjurer and his 
 creations had joined together in a trio, to celebrate the 
 conjurer's own praises. ' Excellent clergyman!' said the 
 Convocationist. * Incomparable man ! ' exclaimed the 
 Moderate. * No minister like our minister ! ' said the two 
 in a breath. * Ah, gentlemen,' said the conjurer, looking 
 modestly down, ' even my very enemies never venture to 
 deny that.' * You, sir,' said the Convocationist, ' bring on 
 no occasion the Church question to the pulpit ; you know 
 better you have more sense : we have quite as much of 
 the Church question as is good for us through the week.' 
 'For you, sir,' chimed in the Moderate, 'I have long 
 cherished the most thorough respect ; but as for your old 
 party, I dislike them more than ever.' * I am not mer- 
 cenary, gentlemen,' said the conjurer, laying his hand on 
 his breast ; ' I am not timid, I am not idle ; I am a gene- 
 rous, diligent, dauntless, attached pastor; I give alms of 
 all I possess in especial to the public charities ; I make 
 long prayers, my very best friends often urge on me that 
 my vast labours, weekly and daily, are undermining my 
 strength ; I fast often, I have guaranteed the payment of 
 three thousand pounds for the West Kirk, and three-fourths 
 of my stipend have gone this year to the liquidation of self- 
 imposed liabilities. True, I will be eventually repaid, that 
 is, if my .people don't leave me ; but I have no other security 
 beyond my confidence in the goodness of the cause, and the con- 
 tinued liberality of my countrymen.' And in this style would 
 the reverend gentleman have continued down to the bottom 
 of the fifth page in his first Dialogue, had it not been for 
 a singularly portentous and terrible interruption. 
 
 The haunted Tomnahurich rose, as we have said, im- 
 mediately behind us, leafy and green ; and not one of its 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 347 
 
 multitude of boughs trembled in the sunshine. Suddenly, 
 however, the hill-side began to move. There was a low 
 deep noise like distant thunder ; and straightway the debris 
 of a landslip came rolling downwards, half obliterating in 
 its course the circle of the conjurer. Turf, and clay, and 
 stone lay in a mingled ruin at our feet ; and wriggling in 
 the midst, like a huge blue-bottle in an old cobweb, there 
 was a reverend gentleman dressed in black. He gathered 
 himself up, sprung deftly to his feet, and stood fronting the 
 conjurer. Wonderful to relate, the man in black proved to 
 be the veritable Mr. Clark of three years ago Mr. Clark 
 of 1840 Mr. Clark who published the great non-intrusion 
 discourse, who wrote the Rights of Members^ who spoke 
 the long anti-patronage speeches, who led the debate in 
 the Assembly anent the rights of the people, and who 
 declared it clear as day that the Church had power to 
 enact the Veto. The conjurer started backwards like a 
 man who receives a mortal wound : the two little figures 
 uttered a thin scrannel shriek apiece, and then slunk out of 
 existence. ' Avoid ye,' exclaimed the conjurer, * Avoid ye ! 
 Conjuro te, conjuro te T He then went on to mutter, as 
 if by way of exorcism, in low and very rapid tones, * I have 
 no anxiety to refute the charge of inconsistency, which 
 some have endeavoured to fasten on me, from detached 
 portions of what I have written or spoken during several 
 years, on what may be termed Church politics. In matters 
 not essential to salvation, increased light or advanced ex- 
 perience may properly produce change of sentiment in the 
 most enlightened and conscientious Christian. For a man 
 to assert that he is subject to no change, is to lay claim to 
 one of the perfections ' Dialogue ist, p. 6. 
 
 ' And so you won't go out,' said the true Mr. Clark, inter- 
 rupting him. 
 
 4 No, sir,' replied the conjurer. 'I have maturely con- 
 sidered the proposed secession from the Established Church, 
 
348 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 and, without pronouncing any judgment on the motives or 
 doings of others who may think or act differently, I deeply 
 feel that in such a measure I could not join without manifest 
 sin against the light of my conscience.' Dialogue ist, p. 4. 
 ' Ah, 1 rejoined the true Mr. Clark, ' did I not say it would 
 be so? I knew there would be found a set of recreant 
 priests, who, for a pitiful morsel of the world's bread, would 
 submit to be the instruments of trampling on the blood- 
 bought rights of the Scottish people, and call themselves a 
 Church, while departing from their allegiance to Him who is 
 the source of all true ecclesiastical authority ; but never can 
 these constitute the Church of Scotland ! ' Sermon, p. 40. 
 
 * I cannot reconcile it with the views I have long enter- 
 tained of my duty to the Church and to the country,' said 
 the conjurer, ' to secede from the National Establishment, 
 simply because it wants what it wanted when I became one 
 of its ministers.' Dialogue ist, p. 12. 
 
 * Wanted when you became one of its ministers ! ' ex- 
 claimed the true Mr. Clark. * No, sir. The civil courts 
 are now compelling obedience in cases in which they have 
 no jurisdiction, and have levelled with the ground the in- 
 dependent jurisdiction of the Church, a Church bearing 
 in its diadem a host of martyrs, and which never hitherto 
 submitted to the supremacy of any power, excepting that 
 of the Son of God.' Sermon, pp. 59-63. 
 
 ' I won't go out,' reiterated the conjurer. 
 
 ' Well, you have told me what you have long deemed to 
 be your duty,' said the true Mr. Clark. ' I shall repeat to 
 you, in turn, what I three years ago recorded as mine. " It 
 is the duty of the Church," I said, " to maintain its position, 
 confirmed as it is by solemn statutes and by the faith of 
 national treaties, until that shall be overthrown by the 
 deliberate decision of the State itself. Should such a cir- 
 cumstance really occur, as that the Legislature should insist 
 that the Church holds its endowments on the express con- 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 349 
 
 dition of its rendering to civil authority the subjection 
 which it can consistently yield to Christ alone, there being 
 then a plain violation of the terms on which the Church 
 entered into alliance with the State, that alliance must be 
 dissolved, as one which can be no longer continued, but by 
 rendering to men what is due to God." ' Sermon, p. 28. 
 
 1 1 deny entirely and in totoj said the conjurer, ' that the 
 present controversy involves the doctrine of the Headship/ 
 See 2d Dialogue. 
 
 ( Admit,' said the true Mr. Clark, ' but the right of secular 
 courts to review, and thus to confirm or annul, the pro- 
 ceedings of the Scottish Church in one of the most im- 
 portant spiritual functions, and the same power may soon 
 be, under various pretexts, used to control all the inferior 
 departments of its ecclesiastical procedure. Will any man 
 say that a society thus acknowledging the supremacy of a 
 different power from that of Christ is any longer to be re- 
 garded as a branch of the Church whose unity chiefly exists 
 in adherence to Him as its Head ?' Sermon, p. 45. 
 
 ' The claim,' said the conjurer, ' is essentially Papal.' 
 Dialogue 2d, p. 6. 
 
 * No,' replied the true Mr. Clark, not Papal, but Pro- 
 testant : our confessors and martyrs chose to suffer for it 
 the loss of all their worldly goods, and to incur the pains of 
 death in its most appalling forms.' Sermon, p. 45. 
 
 ' Papal notwithstanding,' reiterated the conjurer. ' But 
 it is not to be wondered at, that in the earliest stages of 
 the Reformation, men newly come out of the Church of 
 Rome should have been led to assert for the office-bearers 
 of their Church the prerogatives which Romanism claimed 
 for her own.' Dialogue zd, p. 7. 
 
 * What ! ' exclaimed the true Mr. Clark, ' is not the pre- 
 sent contest clearly for the rights of the members of Christ, 
 rights manifestly recognised in His word, and involving 
 His Headship?' Sermon, p. 37. See also p. 31. 
 
350 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 1 Not at all,' replied the conjurer. ' The question is one 
 of faction, and of faction only. Struggles for the victory of 
 mere parties have been as injurious to vital godliness in the 
 Church as the same cause has been to the true prosperity 
 of the State.' Dialogue ist, p. 15. 
 
 1 Faction! ' exclaimed the true Mr. Clark; 'the Church of 
 Scotland is now engaged in asserting principles which the 
 allegiance it owes to Christ will never permit it to desert. 
 And let it be rung in the ears of the people of Scotland, 
 that the great reason why the asserting of the Church's 
 spiritual jurisdiction is so clamorously condemned in certain 
 quarters, is because it is employed to maintain the rights of 
 the people.' Sermon, pp. 37-39. 
 
 ' To be above the authority of the law, no Church in this 
 country can be,' said the conjurer. ' The Church courts 
 would be able, were their principles fully recognised, to 
 tread under foot the rights of the people as effectually as ever 
 they resisted those of patrons.' Dialogue is/, pp. 14 and 16. 
 
 ' Nothing can be more absurd than such insinuations,' 
 exclaimed the true Mr. Clark. 'The Church disclaims every 
 kind of civil authority, and simply requires that there be 
 no interference on the part of civil rulers with its spiritual 
 functions. How that which declines a jurisdiction in civil 
 matters, can in any sense of the word, or in any.conceivable 
 circumstances, be injurious to civil liberty, it is impossible 
 to conceive.' Sermon , p. 32. 
 
 ' Alas,' said the conjurer, 'if the Church by recent events 
 has been exhibited in a lower position than Scotsmen ever 
 saw it placed in before, this has been occasioned by the 
 unhappy attitude of defiance of the civil tribunals in which 
 it was unadvisedly placed, and which no body, however 
 venerable, can be permitted to occupy with impunity in a 
 well-governed country.' Dialogue isf, p. 12. 
 
 * Degradation!' indignantly exclaimed the true Mr. Clark; 
 'did the Church, in consequence of the findings of the 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 351 
 
 civil courts, proceed to act in opposition to what it believes 
 and has solemnly declared to be founded on the Scripture, 
 and agreeable thereto, it would exhibit itself to the world 
 a disgraced and degraded society, utterly fallen from the 
 faithfulness to religious duty which marked former periods 
 of its history.' Sermon, p. 21. 
 
 ' Clear it is,' said the conjurer, ' that the Church must 
 not be permitted to retain with impunity her attitude of 
 defiance to the civil tribunals. Were it otherwise, an 
 ecclesiastical power might come to be established in this 
 kingdom, fully able to trample uncontrolled on the most 
 sacred rights of the nation.' Dialogue ist, p. 12. 
 
 ' Nothing, I repeat,' said the true Mr. Clark, ' can be 
 more absurd than the insinuation. The liberties of the 
 Church of Scotland have been often assailed by the civil 
 authorities of the land, but uniformly by those who were 
 equally hostile to the civil freedom of the country. Its 
 rights were, during one dreary period, so effectually over- 
 thrown, that none stood up to assert them but the devoted 
 band who, in the wildest fastnesses of their country, were 
 often compelled by the violence of military rule to water 
 with their blood the moors, where they rendered homage to 
 the King of Zion ; while, in the sunshine of courtly favour, 
 ecclesiastics moved, who without fear bartered, for their 
 own sordid gain, the blood-bought -liberties of the Church 
 of God, and showed themselves as willing to subvert the 
 civil rights of their countrymen as they had been to destroy 
 their religious privileges.' Sermon, p. 30. 
 
 ' To be above the law,' reiterated the conjurer, * no 
 Church in this country can be.' Dialogue isf, p. 16. 
 
 'There may arise various occasions,' said the true Mr. 
 Clark, * on which the injunctions of man may interfere with 
 the injunctions of God ; and in every such case a Christian 
 man must yield obedience to the authority of the highest 
 Lord.' Sermon, p. 22. 
 
352 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 1 Sad case that of Strathbogie ! ' ejaculated the conjurer. 
 
 ' Very sad,' replied the true Mr. Clark. ' What is your 
 version of it ? ' 
 
 ' Listen,' said the conjurer. ' What has been termed the 
 Veto Law was enacted less than ten years ago, and after 
 lengthened legal proceedings, was declared illegal by the 
 House of Lords, the highest judicial authority in this king- 
 dom. For proceedings adopted in conformity to this deci- 
 sion, seven ministers in the Presbytery of Strathbogie were 
 first suspended and then deposed from their ministerial 
 offices, without any other charges laid against them than 
 that they sought the protection of the civil courts in acting 
 according to their decision. For refusing to obey a law 
 which the House of Lords declared to be illegal, no mini- 
 ster can be lawfully deposed from his office in this country, 
 unless we are prepared to adopt a principle which would 
 ultimately subvert the entire authority of the law. The 
 civil courts, simply on the ground that these ministers had 
 been deposed for obeying the statutes of the realm, reversed 
 the sentence, as what was beyond the lawful powers of any 
 Church in this land, whether Voluntary or Established. 
 And on the same principle, they interfered to prevent any 
 from treating them as suspended or deposed.' Dialogue 
 ij/, p. 10. 
 
 'A most injurious representation of the case,' said the 
 true Mr. Clark. ' Seven niinisters, forming the majority of 
 the Presbytery of Strathbogie, chose to intimate their reso- 
 lution to take steps towards the settlement of Mr. Edwards 
 as minister of Marnoch, in defiance of the opposition of 
 almost all the parishioners, and in direct contempt of the 
 instructions given them by the superior church courts. 
 The civil courts in the meantime merely declared their 
 opinion of the law, but they issued no injunction whatever, 
 so as to give the presbytery the pretext of choosing between 
 obeying the one or the other jurisdiction ; and they violated 
 
THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 353 
 
 the express injunction of the 'supreme church court, with- 
 out being able to plead in justification that they had been 
 compelled by the civil authority to do so. They chose to 
 act ultroneously in violation of their duty to the Church. 
 They had solemnly promised to obey the superior church 
 courts, and had never come under any promise to obey in 
 spiritual things any other authority. In proposing to take 
 the usual steps for conferring the spiritual office of a pastor 
 in the Church of Christ, in defiance of the injunction laid 
 upon them by the supreme court of the Church of Scotland, 
 they plainly violated their ordination engagements. And in 
 actually ordaining Mr. Edwards, the whole procedure was a 
 solemn mockery of holy things.' Sermon, p. 26. 
 
 'After all,' said the conjurer, with a sigh, 'the agitated 
 question is but of inferior moment.' Dialogue ist, p. 3. 
 
 ' Inferior moment ! ' exclaimed the true Mr. Clark ; ' no 
 religious question of the same magnitude and importance 
 has come before this country since the ever-memorable Re- 
 volution in 1688. The divisions of secular partisanship sink 
 into utter insignificance when compared with this. Let the 
 principles once become triumphant for which the Court of 
 Session is now contending, and the Church of Scotland is 
 ruined.' Sermon, pp. 7 and 59. 
 
 ' Ruined ! ' shouted out the conjurer ; ' it is you who are 
 ruining the Church, by urging on the disruption. For my 
 own part, I promised, as all ministers do at their ordination, 
 never, directly or indirectly, to endeavour her subversion, 
 or to follow divisive courses, but to maintain her unity and 
 peace against error and schism, whatsoever trouble or perse- 
 cution might arise ; and now, in agreement with my solemn 
 ordination engagements, have I determined to hold by her 
 to the last.' Dialogue \st, p. 9. 
 
 ' What mean you by the Church ? ' asked the true Mr. 
 Clark. ' The Church and the establishment of it are surely 
 very different things. Men have talked of themselves as 
 
 z 
 
354 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 friends of the Church, because they were the friends of its 
 civil establishment, and loudly declaim against the pro- 
 ceedings of the majority of its office-bearers now, as fraught 
 with danger to this object. But what do they mean by the 
 civil establishment of an Erastian Church ! Is it possible 
 that they mean by it the receiving of certain pecuniary 
 endowments as a price for rendering a divided allegiance to 
 the Son of God ? If that be their meaning, it is time they 
 and the country at large should know that the Church of 
 Scotland was never established on such principles.' Ser- 
 mon, p. 42. 
 
 'It is not true, however,' said the conjurer, 'that the 
 majority of the faithful ministers of Scotland have resolved 
 to abandon the Establishment, though this may be the case 
 in some parts of the country.' Dialogue ist, p. 16. 
 
 ' Not true, sir ! ' said the true Mr. Clark ; * nothing can be 
 more true. All all will leave it except a set of recreant 
 priests, who for a pitiful morsel of this world's bread will 
 submit to be the instruments of trampling on the blood- 
 bought rights of the Scottish people.' Sermon, p. 42. 
 
 * What has pained me most in all this controversy,' re- 
 marked the conjurer, 'has been the insidious manner in 
 which certain persons have endeavoured to sow disunion 
 in some cases too successfully between ministers and 
 their hearers.' Dialogue isf, p. 3. 
 
 ' Sir,' exclaimed the true Mr. Clark, 'Sir, every individual 
 would do well to remember, when summoned to such a 
 contest as this, the curse denounced against Meroz for 
 remaining in neutrality when the battle raged in Israel. 
 This curse was denounced by the angel of the Lord, and 
 is written for the admonition of all ages, as a demonstration 
 of the feelings with which God regards the standing aloof, 
 in a great religious struggle, by whatever motives it may be 
 sought to be justified.' Sermon, p. 59. 
 
 'The men who thus sow disunion,' said the conjurer, 
 
THE TWO MR. C LARKS. 355 
 
 'never venture to deny that they, whose usefulness they 
 endeavour to destroy, are ministers of the gospel, urging 
 on the acceptance of a slumbering world the message of 
 celestial mercy, which must produce results of weal or woe 
 destined to be eternally remembered, when the strifes of 
 words which have agitated the Church on earth are all 
 forgotten.' Dialogue ist, p. 4. 
 
 'Hold, hold, sir,' said the true Mr. Clark. < On the 
 event of this struggle depends not merely the temporal 
 interests of our country, but the welfare of many immortal 
 spirits through the ceaseless ages of future being.' Sermon, 
 p. 60. 
 
 * It is so distracting a subject this Church question,' said 
 the conjurer, ' that I make it a point of duty never to bring 
 it to the pulpit.' Dialogue ist, p. 3. 
 
 ' In that you and I differ,' said the true Mr. Clark, ' just 
 as we do in other matters. I have written very long sermons 
 on the subject, ay, and published them too; and in par- 
 ticular beg leave to recommend to your careful perusal my 
 sermon on the Present Position, preached in Inverness on 
 the evening of the iQth January 1840.' 
 * ' I suppose you have heard it said, that I changed my 
 views from the fear of worldly loss,' said the conjurer. 
 Dialogue ist, p. 4. 
 
 'Heard it said!' said the true Mr. Clark. ' You forget 
 that I have been bottled up on the hill-side yonder for the 
 last three years.' 
 
 * Sir,' said the conjurer, with great solemnity, ' when the 
 West Church was built, in order to secure this valuable 
 addition to the church accommodation of the parish, I did 
 not hesitate to undertake, on my own personal risk, to 
 guarantee the payment of three thousand pounds. This 
 obliged me to diminish, to no small extent, my personal 
 expenditure, as the only way in which the pecuniary bur- 
 den could be met, without diminishing my contributions to 
 
356 THE TWO MR. CLARKS. 
 
 the public charities of the town, and to the numerous cases 
 of private distress brought continually under my notice, in 
 the various walks of ministerial duty. And though the 
 original debt is now reduced to half that amount by the 
 liberal benefactions received from various individuals, still 
 nearly three-fourths of my stipend this year has been ex- 
 pended on this object, in terms of my voluntary obligation. 
 The large sum which I am now in advance, I believe, will be 
 eventually repaid ; but for this I have no security beyond 
 my confidence in the goodness of the cause, and the con- 
 tinued liberality of my countrymen. All this respecting the 
 West Church is known to few, and would not have been 
 mentioned by me at this time, had it not been for the per- 
 severance with which some, inaccessible to higher motives 
 themselves, have endeavoured to persuade my hearers that 
 mercenary considerations have produced the position I 
 have felt it my duty to take in the present discussion.' 
 Dialogue ist, p. 5. 
 
 For a few seconds the true Mr. Clark seemed as if struck 
 dumb by the intelligence. ' Ah ! fast anchored!' he at 
 length ejaculated. 'Fairly tethered to the Establishment 
 by a stake of fifteen hundred pounds. Demas, happy man, 
 had a silver mine to draw him aside a positive silver 
 mine. The West Church is merely a negative one. Were 
 it to get into the hands of the Moderates, it would become 
 waterlogged to a certainty, and not a single ounce of the 
 precious metal would ever be fished out of it ; whereas you 
 think there is still some little chance of recovery when you 
 remain to ply the pump yourself. Most disinterested man ! 
 let your statement of the case be but fairly printed, and 
 it will serve you not only as an apology, but as an adver- 
 tisement to boot.' 
 
 'Printed !' said the conjurer ; ' I have already printed it 
 in English, and Mr. M'Donald the schoolmaster is trans- 
 lating it into Gaelic.' 
 
THE TWO MR. C LARKS. 357 
 
 But we have far exceeded our limits, and have yet given 
 scarce a tithe of the controversy. We found ourselves 
 sitting all alone in front of our own quiet fire long ere it 
 was half completed ; and we recommend such of our 
 readers as are desirous to see the rest of it in the originals, 
 to possess themselves of the Rev. Mr. Clark's Sermon, and 
 the Rev. Mr. Clark's Dialogues. They form, when bound 
 up together, one of the extremest, and at the same time 
 one of the most tangible, specimens of inconsistency and 
 self-contradiction that controversy has yet exhibited; and 
 enable us to anticipate the character and standing of the 
 evangelic minority in the Erastian Church. ' If the salt has 
 lost its savour, wherewithal shall it be salted?' 
 
 April 12, 1843. 
 
PULPIT DUTIES NOT SECONDARY. 
 
 THERE are two antagonist perils to which all evangelical 
 Churches, whether established or unendowed, are exposed 
 in an age in which men's minds are so stirred by the fluctua- 
 tions of opinion, that though there may not be much pro- 
 gress, there is at least much motion. They lie open, on 
 the one hand, to the danger of getting afloat on the tide of 
 innovation, and so drifting from the fixed position in which 
 Churches, as exponents of the mind of Christ, possess an 
 authoritative voice, into the giddy vortices of some revolv- 
 ing eddy of speculation, in which they can at best assume 
 but the character of mere advocates of untried experiment ; 
 or, on the other hand, they are liable to fall into the opposite 
 mistake of obstinately resisting all change however excel- 
 lent in itself, and however much a consequence of the 
 onward march of the species and this not from any direct 
 regard to those divine laws, of which one jot or tittle 
 cannot pass away, but simply out of respect to certain 
 peculiar views and opinions entertained by their ancestors 
 in ages considerably less wise than the times which have 
 succeeded them. 
 
 An evangelistic Church cannot fall into the one error 
 without losing its influential voice as a Church. It may 
 gain present popularity by throwing itself upon what chances 
 to be the onward movement of the time ; but it is a spend- 
 thrift popularity, that never fails in the end to leave it ex- 
 hausted and weak. The political ague has always its cold 
 as certainly as its hot fever fits : action produces reaction ; 
 
 358 
 
PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 359 
 
 great exertion induces great fatigue j the desired object, even 
 when fully gained, is sure always, like all mere sublunary 
 objects of pursuit, to disappoint expectation j and the Church 
 that, forgetting where its real power lies, seeks, Antaeus-like, 
 to gather strength in this way from the earth, contracts in 
 every instance but the soil and weakness inherent in those 
 earthy and unspiritual things to which it attaches itself. It, 
 too, comes to have its cold ague fits and its reaction periods 
 of exhaustion, disappointment, and decline. And the op- 
 posite error of clinging to the worn-out and the obsolete 
 produces ultimately the same effect, though it operates in a 
 different way. A Church that, in behalf of some antiquated 
 type of thought or action, opposes itself to what is in reality 
 the onward current of the age, is sure always to fare like 
 stranded ice-floes, that, in a river flooded by thaw, retain the 
 exact temperature under which they were formed, when the 
 temperature all around them has altered. The ice-floes 
 and the obsolete Church may be alike successful for a time 
 in keeping up the ancient state of things within their own 
 lessening limits, but both are eventually absorbed and dis- 
 appear. While the more versatile ecclesiastical body, tossed 
 by the cross currents and eddies of novel and uncertain 
 change, loses its true course and makes shipwreck, the 
 rigidly immoveable^one, anchored over the worn-out pecu- 
 liarities of bygone days, is borne down by the irresistible 
 rush of the stream, and founders at its moorings. 
 
 The Free Church, as a body, is, we trust, not greatly in 
 danger from either extreme. They are the extremes, how- 
 ever, which in the present day constitute her true Scylla 
 and Charybdis ; and it were perhaps well that she should 
 keep the fact steadily before her, by laying them down as 
 such on their chart. Not from the gross and earthy fires 
 of political movement in the present day, or from the cold 
 grey ashes of movement semi-political in some uninspired 
 age of the past, must that pillar of flame now ascend which 
 
360 PULPIT D UT1ES NOT SECOND AR Y. 
 
 is to marshal her on her pilgrimage through the wilderness, 
 at once reviving her by its heat and guiding her by its 
 effulgence. The light borrowed from the one would but 
 flicker idly before her, a wandering and delusive meteor ; 
 the other would furnish her with but an unlighted torch, 
 unsuited to cast across her way a single beam of direction 
 and guidance. Her light must be derived from an antiquity 
 more remote than that of the uninspired ages, and her heat 
 from a source more permanent than that of present excite- 
 ment, social or political : the one direct from the unerring 
 record of those times when God walked the earth in the flesh ; 
 the other from that living spirit without whose influence 
 energy the most untiring can be influential in but the pro- 
 duction of evil, and earnestness the most intense may be 
 profession, but cannot be revival. Strength must be sought 
 by her, not in the turmoil of evanescent agitation, nor in the 
 worn-out modes of an age the fashion of which has perished, 
 but in the perennial verities of the everlasting gospel. While 
 so far adapting herself to the times as to present an armed 
 front to every form of error, she must preach to her people 
 as if the prisoner of Patmos had but just completed the 
 record of Revelation. 
 
 There is one special error regarding this the most im- 
 portant portion of her proper work the preaching of the 
 word to which it may be well to advert. It has become 
 much the fashion of the time most unthinkingly, surely to 
 speak of preaching as not the paramount, but merely one 
 of the subsidiary duties of a clergyman. ' He is not a man 
 of much pulpit preparation,' it has become customary to 
 remark of some minister, at least liked if not admired, * but 
 he is diligent in visiting and in looking after his schools ; 
 and preaching is in reality but a small part of a minister's 
 duty.' Or, in the event of a vacancy, the flock looking out 
 for a pastor are apt enough to say, * Our last minister was 
 an accomplished pulpit man, but what we at present want 
 
PULFIT DUTIES NOT SECONDAR Y. 361 
 
 is a man sedulous in visiting ; for preaching is in reality but 
 a small part of a minister's duty.' Nay, ministers, especially 
 ministers of but a few twelvemonths' standing, have them- 
 selves in some cases caught up the remark, as if it embodied 
 a self-evident truth ; and while they dare tell, not without 
 self-complacency, that their discourses things written at a 
 short sitting, if written at all cost them but little trouble, 
 they add further, as if by way of apology, that they are, how- 
 ever, l much occupied otherwise, and that preaching is in 
 reality but a small part of a minister's duty.' We have some- 
 times felt inclined to assure these latter personages in reply, 
 that they might a little improve the matter just by making 
 preaching no part of their duty at all. But where, we ask, 
 is it taught, either by God in His word or by the Church in 
 her standards, that preaching is merely one of the minor 
 duties of the minister, or indeed other than his first and 
 greatest duty? Not, certainly, in the New Testament, for 
 there it has invariably the paramount place assigned to it ; 
 as certainly not in our standards, for in them the emphasis 
 is ( especially' laid on the ' preaching of the word' as God's 
 most ' effectual means ' of converting sinners. If it be a 
 truth that preaching is but comparatively a minor part of a 
 minister's duty, it is certainly neither a Scripture nor a 
 Shorter Catechism truth ; and, lest it should be not only 
 not a truth at all, but even not an innocuous untruth, we 
 think all who hold it would do well to inquire how they 
 have come by it. 
 
 We have our own suspicion regarding its origin. It is 
 natural for men to exaggerate the importance of whatever 
 good they patronize, or whatever improvement or enterprise 
 they advocate or recommend. And perhaps some degree 
 of exaggeration is indispensable. In order to create the 
 impulse necessary to overcome the vis inertia of society, and 
 induce in the particular case the required amount of exer- 
 tion, the stream of the moving power has if we may so 
 
362 PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 
 
 speak to be elevated to the level of hopes raised high 
 above the point of possible accomplishment. To employ 
 the language of the mechanist, the necessary y#// would be 
 otherwise awanting, and the machine would fail to move. 
 If, for instance, all men had estimated the advantages of 
 free trade according to the sober computations of Chalmers, 
 the country would have no Anti-Corn-Law League, and no 
 repeal of the obnoxious statutes. And yet who can now 
 doubt that the calculations of Chalmers were in reality the 
 true ones? In like manner, if it had been truly seen that the 
 * baths for the working classes' could have merely extended 
 to the humbler inhabitants of our cities those advantages 
 of ablution which the working men of our sea-coasts already 
 possess, but of which when turned of forty not one out of 
 a hundred among them ever avails himself, we would scarce 
 have witnessed bath meetings, with Dukes in the chair; nor 
 would the baths themselves have been erected. But the 
 natural exaggerative feeling prevailed. Baths for the work- 
 ing classes were destined somehow to renovate society, it 
 was thought ; and so, though Chartism be now as little con- 
 tent as ever, baths for the working classes our cities possess. 
 And, doubtless, exaggeration pf a similar kind has tended 
 to heighten the general estimate of the minor duties of the 
 clergyman ; and were there no invidious comparisons insti- 
 tuted between the lesser and the paramount duties, between 
 what is secondary in its nature magnified into primary im- 
 portance, and what is primary in its nature diminished into 
 a mere secondary, and standing as if the one had been 
 viewed by the lesser, and the other through the greater lens 
 of a telescope, we would have no quarrel whatever with 
 the absolute exaggeration in the case, regarded simply as a 
 mere moving force. But we must quarrel with it when we 
 see it leading to practical error ; and so, in direct opposi- 
 tion to the common remark, that preaching is but a small 
 part of the minister's duty, we assert that it is not a small, 
 
PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 363 
 
 but a very large, and by far the most important part of it ; 
 and that it is not our standards or the Scriptures that are 
 in error on this special head, but the numerous class who, 
 taking up the antagonist view, maintain as a self-evident 
 proposition what has neither standing in the New Testa- 
 ment, nor yet guarantee in the experience of the Church. 
 
 No apology whatever ought to be sustained for imperfect 
 pulpit preparation; nay, practically at least, no apology 
 whatever has or will be sustained for it. It is no unusual 
 thing to see a church preached empty ; there have been cases 
 of single clergymen, great in their way, who have emptied four 
 in succession : for people neither ought nor will misspend 
 their Sabbaths in dozing under sermons to which no effort 
 of attention, however honestly made, enables them to listen ; 
 and what happens to single congregations may well happen 
 to a whole ecclesiastical body, should its general style of 
 preaching fall below the existing average. And certainly 
 we know nothing more likely to produce such a result than 
 the false and dangerous opinion, that preaching is compara- 
 tively a small part of a minister's duty. It is supereminently 
 dangerous for one to form a mean estimate of one's work, 
 unless it be work of a nature very low and menial indeed. 
 * No one,' said Johnson, ' ever did anything well to which 
 he did not give the whole bent of his mind.' It is this 
 low estimate this want of a high standard in the mind 
 that leads some of our young men to boast of the facility 
 with which they compose their sermons, a boast alike 
 derogatory to the literary taste and knowledge and to the 
 Christian character of him who makes it. Easy to compose 
 a sermon ! easy to compose what, when written, cannot be 
 read j and what, when preached, cannot be listened to. We 
 believe it ; for in cases of this kind the ease is all on the part 
 of the author. We believe further, we would fain say to the 
 boaster, that you and such as you could scuttle and sink 
 the Free Church with amazingly little trouble to yourselves. 
 
364 PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 
 
 But is it easy, think you, to mature such thoughts as Butler 
 matured ? And yet these were embodied in sermons. Is it 
 easy, think you, to convey in language exquisite as that of 
 Robert Hall, sentiments as refined and imagery as classic 
 as his ? And yet Hall's noblest compositions were sermons. 
 Is it easy, think you, to produce a philosophic poem, the 
 most sublime and expansive of any age or country ? And 
 yet such is the true character of the Astronomical Sermons 
 of Chalmers. Or is that spirituality which impresses and 
 sinks into the heart of a people, independently at times of 
 thought of large calibre or the polish of a fine literary taste, 
 a thing easily incorporated into the tissue of a lengthened 
 sermon ? Think you, did Maclaurin's well-known Sermon 
 on the Cross cost him little trouble ? or the not less noble 
 sermon of Sir Matthew Hale, on Christ and Him crucified ? 
 Look, we beseech you, to your New Testaments, and see 
 if there be ought slovenly in the style, or loose and point- 
 less in the thinking, of the model sermons given you there. 
 The discourse addressed by our Saviour from the mount to 
 the people was a sermon ; as was also the magnificent ad- 
 dress of Paul to the Athenians, where he chose as his text 
 the inscription on one of their altars, ' To the unknown 
 God.' There may be a practical and most mischievous 
 heterodoxy embodied in the preacher's idea of sermons, as 
 certainly as he may embody a heterodoxy theoretic and 
 doctrinal in the sermons themselves. 
 
 The ordinary course of establishing a Church in any 
 country, as specially shown by New Testament history and 
 that of the Reformation, is first and mainly through the 
 preaching of the word. An earnest, eloquent man a Peter 
 in Jerusalem a Paul at Athens, on Mars Hill a John 
 Knox in Edinburgh or St. Andrews a George Whitfield 
 in some open field or market-place of Britain or America 
 or a Thomas Chalmers in some metropolitan pulpit, Scotch 
 or English addresses himself to the people. 
 
PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR K 365 
 
 There is a strange power in the words, and they cannot 
 but listen ; and then the words begin to tell. The heart is 
 affected, the judgment convinced, the will influenced and 
 directed : ancient beliefs are, as the case may be, modified, 
 resuscitated, or destroyed ; new or revived convictions take 
 the place of previous convictions, inadequate or erroneous ; 
 and thus churches are planted, and the face of society 
 changed. We limit ourselves here to what being strictly 
 natural in the process would operate, if skilfully applied, 
 as directly on the side of error as of truth. It is the first 
 essential of a book, that it be interesting enough to be read; 
 and of a preacher, whatever his creed, that he be sufficiently 
 engaging to be attentively listened to; and without this 
 preliminary merit, no other merit, however great, is of any 
 avail whatever. And when a Church possesses it in any 
 great degree, it is sure to spread and increase. Are there 
 churches in the Establishment which, though thinned by the 
 Disruption, have now all their seats let, and are crammed 
 every Sabbath to the doors ? If so, be sure there is popular 
 talent in the pulpit, and that the clergyman who officiates 
 there does not find it a very easy matter to compose his 
 sermons. Nay, dear as the distinctive principles of the Free 
 Church are to the people of Scotland, with superior pulpit 
 talent in the Establishment on the one hand, and in the 
 ranks of the disendowed body, on the other, a goodly supply 
 of those youthful ministers who boast that they either never 
 write their sermons, or write them at a short sitting, we 
 would by no means guarantee to our Church a ten years' 
 vigorous existence. These may not be palatable truths, 
 but we trust they are wholesome ones; and we know that 
 the time peculiarly requires them. It is, however, not 
 mainly with the Establishment that the Free Church has to 
 contend. 
 
 We ask the reader whether he has not marked, within the 
 last few years, the debut of another and more formidable 
 
366 PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 
 
 antagonist, with which all Christian Churches may be soon 
 called on to grapple ? 
 
 Our newly-instituted athenaeums and philosophical asso- 
 ciations form one of the novel features of the time, insti- 
 tutions in which at least the second-class men of the age 
 Emersons, and Morells, and Combes with much that is 
 interesting in science and fascinating in literature, blend 
 sentiments and opinions at direct variance with the great 
 doctrinal truths embodied in our standards. The press, not 
 less formidable now than ever, is an old antagonist ; but, 
 with all its appliances and powers, it lacked the charm of 
 the living voice. That peculiar charm, however, the new 
 combatant possesses. The pulpit, met by its own weapons 
 and in its own field, will have to a certainty to measure its 
 strength against it ; and the standard of pulpit accomplish- 
 ment and of theological education, instead of being lowered, 
 must in consequence be greatly elevated. The Church of 
 this country, which in the earlier periods of her history, 
 when Knox was her leader, and Buchanan the moderator of 
 her General Assembly, stood far in advance of the age in 
 popular eloquence, solid learning, and elegant accomplish- 
 ment, and which, in the person of Chalmers in our own 
 days, was vested in the more advanced views and the more 
 profound policy of a full century hence, must not be suf- 
 fered to lag behind the age now. Her troops must not be 
 permitted to fall into confusion, and to use as arms the rude, 
 unsightly bludgeons of an untaught and undisciplined mob, 
 when the enemy, glittering in harness, and furnished with 
 weapons keen of temper and sharp of edge, is bearing down 
 upon them in compact phalanx. 
 
 We know what it is to have sat for many years under 
 ministers who, possessed of great popular talent and high 
 powers of original thought, gave much time and labour to 
 pulpit preparation. We know how great a privilege it is to 
 have to look forward to the ministrations of the Sabbath, 
 
PULPIT D UT2ES NOT SECOND AR Y. 367 
 
 not as wearinesses, which, simply as a matter of duty, were 
 to be endured ; but as exquisite feasts, spiritual and intel- 
 lectual, which were to be greatly relished and enjoyed. 
 And when hearing it sometimes regretted, with reference to 
 at least one remarkable man, that he did not visit his flock 
 quite so often as was desirable many of the complainants' 
 sole idea of a ministerial visit, meanwhile, being simply 
 that it was a long exordium of agreeable gossip, with a 
 short tail-piece of prayer stuck to its hinder end we have 
 strongly felt how immensely better it was that the assembled 
 congregation should enjoy each year fifty-two Sabbaths of 
 their minister at his best, than that the tone of his pulpit 
 services should be lowered, in order that each individual 
 among them might enjoy a yearly half-hour of him apart. 
 And yet such, very nearly, was the true statement of the 
 case. We fully recognise the importance, in its own sub- 
 ordinate place, of ministerial visitation, especially when 
 conducted a circumstance, however, which sometimes 
 lowers its popularity as it ought to be. But it must not 
 be assigned that prominent place denied to it by our stan- 
 dards, and which the word of God utterly fails to sanction. 
 
 It is, though an important, still a minor duty ; and the 
 Free Church must not be sacrificed to the ungrounded idea 
 that it occupies a level as high, or even nearly as high, as 
 ' the preaching of the word.' To that peculiar scheme of 
 visitation advocated by Chalmers as a first process in his 
 work of excavation, we of course do not refer. In those 
 special cases to which he so vigorously directed himself, 
 visitation was an inevitable preliminary,, without which the 
 appliances of the pulpit could not be brought to bear. Philip 
 had to open the Scriptures tete-d-tete to the Ethiopian eunuch, 
 for the Ethiopian eunuch never came to church. 
 
 But even were his scheme identical with that to which 
 we particularly refer, we would say to the young preacher 
 who sheltered under his authority, ' Well, prepare for the 
 
3 63 PULPIT D UTIES NOT SECOND AR Y. 
 
 pulpit as Dr. Chalmers did, even when he had the West 
 Port congregation for his audience, and we shall be quite 
 content to let you visit as much as you may.' The com- 
 position of a sermon was never easy work to him. He 
 devoted to it much time, and the full bent of his powerful 
 mind; and even when letting himself down to the humblest 
 of the people, the philosopher of largest capacity might 
 profitably take his place among the hearers, and listen with 
 an interest never for one moment suffered to flag. 
 
 May 3, 1848. 
 
DUGALD STEWART. 
 
 IT is now more than forty years since it was remarked 
 by Jeffrey, in his Review, that metaphysical science was 
 decidedly on the decline in Scotland. Dugald Stewart, 
 though in a delicate state of health at the time, was in the 
 full vigour of his faculties, and had still eighteen years of 
 life before him ; Thomas Brown had just been appointed 
 his assistant and successor in the Moral Philosophy Chair 
 of the University of Edinburgh ; and the elite of the Scottish 
 capital were flocking in crowds to his class-room, captivated 
 by the eloquence and ingenuity of his singularly vigorous 
 and original lectures. Even fifteen years subsequent, Dr. 
 Welsh could state, in the Life of his friend, that the recep- 
 tion of his work on the Philosophy of the Human Mind had 
 been 'favourable to a degree of which, in metaphysical 
 writings, there was no parallel.' It has been recorded as a 
 very remarkable circumstance', that the Essay of Locke 
 produced at a period when the mind of Europe first awoke 
 to general activity in the metaphysical province passed 
 through seven editions in the comparatively brief space of 
 fourteen years. The Lectures of Dr. Brown passed through 
 exactly seven editions in twelve years, and this at a time 
 when, according to Jeffrey, that science of mind of which 
 they treated was in a state of gradual decay. The critic 
 was, however, in the right. The genius of Brown had im- 
 parted to his brilliant posthumous work an interest which 
 could scarce be regarded as attaching to the subject of it ; 
 and in a few years after from about the year 1835 till 
 
 2 A 
 
370 DUGALD STEWART. 
 
 after the disruption of the Scottish Church metaphysical 
 science had sunk, not in Scotland only, but all over Britain, 
 to its lowest ebb. A few retired scholars continued to 
 prosecute their researches in the province of mind ; but 
 scarce any interest attached to their writings, and not a 
 bookseller could be found hardy enough to publish at his 
 own risk a metaphysical work. We are old enough to 
 remember a time, contemporaneous with the latter days of 
 Brown, when young students, in their course of preparation 
 for the learned professions, especially for the Church, used 
 to be ever recurring in conversation to the staple meta- 
 physical questions, occasionally, no doubt, much in the 
 style of Jack Lizard in the Guardian, who comforted his 
 mother, when the worthy lady was so unlucky as to scald 
 her hand with the boiling tea-kettle, by assuring her there 
 was no such thing as heat, but which at least served to 
 show that this branch of liberal education fully occupied 
 the mind of the individuals ostensibly engaged in mastering 
 it ; and we remember a subsequent time, when students 
 some of them very clever ones seemed never to have 
 thought on these questions at all, and remained silent in 
 conversation when they chanced to be mooted by the men 
 of an earlier generation. During, however, the last ten 
 years, mainly through the revival of a taste for metaphysical 
 inquiry in France and Germany, which has reacted on this 
 country, abstract questions on the nature and functions of 
 mind are again acquiring their modicum of space and im- 
 portance in Scotland. Our country no longer takes the 
 place it once did among the nations in this^department, 
 and never again may; but it at least begins to remember it 
 once was, and to serve itself heir to the works of the older 
 masters of mind; and we regard it as an evidence of the 
 reaction to which we refer, that a greatly more complete 
 edition of the writings of Dugald Stewart than has yet ap- 
 peared is at the present time in the course of issuing from 
 
DUGALD STEWART. 371 
 
 the press of one of our most respected Scotch publishers 
 the inheritor of a name paramount in the annals of the 
 trade Mr. Thomas Constable. 
 
 The writings of Dugald Stewart have been unfortunate in 
 more than that state of exhaustion and syncope into which 
 metaphysical science continued to sink during the lapse of 
 more than half a generation after the death of their author, 
 and the commencement of which 'had been remarked . by 
 Jeffrey more than half a generation before. From some 
 peculiar views founded, we believe, on an overweening 
 estimate of their pecuniary value the son and heir of the 
 philosopher tabooed their publication ; and it is only now 
 that, in consequence of his death, and of the juster views 
 entertained on the subject by a sister, also recently de- 
 ceased, that they are permitted to reappear. The time, 
 however, from that awakened interest in metaphysical 
 speculation which we have remarked, seems highly favour- 
 able for such an undertaking ; and we cannot doubt that the 
 work will find what it deserves a sure and steady, if not 
 very rapid sale. Stewart may be regarded as not merely 
 one of the more distinguished members of the Scottish 
 school of metaphysics, but as peculiarly its historian and 
 exponent. The mind of Reid was cast in a more original 
 mould, but he wanted both the elegance and the eloquence 
 of Stewart, nor were his powers of illustration equally great. 
 His language, too, was not only less refined and flowing, 
 but also less scientifically correct, than that of his dis- 
 tinguished exponent and successor. We would cite, for 
 instance, the happy substitution by the latter of the terms 
 'laws of human thought and belief,' for the unfortunate 
 phrases 'common sense' and 'instinct,' which raised so 
 extensive a prejudice against the vigorous protest against 
 scepticism made in other respects so effectively by Reid ; 
 and he passes oftener from the abstractions of his science 
 into the regions of life and character in which all must feel 
 
372 DUGALD STEWART. 
 
 interested, however slight their acquaintance with the 
 subtleties of metaphysical speculation. The extraordinary 
 excellence of Professor Stewart's style has been recognised 
 by the highest authorities. Robertson was perhaps the best 
 English writer of his day. The courtly Walpole, on ascer- 
 taining that he spoke Scotch, told him he was heartily glad 
 of it ; for ' it would be too mortifying,' he added, ' for English- 
 men to find that he not only wrote, but also spoke, their 
 language better than themselves.' And yet the Edinburgh 
 Reviewers recognised Stewart as the writer of a more 
 exquisite style than even Robertson. And Sir James 
 Mackintosh, no mean judge, characterizes him as the 
 most perfect, in an artistic point of view, of the philo- 
 sophical writers of Britain. * Probably no writer ever ex- 
 ceeded him,' says Sir James, ' in that species of eloquence 
 which springs from sensibility to literary merit and moral 
 excellence ; which neither obscures science by prodigal 
 ornament, nor disturbs the serenity of patient attention ; 
 but, though it rather calms and soothes the feelings, yet 
 exalts the genius, and insensibly inspires a reasonable 
 enthusiasm for whatever is good and fair.' Now, it is 
 surely not unimportant that the writings of such a man, 
 simply in their character as literary models, should be sub- 
 mitted to an age like the present, especially to its Scotch- 
 men. It is stated by Hume, in one of his letters to 
 Robertson, that meeting in Paris with the lady who first 
 gave to the French a translation of Charles v., he asked 
 her what she thought of the style of the work, and that 
 she instantly replied, with great naivet^ ' Oh, it is such a 
 style as only a Scotchman could have written.' Scotland 
 did certainly stand high in the age of Hume and Mackenzie, 
 of Robertson and of Adam Smith, for not only the vigour 
 of its thinking, but also for the purity and excellence of 
 its style. We fear, however, it can no longer arrogate to 
 itself praise on this special score. There have been books 
 
DUGALD STEWART. 373 
 
 produced among us during the last twenty years, which 
 have failed in making their way into England, mainly in 
 consequence of the slipshod style in which they were 
 written. A busy age, much agitated by controversy, is 
 no doubt unfavourable to the production of compositions 
 of classic beauty. ' The rounded period,' says an ingenious 
 French writer, ' opens up the long folds of its floating robe 
 in a time of stability, authority, and confidence. But when 
 literature has become a means of action, instead of con- 
 tinuing to be used for its own sake, we no longer amuse 
 ourselves with the turning of periods. The period is con- 
 temporary with the peruke the period is the peruke of 
 style. The close of the eighteenth century shortened the 
 one as much as the other. The peruke reaching the middle 
 of the loins could not be suitable to men in haste to accom- 
 plish a work of destruction. When was J. J. Rousseau 
 himself given to the turning of periods ? Assuredly it was 
 not in his pamphlets ! ' Now the style of Stewart was first 
 formed, we need scarce remark, during that period of pro- 
 found repose which preceded the French Revolution ; and 
 his after-life, spent in quiet and thoughtful retirement, with 
 the classics of our own and other countries, ancient and 
 modern, for his companions, and with composition as his 
 sole employment though the world around him was fiercely 
 engaged with politics or with war had nothing in it to 
 deteriorate it. He never heard the steam-press groaning, 
 as the night wore late, for his unfinished lucubrations ; nay, 
 we question if he ever wrote a careless or hurried sentence. 
 His naturally faultless taste had full space to satisfy itself 
 with whatever he deemed it necessary to perform ; and 
 hence works of finished beauty, which, as pieces of art, the 
 younger literati of Scotland would do well to study and 
 imitate. There may be differences of opinion regarding 
 the standing of Stewart as a metaphysician, but there are 
 no differences of opinion regarding his excellence as a writer. 
 
374 DUGALD STEWART. 
 
 With regard to metaphysics themselves, we are disposed 
 to acquiesce in the judgment of Jeffrey, without, however, 
 acquiescing in much which he has founded upon it. To 
 observe as a mental philosopher, and to experiment as a 
 natural one, are very different things ; and never will mere 
 observation in the one field lead to results so splendid or 
 so practical as experiment on the properties of matter, to 
 which man owes his extraordinary control over the ele- 
 ments. To the knowledge acquired by his observations on 
 the nature or operations of mind, he owes no new power 
 over that which he surveys : in at least its direct conse- 
 quences, his science is barren. It would be difficult, how- 
 ever, to overestimate its indirect consequences. It seems 
 impossible that the metaphysical province should long exist 
 blank and unoccupied in any highly civilised country, espe- 
 cially in a country of active and acquiring intellects, such 
 as Scotland. If the philosophy of Locke or of Reid fail 
 to occupy the field, we find it occupied instead by that 
 of Comte or of Combe. Owens and Martin eaus take the 
 place of Browns and of Stewarts ; and bad metaphysics, of 
 the most dangerous tendency, are taught, in the lack of 
 metaphysics wholesome and good. All the more dangerous 
 parties of the present day have their foundations of prin- 
 ciple on a basis of bad metaphysics. The same remark 
 applies to well-nigh all the religious heresies \ and the less 
 metaphysical an age is, all the more superficial usually are 
 the heresies which spring up in it. We question whether 
 Morrisonianism could . have originated in what was em- 
 phatically the metaphysical age of Scotland, in the latter 
 days of Reid, or the earlier days of Stewart. What became 
 in our times a heresy in the theological field, would have 
 spent itself, as the mere crotchet of a few unripened in- 
 tellects, in the metaphysical one. It would have found 
 vent in some debating club or speculative society, and the 
 Churches would have rested in peace. There are other in- 
 
DUGALD STEWART. 375 
 
 direct benefits derived from metaphysical study. It forms 
 the best possible gymnastics of mind. All the great meta- 
 physicians, if not merely acute, but also broad-minded men, 
 have been great also in the practical departments of thought. 
 The author of the Essay on the Human Understanding was 
 the author also of the Treatise on Government and the Letters 
 on Toleration. Hume, in those Essays on Trade and Politics, 
 which are free from the stain of infidelity, was one of the 
 most solid of thinkers ; and he who produced the Theory 
 of Moral Sentiments continues to give law at the present 
 time, in his Wealth of Nations, to the commerce of the 
 civilised world. From a subtile but comparatively narrow 
 class of intellects, though distinguished in the metaphysical 
 province, mankind has received much less. Berkeley was 
 one of these, and may be regarded as their type and repre- 
 sentative. Save his metaphysics, demonstrative of the 
 non-existence of matter, or demonstrative rather that fire 
 is not conscious of heat, nor ice of cold, nor yet our en- 
 lightened surface of colour, he bequeathed little else to 
 the world than his tar-water ; and his tar-water, no longer 
 recognised as a universal medicine, has had its day, and is 
 forgotten. Without professing to know aught of German 
 metaphysicians for in the times when we used to read 
 Hume and Reid they were but little known in this country 
 we can by no means rate them so high as the men whose 
 writings they are supplanting. What, we have been accus- 
 tomed to ask, are their trophies in the practical ? Have 
 any of them given to the world even tar-water ? Where are 
 their Lockes, Humes, and Adam Smiths ? The man who, 
 according to Johnson, can walk vigorously towards the 
 east, can walk vigorously toward the west also. How is 
 it that these German metaphysicians exhibit their vigour 
 exclusively in walking one way? Where are their works 
 of a practical character, powerful enough to give law to the 
 species? Where their treatises like those of Locke on 
 
376 DUGALD STEWART. 
 
 Toleration or on Government, or their essays like that of 
 Hume or of Adam Smith on the Balance of Power or the 
 Wealth of Nations ? Are they doing other, to use a very 
 old illustration, than merely milking rams, leaving their 
 admirers and followers to hold the pail ? 
 
 Dugald Stewart, though mayhap less an original in the 
 domain of abstract thought than some of his predecessors, 
 belongs emphatically to the practical school. With him 
 philosophy is simply common sense on that large scale which 
 renders it one of the least common things in the world. 
 And never, perhaps, was there a more thoroughly honest 
 seeker after truth. Burns somewhat whimsically describes 
 him, in a recently recovered letter given to the world by 
 Robert Chambers, as * that plain, honest, worthy man, the 
 Professor. I think,' adds the poet, ' his character, divided 
 into ten parts, stands thus : Four parts Socrates, four parts 
 Nathaniel, and two parts Shakespeare's Brutus.' The esti- 
 mate of Sir James Mackintosh is equally high ; nor will it 
 weigh less with many of our readers that the elder M'Crie 
 used to give expression to a judgment quite as favourable. 
 ' He was fascinated,' says the son and biographer of the 
 latter, ' with the beau ideal of academical eloquence which 
 adorned the Moral Chair in the person of Dugald Stewart. 
 Long after he had sat under this admired leader, he would 
 describe with rapture his early emotions while looking on 
 the handsomely erect and elastic figure of the Professor 
 in every attitude a model for the statuary listening to ex- 
 positions, whether of facts or principles, always clear as the 
 transparent stream ; and charmed by the tones of a voice 
 which modulated into spoken music every expression of in- 
 telligence and feeling. An esteemed friend of his happening 
 to say to him some years ago, " I have been hearing Dr. 
 Brown lecture with all the eloquence of Dugald Stewart," 
 " No, sir," he exclaimed with an air of almost Johnsonian 
 decision, " you have not, and no man ever will." ' The first 
 
DUGALD STEWART. 377 
 
 volume of the collected works of Stewart, now given to the 
 world in a form at once worthy of their author and of the 
 name of Constable, contains the far-famed Dissertations , and 
 is edited by Sir William Hamilton. It contains a consider- 
 able amount of original matter, now published from the 
 author's manuscripts for the first time. It would be idle 
 to attempt criticising a work so well established ; but the 
 brief remark of one of the first of metaphysical critics Sir 
 James Mackintosh on what he well terms * the magnificent 
 Dissertations,' may be found not unacceptable. ' These Dis- 
 sertations,' says Sir James, ' are perhaps most profusely 
 ornamented of any of their author's compositions, a pecu- 
 liarity which must in part have arisen from a principle of 
 taste, which regarded decoration as more suitable to the 
 history of philosophy than to philosophy itself. But the 
 memorable instances of Cicero, of Milton, and still more 
 those of Dryden and Burke, seem to show that there is 
 some natural tendency in the fire of genius to burn more 
 brightly, or to blaze more fiercely, in the evening than in 
 the morning of human life. Probably the materials which 
 long experience supplies to the imagination, the boldness 
 with which a more established reputation arms the mind, 
 and the silence of the low but formidable rivals of the 
 higher principles, may concur in providing this unexpected 
 and little observed effect.' 
 
 1854. 
 
OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 
 
 IT is a grand, though doubtless natural, mistake to hold that 
 the members of the Town Councils of our Scottish cities 
 and burghs really represent in opinion and feeling their 
 nominal constituencies the electors, through whose suffrages 
 they have been placed in office. In very many cases they 
 do not represent them at all : they form an entirely dis- 
 similar class, a class as thoroughly different from the solid 
 mass of the community, on which they float like froth 
 and spume on the surface of the great deep, as that other 
 class from which, because there are unhappily scarce any 
 other men in the field, we have to select our legislators. 
 The subject is one of importance. In the Sabbath con- 
 troversy now carrying on, it has been invariably taken for 
 granted by the anti-Sabbatarian press of the country, that 
 our Town Councils do represent the general constituency ; 
 and there has been much founded on the assumption. We 
 shall by and by be finding the same assumption employed 
 against us in the Popery endowment question; and it 
 would be well, therefore, carefully to examine the grounds 
 on which it rests, and to ascertain whether there may not 
 exist some practical mode of testing its unsolidity. 
 
 It is not difficult to see how that upper class to which 
 our legislators of both Houses of Parliament mainly belong, 
 should differ greatly from the larger and more solid portion 
 of the middle classes in almost all questions of a religious 
 character and bearing. Bacon, in his Essay on Kings, has 
 quaintly, but, we are afraid, all too justly remarked, that 
 
 378 
 
OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 379 
 
 'of all kind of men, God is the least beholding unto them 
 [kings] ; for He doth most for them, and they do ordinarily 
 least for Him.' But the character applies to more than 
 kings. It affects the whole upper layers of the great 
 pyramid of society, from its gilded pinnacle down to the 
 higher confines of its solid middle portion ; and to these 
 upper layers of the erection our legislators, hereditary and 
 elective, with, of course, a very few exceptions in the Lower 
 House, all belong. They are drafted from the classes with 
 which, if we perhaps except the lowest and most degraded 
 of all, religious questions weigh least. There is, of course, 
 no class wholly divorced from good ; and those exceptions 
 to which Cowper could refer two generations ago obtain 
 still : 
 
 * We boast some rich ones whom the gospel sways, 
 And one who wears a coronet, and prays : 
 Like gleanings of an olive tree, they show 
 Here and there one upon the topmost bough.' 
 
 But in at least the mass, religion has not been influential 
 among the governing classes in Britain since the days of 
 the Commonwealth. It has formed one of the great forces 
 on which they have calculated a formidable power among 
 the people, that they have striven, according to the nature 
 of the emergency, to quiet or awaken, bias or control, now 
 for the ends of party, when an antagonist faction had to be 
 overborne and put down, now for the general benefit of 
 the country, when a foreign enemy had to be repelled or an 
 intestine discord to be suppressed ; but it has been pecu- 
 liarly a force outside the governing classes external, not 
 internal, to them, a power which it has been their special 
 work to regulate and direct, not a power which has regulated 
 and directed them. The last British Government which 
 God, according to Bacon, having done much for it laboured 
 earnestly to do much for God, was that very remarkable 
 one which centred in the person of the Lord Protector. 
 
380 OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 
 
 Hence naturally much that is unsatisfactory to the com- 
 paratively religious middle classes of the country, in the 
 conduct, with regard to religious questions, of the classes 
 on whom devolves the work of legislation. There is no 
 real community of feeling and belief in these matters 
 between the two. To the extent to which religion is in- 
 volved in the legislative enactments of the time, the middle 
 class is in reality not represented, and the upper class does 
 not represent. It may not seem equally obvious, however, 
 how there should be a lack of representation, not only 
 among our members of Parliament, but also among our 
 members of Council. They at least surely belong, it may 
 be said, to the middle classes, by whom and from among 
 whom they are chosen for their office. Certainly in some 
 cases they do ; in many others, however, they form a class 
 scarce less peculiar than those upper classes out of which 
 the legislators of the country come to be drawn, simply 
 because there is no other class in the field out of which 
 they can be selected. 
 
 The Reform and Municipality Bills wrought a mighty 
 change in the Town Councils of the kingdom. The old close 
 burgh system, with all its abuses, ceased for ever, save in its 
 remains monumental debts, and everlasting leases of town 
 lands, granted on easy terms to officials and their friends; and 
 droll recollections, like those embalmed by Gait in our litera- 
 ture, of solid municipal feasting, and not so solid municipal 
 services, of exclusive cliqueships, misemployed patronages, 
 modest self-elections, in short, of a general practice of job- 
 bing, more palpable than pleasant, and that tended rather to 
 individual advantage than corporate honour. The old men 
 retired, and a set of new men were elevated by newly-created 
 constituencies into their vacated places, to be disinterested 
 on dilapidated means, and noisy on short commons. The 
 days of long and heavy feasts had come to a close, and the 
 days of long and heavy speeches succeeded. No two events 
 
O UR TO WN CO UNCILS. 381 
 
 which this world of ours ever saw, led to so vast an amount 
 of bad speaking as the one Reform Bill that swept away 
 the rotten burghs, and the other Reform Bill that opened 
 the close ones. By and by, however, it came to be seen 
 that the old, privileged, self-elected class were succeeded in 
 many instances by a class that, though elected by their 
 neighbours, were yet not quite like their neighbours. Their 
 neighbours were men who, with their own personal business 
 to attend to, had neither the time nor the ambition to be 
 moving motions or speaking speeches in the eye of the 
 public, and who could not take the trouble to secure elec- 
 tions by canvassing voters. The men who had the time, 
 and took the trouble, were generally a class ill-hafted in 
 society, who had high notions of reforming everything save 
 themselves, and of keeping right all kinds of businesses 
 except their own. The old state of things was, notwith- 
 standing its many faults, a state under which our Scotch 
 burghers rose into consideration by arts of comparative 
 solidity. A tradesman or shopkeeper looked well to his 
 business, became an important man in the market-place 
 and a good man in the bank, increased in weight in the 
 same proportion that his coffers did so, and grew influential 
 and oracular on the strength of his pounds sterling per 
 annum. With altered times, however, there arose a new 
 order of men, 
 
 * The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame.' 
 
 It was no longer necessary to spend the greater part of a 
 lifetime in acquiring money and character : a glib tongue, 
 a few high professions of public principle, and a few weeks' 
 canvassing, were found to serve the turn more than equally 
 well. 
 
 There commenced straightway a new dynasty of dignities 
 and honours. Councillors got into print in the capacity of 
 speechmakers, who, save for the revolution effected, would 
 
382 OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 
 
 never have got into print in any other capacity than, may- 
 hap, that of bankrupts in the Gazette. Eloquent men 
 walked to church in scarlet, greatly distinguished as provosts 
 and bailies, who but for the happy change would have crept 
 unseen all their lives long among the crowd. Members of 
 Parliament went arm-in-arm, when they visited their con- 
 stituencies, with folk altogether unused to such considera- 
 tion ; and when a burgher's son sought to be promoted to 
 the excise, or a seaman to the coast-guard service, it was 
 through the new men that influence had to be exerted. 
 And of course the new men had to approve themselves 
 worthy of their honours, by making large sacrifices for the 
 public weal. They had in many cases not much to do : the 
 magistracy of the bygone school, whom they succeeded, 
 had obligingly relieved posterity of the trouble of having a 
 too preponderous amount of municipal property to manage 
 and look after ; but if they had not much to do, they had 
 at least a great deal to say; and as they were ambitious of 
 saying it, their own individual concerns were not unfre- 
 quently neglected, in order that their constituencies might 
 be edified and informed. In cases not a few, the natural 
 consequences ensued. We have in our eye one special 
 burgh in the north, in which every name in the Town 
 Council, from that of the provost down to that of the 
 humblest councillor, had, in the course of some two or 
 three years, appeared also in the Gazette; and the previous 
 provost of the place had got desperately involved with the 
 branch banks of the district, and had ultimately run the 
 country, to avoid a prosecution for forgery. 
 
 Let it not be held that we are including the entire tribe 
 of modern town functionaries in one sweeping condemna- 
 tory description. We ourselves, in our time (we refer to 
 the fact with a high but surely natural pride), held office as 
 a town councillor, under the modern regime, for the space 
 of three whole years in a parliamentary burgh that contained 
 
OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 383 
 
 no fewer than forty voters. All may learn from history how 
 it was that Bailie Weezle earned his municipal honours 
 during the ancient state of things in the famous burgh of 
 Gudetown. * Bailie Weezle,' says Gait, ' was a man not 
 overladen with worldly wisdom, and had been chosen into 
 the Council principally on account of being easily managed. 
 Being an idle person living on his money, and of a soft and 
 quiet nature; he was, for the reason aforesaid, taken by one 
 consent among us, where he always voted on the provost's 
 side j for in controverted questions every one is beholden 
 to take a part, and the bailie thought it was his duty to side 
 with the chief magistrate.' Our own special qualifications 
 for office were, we must be permitted in justice to ourselves 
 to state, different from Bailie Weezle's by a shade. 
 
 It was generally held, that if there was nothing to do we 
 would do nothing, and if nothing to say we would say 
 nothing ; and so thoroughly did we fulfil every expectation 
 that had been previously formed of us, that for three years 
 together we said and did nothing in our official capacity 
 with great falat, and regularly absented ourselves from every 
 meeting of Council except the first, to the entire satisfaction 
 of our constituency. It will not be held, therefore, in the 
 face of so important a fact, that we include in our description 
 all the town magistracies under the existing state of things, 
 and most certainly not all modern town councillors. 
 
 Nothing, however, can be more certain, we repeat, than 
 that they differ from their constituencies as a class, and that 
 they are chosen to represent them in municipal affairs, just 
 as another and higher class is chosen to represent them in 
 the Legislature merely because there is no other class in the 
 field. The solid middle-class men of business have, as has 
 been said, something else to employ them, and cannot spare 
 their services. They cannot accept of mere notoriety, with 
 mayhap a modicum of patronate influence attached, as an 
 adequate price for the time and labour which their own 
 
384 OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 
 
 affairs demand. It is a peculiar class in the municipal as 
 in the literary field, that ' weigh solid pudding against empty 
 praise,' and come to regard the empty praise as solid enough 
 to outweigh the pudding. Not but that it is a fine thing to 
 be in a Town Council, and to see one's fortnightly speeches 
 flourishing in the public prints. Where else could some of 
 our Edinburgh worthies bring themselves so prominently 
 before the eyes of the country ? 
 
 Where else, for instance, could Councillor impart 
 
 such universal interest to the fact that he taught in a Sabbath 
 school, and rode out of town every evening to attend to its 
 duties by a Sunday train, thus forming an invariable item, 
 it would seem, in the average of the ninety-two Sabbath 
 journeyers that travelled by the Edinburgh and Glasgow 
 Railway, and failed to remunerate the proprietors? Or 
 where else could Councillor refer with such prodi- 
 gious effect to Dr. Chalmers's bloody-minded scheme of 
 'executing the heathen?' Or where else could Councillor 
 
 succeed in eliciting so general a belief that he was one 
 
 of the poor endangered heathens over which the threatened 
 execution hung, through his famous oath 'By Jupiter?' 
 
 By the way, is this latter gentleman acquainted with 
 Smollett's story of the eccentric Mr. H., and chivalrously 
 bent, on the same principle, in acknowledging a deity in 
 distress ? ' Mr. H., some years ago, being in the Campi- 
 doglio at Rome,' says Smollett, * made up to the bust of 
 Jupiter, and bowing very low, exclaimed, in the Italian 
 language, " I hope, sir, if ever you get your head above 
 water again, you will remember that I paid my respects to 
 you in your adversity." This sally,' continues the historian, 
 * was reported to the Cardinal Camerlengo, and by him laid 
 before the Pope Benedict xiv., who could not help laugh- 
 ing at the extravagance of the address, and said to the 
 Cardinal, " Those English heretics think they have a right 
 to go to the devil in their own way.'" 
 
OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 385 
 
 Now, standing, as we do, either on the threshold of 
 serious national controversies of a religious bearing, or 
 already entered upon them, it would be well to mark and 
 test the facts which it is our present object specially to 
 point out. It would be well to take measures for rendering 
 it an as palpable as it is a solid truth, that the municipal 
 tail of the country's representation no more really represents 
 it in several very important respects than its parliamentary 
 head. It represents it most inadequately on the Sabbath 
 question now ; it will represent it quite as inadequately in 
 the Popish endowment question by and by ; and if in reality 
 we do not wish to see the battle going against us on both 
 issues, there must be effective means employed to demon- 
 strate the fact. In matters of a religious bearing, the ill- 
 hafted notoriety-men of our Town Councils much more 
 nearly resemble the upper indifferent classes, from which 
 our legislators are drafted, than they do the solid bulk of 
 the community. 
 
 They are decidedly in the movement party, and form a 
 portion, not of the ballast, but of the superfluous sail, of 
 the State. Nor should it be difficult to render the fact 
 evident to all. In one of our northern burghs Dingwall 
 a majority of the Town Council lately memorialized the 
 Directors of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in exactly 
 the same vein as the majority of our Edinburgh Town 
 Council. So extreme a step seemed rather extraordinary 
 for Ross-shire ; and a gentleman of the burgh, one of the 
 voters, convinced that the officials were far indeed from 
 representing their constituency, shrewdly set himself to 
 demonstrate the real state of the case. First he possessed 
 himself of an accredited list of the voters ; and then, with a 
 memorial addressed to the Directors, strongly condemna- 
 tory of the conduct of the Council-, he called upon every 
 voter in the burgh who had not taken the opposite side in 
 the character of a councillor, with the exception of two, 
 
 2 B 
 
386 OUR TOWN COUNCILS. 
 
 whose views he had previously ascertained to be unfavour- 
 able. And what, thinks our reader, was the result? Seven 
 councillors had voted on the anti-Sabbatarian side ; and the 
 provost, for himself and the Council, had afterwards signed 
 the memorial. And of the voters outside, four were found 
 to make common cause with them. Two more did not 
 make common cause with them, but were not prepared to 
 condemn them, and so did not sign. There were thus 
 fourteen in all who were either not opposed to the running 
 of Sabbath trains, or who were at least not disposed openly 
 to denounce the parties who had memorialized the Direc- 
 tors, in the name of the burgh, to the effect that Sabbath 
 trains should be run. Of the other electors, ten were non- 
 resident, five more were out of town at the time, three had 
 fallen out of possession since the roll had been made up, 
 and one was dead. And all the others, amounting to sixty- 
 nine in number, at once signed the document condemnatory 
 of the Council, and were happy to have an opportunity of 
 doing so. The available votes of the burgh were opposed 
 to those of their pseudo-representatives in the proportion 
 of nearly six to one. 
 
 In the parliamentary burgh of Cromarty an almost similar 
 experiment was made. There, however, though the move- 
 ment party had composed the majority of the Council only 
 a few years since, they had been cast out of orifice, partly 
 through a strong reaction which had taken place against 
 them, partly in consequence of a quarrel among themselves. 
 And so the existing Town Council took the initiative in 
 memorializing the Directors in favour of the recent resolu- 
 tion not to run Sunday trains. Of all the voters of the 
 burgh, only five stood aloof; all the others made common 
 cause with the Town Council in attaching their names to 
 their document. 
 
 But it is a significant fact, that in the knot of five the 
 ex-councillors of the movement party were included; and 
 
O UR TO WN CO UNC1LS. 387 
 
 that had they been in the Council still, a majority would to 
 a certainty have voted in the wake of the Edinburgh Town 
 Council. There is much instruction in facts such as these ; 
 and they may be turned to great practical account. 
 
 Why should not the sentiments of every voter in Scot- 
 land be taken on this same Sabbath question now ? or what 
 is there to prevent us from taking the sentiments of every 
 voter in Scotland on the Popish endowment question by 
 and by ? 
 
 It is a tedious and expensive matter to get up petitions, 
 to which all and sundry affix their names ; but the franchise- 
 holders of Scotland are comparatively a not very numerous 
 class j and about the same amount of labour that goes to 
 a monthly collection for the Sustentation Fund, would be 
 quite sufficient to place before Government and the country 
 the full expression of their feelings and opinions on the two 
 leading questions of the day. But enough for the present 
 ' a word to the wise.' 
 
 January 20, 1847. 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS;' 
 
 OR, 
 
 HOW A COUNTRY MAY BE RUINED. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THERE appeared at Paris, about five years ago, a singularly 
 ingenious work on political economy, from the pen of the 
 late M. de Sismondi, a writer of European reputation. The 
 greater part of the first volume is taken up with discussions 
 on territorial wealth, and the condition of the cultivators of 
 the soil ; and in this portion of the work there is a promi- 
 nent place assigned to a subject which perhaps few Scotch 
 readers would expect to see introduced through the medium 
 of a foreign tongue to the people of a great continental 
 State. We find this philosophic writer, whose works are 
 known far beyond the limits of his language, devoting an 
 entire essay to the case of the late Duchess of Sutherland 
 
 1 ' I will go and inquire upon the spot whether the natives of the 
 county of SUTHERLAND were driven from the land of their birth by 
 the Countess of that name, and by her husband the Marquis of Stafford. 
 ... I wish to possess authentic information relative to that "CLEAR- 
 ING " affair; for though it took place twenty years ago, it may be just 
 as necessary to inquire into it now. It may be quite proper to inquire 
 into the means that were used to effect the CLEARING.' COBBETT. 
 
 ' It is painful to dwell on this subject ' [the present state of Suther- 
 land] ; ' but as information communicated by men of honour, judgment, 
 and perfect veracity, descriptive of what they daily witness, affords the 
 best means of forming a correct judgment, and as these gentlemen, from 
 
 388 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 389 
 
 and her tenants, and forming a judgment on it very unlike 
 the decision of political economists in our own country, 
 who have not hesitated to characterize her great and sin- 
 gularly harsh experiment, whose worst effects we are but 
 beginning to see, as at once justifiable in itself and happy 
 in its results. It is curious to observe how deeds done as 
 if in darkness and a corner, are beginning, after the lapse 
 of nearly thirty years, to be proclaimed on the house-tops. 
 The experiment of the late Duchess was not intended to be 
 made in the eye of Europe. Its details would ill bear the 
 exposure. When Cobbett simply referred to it only ten 
 years ago, the noble proprietrix was startled, as if a rather 
 delicate family secret was on the eve of being divulged ; 
 and yet nothing seems more evident now than that civilised 
 man all over the world is to be made aware of how the 
 experiment was accomplished, and what it is ultimately to 
 produce. It must be obvious, further, that the infatuation 
 of the present proprietor, in virtually setting aside the 
 Toleration Act on his property, must have the effect of 
 spreading the knowledge of it all the more widely, and of 
 rendering its results much more disastrous than they could 
 have possibly been of themselves. 
 
 In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in 
 the right or the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, 
 the argument which the philosophic Frenchman employs in 
 behalf of the ejected tenantry of Sutherland, is an argument 
 
 their situations in life, have no immediate interest in the determination 
 of the question, beyond what is dictated by humanity and a love of truth, 
 their authority may be considered as undoubted. ' GENERAL STEWART 
 of Garth. 
 
 ' It is by a cruel abuse of legal forms it is by an unjust usurpation 
 that the tacksman and the tenant of Sutherland are considered as having 
 no right to the land which they have occupied for so many ages. . . 
 A count or earl has no more right to expel from their homes the inha- 
 bitants of his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabi- 
 tants of his kingdom.' SISMONDI. 
 
390 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 at which proprietors may afford to smile. In a time of 
 revolution, however, when lands change their owners, and 
 old families give place to new ones, it might be found 
 somewhat formidable, sufficiently so, at least, to lead a 
 wise proprietor in an unsettled age rather to conciliate 
 than oppress and irritate the class who would be able in 
 such circumstances to urge it with most effect. It is not 
 easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and 
 reasonings of an elaborate essay ; but the line of the argu- 
 ment runs somewhat thus. 
 
 Under the old Celtic tenures the only tenures, be it 
 remembered, through which the lords of Sutherland derive 
 their rights to their lands the Klaan, or children of the 
 soil, were the proprietors of the soil : ' the whole of Suther- 
 land,' says Sismondi, belonged to * the men of Sutherland.' 
 Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute monarch 
 he was. 'He gave the different tacks of land to his officers, 
 or took them away from them, according as they showed 
 themselves more or less useful in war. But though he 
 could thus, in a military sense, reward or punish the clan, 
 he could not diminish in the least the property of the clan 
 itself; ' he was a chief, not a proprietor, and had ' no 
 more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of his 
 county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabi- 
 tants of his kingdom.' * Now, the Gaelic tenant,' continues 
 the Frenchman, 'has never been conquered; nor did he 
 forfeit, on any after occasion, the rights which he originally 
 possessed;' in point of right, he is still a co-proprietor 
 with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law 
 of property as it has existed among us, in even the High- 
 lands, for the last century, and everywhere else for at least 
 two centuries more, the view may seem extreme ; not so, 
 however, to a native of the Continent, in many parts of 
 which prescription and custom are found ranged, not on 
 the side of the chief, but on that of the vassal. ' Switzer- 
 
SUTHERLAND- AS IT WAS AND IS. 391 
 
 land,' says Sismondi, ' which in so many respects resembles 
 Scotland in its lakes its mountains its climate and the 
 character, manners, and habits of its children was likewise 
 at the same period parcelled out among a small number of 
 lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg, of Haps- 
 burg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English 
 laws, they would find themselves at the present day pre- 
 cisely in the condition in which the Earls of Sutherland 
 were twenty years ago. Some of them would perhaps have 
 had the same taste for improvements, and several republics 
 would have been expelled from the Alps, to make room for 
 flocks of sheep.' ' But while the law has given to the Swiss 
 peasant a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird 
 that it has extended this guarantee in the British empire, 
 leaving the peasant in a precarious situation.' ' The clan 
 recognised at first by the captain, whom they followed in 
 war and obeyed for their common advantage, as his friends 
 and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals, then 
 as his farmers he has come finally to regard as hired 
 labourers, whom he may perchance allow to remain on the 
 soil of their common country for his own advantage, but 
 whom he has the power to expel so soon as he no longer 
 finds it for his interest to keep them.' 
 
 Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their 
 force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at 
 home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when 
 the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and 
 opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. 
 But it is surety not uninteresting to mark how, in the course 
 of events, that very law of England which, in the view 
 of the Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so 
 much less, and the Highland chief so much more than 
 justice, is bidding fair, in the case of Sutherland at least, to 
 carry its rude equalizing remedy along with it. Between the 
 years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this 
 
392 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, 
 by means for which we would in vain seek a precedent, 
 except, perchance, in the history of the Irish massacre. 
 But though the interior of the county was thus improved 
 into a desert, in which there are many thousands of sheep, 
 but few human habitations, let it not be supposed by the 
 reader that its general population was in any degree lessened. 
 So far was this from being the case, that the census of 1821 
 showed an increase over the census of iSn of more than 
 two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland 
 exceeds, by a thousand, its population before the change. 
 The county has not been depopulated its population has 
 been merely arranged after a new fashion. The late 
 Duchess found it spread equally over the interior and the 
 sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances ; she left 
 it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suf- 
 fering, that fringes the county on its eastern and western 
 shores. And the law which enabled her to make such an 
 arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor High- 
 lander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy 
 way, to make her family pay the penalty. The evil of a 
 poor-law can be no longer averted from Scotland. How- 
 ever much we may dislike compulsory assessment for the 
 support of our poor, it can be no longer avoided. Our 
 aristocracy have been working hard for it during the whole 
 of the present century, and a little longer ; the disruption 
 of the Scottish Church, as the last in a series of events, all 
 of which have tended towards it, has rendered it inevitable. 
 Let the evidence of the present commissioners on the sub- 
 ject be what it may, it cannot be of a kind suited to show 
 that if England should have a, poor-law, Scotland should 
 have none. The southern kingdom must and will give us 
 a poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep poverty 
 which fringes the sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the 
 titled proprietor of the county both his mother's error and 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 393 
 
 his own. If our British laws, unlike those of Switzerland, 
 failed miserably in her day in protecting the vassal, they 
 will more than fail, in those of her successor, in protecting 
 the lord. Our political economists shall have an oppor- 
 tunity of reducing their arguments regarding the improve- 
 ments in Sutherland into a few arithmetical terms, which 
 the merest tyro will be able to grapple with. 
 
 We find a similar case thus strongly stated by Cobbett in 
 his Northern Tour, and in connection with a well-known 
 name: 'Sir James Graham has his estate lying off this 
 road to the left. He has not been clearing his estate the 
 poor-law would not let him do that ; but he has been clear- 
 ing off the small farms, and making them into large ones, 
 which he had a right to do, because it is he himself that is 
 finally to endure the consequences of that : he has a right 
 to do that ; and those who are made indigent in conse- 
 quence of his so doing, have a right to demand a mainte- 
 nance out of the land, according to the Act of the 43d of 
 Elizabeth, which gave the people a COMPENSATION for the 
 loss of the tithes and church lands which had been taken 
 away by the aristocracy in the reigns of the Tudors. If Sir 
 James Graham choose to mould his fine and large estate 
 into immense farms, and to break up numerous happy 
 families in the middle rank of life, and to expose them all 
 to the necessity of coming and demanding sustenance from 
 his estate ; if he choose to be surrounded by masses of 
 persons in this state, he shall not call them paupers, for 
 that insolent term is not to be found in the compensation- 
 laws of Elizabeth ; if he choose to be surrounded by swarms 
 of beings of this description, with feelings in their bosoms 
 towards him such as I need not describe, if he choose this, 
 his RIGHT certainly extends thus far j but I tell him that he 
 has no right to say to any man bora in his parishes, " You 
 shall not be here, and you shall not have a maintenance off 
 these lands.'" 
 
394 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 There is but poor comfort, however, to know, when one 
 sees a country ruined, that the perpetrators of the mischief 
 have not ruined it to their own advantage. We purpose 
 showing how signal in the case of Sutherland this ruin has 
 been, and how very extreme the infatuation which continues 
 to possess its hereditary lord. We are old enough to re- 
 member the county in its original state, when it was- at once 
 the happiest and one of the most exemplary districts in 
 Scotland, and passed, at two several periods, a considerable 
 time among its hills ; we are not unacquainted with it now, 
 nor with its melancholy and dejected people, that wear out 
 life in their comfortless cottages on the sea-shore. The 
 problem solved in this remote district of the kingdom is not 
 at all unworthy the attention which it seems but beginning 
 to draw, but which is already not restricted to one kingdom, 
 or even one continent 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 395 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WE heard sermon in the open air with a poor Highland 
 congregation in Sutherlandshire only a few weeks ago ; and 
 the scene was one which we shall not soon forget. The 
 place of meeting was a green hill-side, near the opening 
 of a deep, long withdrawing strath, with a river running 
 through the midst. We stood on the slope where the last 
 of a line of bold eminences, that form the southern side of 
 the valley, sinks towards the sea. A tall precipitous moun- 
 tain, reverend and hoary, and well fitted to tranquillize the 
 mind, from the sober solemnity that rests on its massy fea- 
 tures, rose fronting us on the north ; a quiet burial-ground 
 lay at its feet ; while, on the opposite side, between us and 
 the sea, there frowned an ancient stronghold of time-eaten 
 stone an impressive memorial of an age of violence and 
 bloodshed. The last proprietor, says tradition, had to quit 
 this dwelling by night, with all his family, in consequence of 
 some unfortunate broil, and take refuge in a small coasting 
 vessel; a terrible storm arose the vessel foundered at sea 
 and the hapless proprietor and his children were nevermore 
 heard of. And hence, it is said, the extinction of the race. 
 The story speaks of an unsettled time ; nor is it difficult 
 to trace, in the long deep valley on the opposite hand, 
 the memorials of a story not less sad, though much more 
 modern. On both sides the river the eye rests on a multi- 
 tude of scattered patches of green, that seem inlaid in the 
 brown heath. \7e trace on these islands of sward the 
 marks of furrows, and mark here and there, through the 
 loneliness, the remains of a group of cottages, well-nigh 
 levelled with the soil, and, haply like those ruins which 
 eastern conquerors leave in their track, still scathed with 
 
396 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 fire. All is solitude within the valley, except where, at wide 
 intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen ; but at 
 its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages 
 for miles together lie clustered as in a hamlet. From the 
 north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower 
 slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, 
 minute patches of corn, and endless cottages. It would 
 seem as if for twenty miles the long withdrawing valley had 
 been swept of its inhabitants, and the accumulated sweep- 
 ings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a 
 room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is 
 the present state of Sutherland. The interior is a solitude 
 occupied by a few sheep-farmers and their hinds ; while a 
 more numerous population than fell to the share of the 
 entire county, ere the inhabitants were expelled from their 
 inland holdings, and left to squat upon the coast, occupy 
 the selvage of discontent and poverty that fringes its shores. 
 The congregation with which we worshipped on this occa- 
 sion was drawn mainly from these cottages, and the neigh- 
 bouring village of Helmsdale. It consisted of from six to 
 eight hundred Highlanders, all devoted adherents of the 
 Free Church. We have rarely seen a more deeply serious 
 assemblage ; never certainly one that bore an air of such 
 deep dejection. The people were wonderfully clean and 
 decent ; for it is ill with Highlanders when they neglect 
 their personal appearance, especially on a Sabbath j but it 
 was all too evident that the heavy hand of poverty rested 
 upon them, and that its evils were now deepened by oppres- 
 sion. It might be a mere trick of association ; but when 
 their plaintive Gaelic singing, so melancholy in its tones at 
 all times, arose from the bare hill-side, it sounded in our 
 ears like a deep wail of complaint and sorrow. Poor 
 people ! * We were ruined and reduced to beggary be- 
 fore,' they say, ' and now the gospel is taken from us.' 
 Nine-tenths of the poor people of Sutherland are ad- 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 397 
 
 herents of the Free Church all of them in whose families 
 the worship of God has been set up all who entertain a 
 serious belief in the reality of religion all who are not the 
 creatures of the proprietor, and have not stifled their con- 
 victions for a piece of bread are devotedly attached to the 
 disestablished ministers, and will endure none other. The 
 residuary clergy they do not recognise as clergy at all. 
 The Established churches have become as useless in the 
 district, as if, like its Druidical circles, they represented 
 some idolatrous belief, long exploded the people will not 
 enter them ; and they respectfully petition his Grace to be 
 permitted to build other churches for themselves. And 
 fain would his Grace indulge them, he says. In accordance 
 with the suggestions of an innate desire, willingly would he 
 permit them to build their own churches and support their 
 own ministers. But then, has he not loyally engaged to 
 support the Establishment? To permit a religious and 
 inoffensive people to build their own places of worship, and 
 support their own clergy, would be sanctioning a sort of 
 persecution against the Establishment ; and as his Grace 
 dislikes religious persecution, and has determined always to 
 oppose whatever tends to it, he has resolved to make use 
 of his influence, as the most extensive of Scottish pro- 
 prietors, in forcing them back to their parish churches. If 
 they persist in worshipping God agreeably to the dictates 
 of their conscience, it must be on the unsheltered hill-side 
 in winter, amid the frosts and snows of a severe northern 
 climate in the milder seasons, exposed to the scorching 
 sun and the drenching shower. They must not be per- 
 mitted the shelter of a roof, for that would be persecuting 
 the Establishment ; and so to the Establishment must the 
 people be forced back, literally by stress of weather. His 
 Grace owes a debt to the national institution, and it seems 
 to irk his conscience until some equivalent be made. He 
 is not himself a member he exercises the same sort of 
 
398 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 liberty which his people would so fain exercise; and to 
 make amends for daring to belong to another Church him- 
 self (that of England), he has determined, if he can help it, 
 that the people shall belong to no other. He has resolved, 
 it would seem, to compound for his own liberty by depriv- 
 ing them of theirs. 
 
 How they are to stand out the winter on this exposed 
 eastern coast, He alone knows who never shuts His ear to 
 the cry of the oppressed. One thing is certain, they will 
 never return to the Establishment. On this Sabbath the 
 congregation in the parish church did not, as we afterwards 
 learned, exceed a score ; and the quoad sacra chapel of the 
 district was locked up. Long before the Disruption the 
 people had well-nigh ceased attending the ministrations of 
 the parish incumbent. The Sutherland Highlanders are still 
 a devout people ; they like a bald mediocre essay none the 
 better for its being called a sermon, and read on Sabbath. 
 The noble Duke, their landlord, has said not a little in his 
 letters to them about the extreme slightness of the differ- 
 ence which obtains between the Free and the Established 
 Churches : it is a difference so exceedingly slight, that his 
 Grace fails to see it ; and he hopes that by and by, when 
 winter shall have thickened the atmosphere with its frost 
 rime and its snows, his poor tenantry may prove as unable 
 to see it as himself. With them, however, the difference is 
 not mainly a doctrinal one. They believe with the old 
 Earls of Sutherland, who did much to foster the belief in 
 this northern county, that there is such a thing as personal 
 piety, that of two clergymen holding nominally the same 
 doctrines, and bound ostensibly by the same standards, one 
 may be a regenerate man, earnestly bent on the conversion 
 of others, and ready to lay down his worldly possessions, 
 and even life itself, for the cause of the gospel ; while the 
 other may be an unregenerate man, so little desirous of the 
 conversion of others, that he would but decry and detest 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 399 
 
 them did he find them converted already, and so careless 
 of the gospel, that did not his living depend on professing 
 to preach it, he would neither be an advocate for it himself, 
 nor yet come within earshot of where it was advocated 
 by others. The Highlanders of Sutherland hold in deep 
 seriousness a belief of this character. They believe, fur- 
 ther, that the ministers of their own mountain district 
 belong to these two classes that the Disruption of the 
 Scottish Church has thrown the classes apart that the 
 residuaries are not men of personal piety they have seen 
 no conversions attending their ministry nor have they 
 lacked reason to deem them unconverted themselves. 
 Unlike his Grace the Duke, the people have been intelli- 
 gent enough to see two sets of principles ranged in decided 
 antagonism in the Church question but still more clearly 
 have they seen two sets of men. They have identified the 
 cause of the gospel with that of the Free Church in their 
 district; and neither the Duke of Sutherland nor the 
 Establishment which he is 'engaged in endeavouring to 
 maintain,' will be able to reverse the opinion. 
 
 We have said that his Grace's ancestors, the old earls, 
 did much to foster this spirit. The history of Sutherland, 
 as a county, differs from all our other Highland districts. 
 Its two great families were those of Reay and Sutherland, 
 both of which, from an early period of the Reformation, 
 were not only Protestant, but also thoroughly evangelical. 
 It was the venerable Earl of Sutherland who first subscribed 
 the National Covenant in the Greyfriars. It was a scion of 
 the Reay family a man of great personal piety who led 
 the troops of William against Dundee at Killiecrankie. 
 Their influence was all-powerful in Sutherland, and directed 
 to the best ends ; and we find it stated by Captain Hender- 
 son, in his general view of the agriculture of the country, as 
 a well-established and surely not uninteresting fact, that 
 4 the crimes of rapine, murder, and plunder, though not 
 
400 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 unusual in the county during the feuds and conflicts of the 
 clans, were put an end to about the year 1640' a full 
 century before our other Highland districts had become 
 even partially civilised. * Pious earls and barons of former 
 times,' says a native of the county, in a small work pub- 
 lished in Edinburgh about sixteen years ago, ' encouraged 
 and patronized pious ministers, and a high tone of religious 
 feeling came thus to be diffused throughout the country.' 
 Its piety was strongly of the Presbyterian' type ; and in no 
 district of the south were the questions which received such 
 prominence in our late ecclesiastical controversy better 
 understood by both the people and the patrons, than in 
 Sutherland a full century ago. We have before us an inte- 
 resting document, the invitation of the elders, parishioners, 
 and heritors of Lairg, to the Rev. Thomas M'Kay, 1748, 
 to be their minister, in which, * hoping that ' he would find 
 their ' call, carried on with great sincerity, unanimity, and 
 order, to be a clear call from the Lord,' they faithfully 
 promise to ' yield him, in their several stations and rela- 
 tions, all dutiful respect and encouragement.' William 
 Earl of Sutherland was patron of the parish, but we find 
 him on this occasion exercising no patronate powers : at 
 the head of parishioners and elders he merely adhibits his 
 name. He merely invites with the others. The state of 
 morals in the county was remarkably exemplified at a later 
 period by the regiment of Sutherland Highlanders, em- 
 bodied originally in 1793, under the name of the Suther- 
 landshire Fencibles, and subsequently in 1800 as the 93d 
 Regiment. Most other troops are drawn from among the 
 unsettled and reckless part of the population ; not so the 
 Sutherland Highlanders. On the breaking out of the 
 revolutionary war, the mother of the present Duke sum- 
 moned them from their hills, and five hundred fighting men 
 marched down to Dunrobin Castle, to make a tender of 
 their swords to their country, at the command of their 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 401 
 
 chieftainess. The regiment, therefore, must be regarded 
 as a fair specimen of the character of the district ; and from 
 the description of General Stewart of Garth, and one or 
 two sources besides, we may learn what that character was. 
 1 In the words of a general officer by whom they were 
 once reviewed,' says General Stewart, ' they exhibited a 
 perfect pattern of military discipline and moral rectitude.' 
 ' When stationed at the Cape of Good Hope, anxious to 
 enjoy the advantages of religious instruction agreeably to 
 the tenets of their national Church, and there being no 
 religious service in the garrison except the customary one 
 of reading prayers to the soldiers on parade, the Suther- 
 land men formed themselves into a congregation, appointed 
 elders of their own number, engaged and paid a stipend 
 (collected among themselves) to a clergyman of the Church 
 of Scotland (who had gone out with an intention of teach- 
 ing and preaching to the Caffres), and had divine service 
 performed agreeably to the ritual of the Established Church. 
 ... In addition to these expenses, the soldiers regularly 
 remitted money to their relatives in Sutherland. When they 
 disembarked at Plymouth in August 1814, the inhabitants 
 were both surprised and gratified. On such occasions it 
 had been no uncommon thing for soldiers to spend in 
 taverns and gin-shops the money they had saved. In the 
 present case the soldiers of Sutherland were seen in book- 
 sellers' shops, supplying themselves with Bibles and such 
 books and tracts as they required. Yet, as at the Cape, 
 where their religious habits were so free of all fanatical 
 gloom that they occasionally indulged in social meetings 
 and dancing, so here, while expending their money on books, 
 they did not neglect their personal appearance; and the 
 haberdashers' shops had also their share of trade, from the 
 purchase of additional feathers to their bonnets, and such 
 extra decorations as the correctness of military regulations 
 allow to be introduced into the uniform. Nor, while thus 
 
 2 C 
 
402 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 mindful of themselves improving their mind and their 
 personal appearance did such of them as had relations in 
 Sutherland forget their destitute condition, occasioned by the 
 loss of their lands, and the operation of the improved state of 
 the country. During the short period that the regiment was 
 quartered at Plymouth, upwards of .500 were lodged in 
 one banking house to be remitted to Sutherland, exclusive 
 of many sums sent through the Post Office and by officers. 
 Some of the sums exceeded 20 from an individual soldier.' 
 
 ' In the case of such men,' continues the General, ' dis- 
 graceful punishment was as unnecessary as it would have 
 been pernicious. Indeed, so remote was the idea of such 
 a measure in regard to them, that when punishments were 
 to be inflicted on others, and the troops in camp, garrison, 
 or quarters assembled to witness the execution, the pre- 
 sence of the Sutherland Highlanders either of the fencibles 
 or of the line was dispensed with ; the effect of terror, 
 as a check to crime, being in their case uncalled for, " as 
 examples of that nature were not necessary for such honour- 
 able soldiers." Such were these men in garrison. How 
 thoroughly they were guided by honour and loyalty in the 
 field, was shown at New Orleans. Although many of their 
 countrymen who had emigrated to America were ready 
 and anxious to receive them, there was not an instance 
 of desertion ; nor did one of those who were left behind, 
 wounded or prisoners, forget their allegiance and remain 
 in that country, at the same time that desertions from the 
 British army were but too frequent.' 
 
 This is testimony which even men of the world will 
 scarce suspect. We can supplement it by that of the 
 missionary whom the Sutherlandshire soldiers made choice 
 of at Cape Town as their minister. We quote from a letter 
 by the Rev. Mr. Thorn, which appeared in the Christian 
 Herald of October 1814 : 
 
 1 When the 93d Sutherland Highlanders left Cape Town 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 403 
 
 last month,' writes the reverend gentleman, ' there were 
 among them 156 members of the church (including three 
 elders and three deacons), all of whom, so far as man can 
 know the heart from the life, were pious persons. The 
 regiment was certainly a pattern for morality and good 
 behaviour to every other corps. They read their Bibles ; 
 they observed the Sabbath ; they saved their money in 
 order to do good ; 7000 rix-dollars (^"1400 currency) the 
 non-commissioned officers and privates gave for books, 
 societies, and the support of the gospel a sum perhaps 
 unparalleled in any other corps in the world, given in the 
 short space of seventeen or eighteen months. Their ex- 
 ample had a general good effect on both the colonists and 
 heathen. How they may act as to religion in other parts 
 is known to God \ but if ever apostolic days were revived in 
 modern times on earth, I certainly believe some of these to 
 have been granted to us in Africa.' 
 
 One other extract of a similar kind : we quote from a 
 letter to the Committee of the Edinburgh Gaelic School 
 Society, Fourth Annual Report : 
 
 ' The regiment (93d) arrived in England, when they 
 immediately received orders to proceed to North America ; 
 but before they re-embarked, the sum collected for your 
 Society was made up, and has been remitted to your trea- 
 surer, amounting to seventy-eight pounds sterling.' 
 
 We dwell with pleasure on this picture ; and shall present 
 the reader, in our next chapter, with a picture of similar 
 character, taken from observation, of the homes in which 
 these soldiers were reared. The reverse is all too stern, 
 but we must exhibit it also, and show how the influence 
 which the old Earls of Sutherland employed so well, has been 
 exerted by their descendants to the ruin of their country. 
 But we must first give one other extract from General 
 Stewart. It indicates the track in which the ruin came. 
 
 ' Men like these,' he says, referring to the Sutherland 
 
4 o 4 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 Highlanders, 'do credit to the peasantry of the country. 
 If this conclusion is well founded, the removal of so many 
 of the people from their ancient seats, where they acquired 
 those habits and principles, must be considered a public 
 loss of no common magnitude. It must appear strange, 
 and somewhat inconsistent, when the same persons who 
 are loud in their professions of an eager desire to promote 
 and preserve the religious and moral virtues of the people, 
 should so frequently take the lead in approving of measures 
 which, by removing them from where they imbibed prin- 
 ciples which have attracted the notice of Europe, and 
 placed them in situations where poverty, and the too 
 frequent attendants, vice and crime, will lay the foundation 
 of a character which will be a disgrace, as that already 
 obtained has been an honour, to this country. In the new 
 stations where so many Highlanders are now placed, and 
 crowded in such numbers as to preserve the numerical 
 population, while whole districts are left without inhabi- 
 tants, how can they resume their ancient character and 
 principles, which, according to the reports of those em- 
 ployed by the proprietors, have been so deplorably broken 
 down and deteriorated a deterioration which was entirely 
 unknown till the recent change in the condition of the 
 people, and the introduction of that system of placing 
 families on patches of potato ground, as in Ireland a 
 system pregnant with degradation, poverty, and disaffec- 
 tion, and exhibiting daily a prominent and deplorable 
 example, which might have forewarned Highland pro- 
 prietors, and prevented them from reducing their people 
 to a similar state ? It is only when parents and heads of 
 families in the Highlands are moral, happy, and contented, 
 that they can instil sound principles into their children, 
 who, in their intercourse with the world, may once more 
 become what the men of Sutherland have already been, 
 " an honourable example, worthy the imitation of all." ' 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 405 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WE have exhibited the Sutherland Highlanders to the 
 reader as they exhibited themselves to their country, when, 
 as Christian soldiers, men, like the old chivalrous knight, 
 * without fear or reproach,' they fought its battles and 
 reflected honour on its name. Interest must attach to the 
 manner in which men of so high a moral tone were reared j 
 and a sketch drawn from personal observation of the interior 
 of Sutherland eight-and-twenty years ago, may be found 
 to throw very direct light on the subject. To know what 
 the district once was, and what it is now, is to know with 
 peculiar emphasis the meaning of the sacred text, ' One 
 sinner destroyeth much good.' 
 
 The eye of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found 
 exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty 
 years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark 
 moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its ex- 
 tensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. 
 Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage 
 beauty ; but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the 
 well-known antithesis in which Goldsmith sums up his 
 description of Italy, the only growth that had not dwindled 
 in it was man. The cottage in which we resided with an 
 aged relative and his two stalwart sons, might be regarded 
 as an average specimen of the human dwellings of the dis- 
 trict. It was a low long building of turf, consisting of four 
 apartments on the ground floor, the one stuck on to the 
 end of the other, and threaded together by a passage that 
 connected the whole. From the nearest hill the cottage 
 reminded one of a huge black snail crawling up the slope. 
 
406 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 The largest of the four apartments was occupied by the 
 master's six milk cows ; the next in size was the ha', or 
 sitting-room, a rude but not uncomfortable apartment, 
 with the fire on a large flat stone in the middle of the floor. 
 The apartment adjoining was decently partitioned into 
 sleeping places ; while the fourth and last in the range 
 more neatly fitted up than any of the others, with furniture 
 the workmanship of a bred carpenter, a small bookcase 
 containing from forty to fifty volumes, and a box-bed of 
 deal was known as the stranger's room. There was a 
 straggling group of buildings outside, in the same humble 
 style, a stable, a barn, a hay-barn, a sheep-pen with a 
 shed attached, and a milk-house ; and stretching around the 
 whole lay the farm, a straggling patch of corn land of from 
 twelve to fifteen acres in extent, that, from its extremely 
 irregular outline, and the eccentric forms of the parti- 
 coloured divisions into which it was parcelled, reminded 
 one of a coloured map. Encircling all was a wide sea of 
 heath studded with huge stones the pasturage land of 
 the farmer for his sheep and cattle which swept away on 
 every hand to other islands of corn and other groups of 
 cottages, identical in appearance with the corn land and 
 the cottages described. 
 
 We remember that, coming from a seaport town, where, 
 to give to property the average security, the usual means 
 had to be resorted to, we were first struck by finding that 
 the door of our relative's cottage,, in this inland parish, was 
 furnished with neither lock nor bar. Like that of the 
 hermit in the ballad, it opened with a latch ; but, unlike 
 that of the hermit, it was not because there were no stores 
 under the humble roof to demand the care of the master. 
 It was because that, at this comparatively recent period, 
 the crime of theft was unknown in the district. The philo- 
 sophic Biot, when occupied in measuring the time of the 
 seconds pendulum, resided for several months in one of the 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 407 
 
 smaller Shetland islands ; and, fresh from the troubles of 
 France, -his imagination bearing about, if we may so speak, 
 the stains of the guillotine, the state of trustful security in 
 which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with asto- 
 nishment. ' Here,' he exclaimed, ' during the twenty-five 
 years in which Europe has been devouring herself, the door 
 of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night.' 
 The whole interior of Sutherland was, at the time of which 
 we write, in a similar condition. It did not surprise us 
 that the old man, a person of deep piety, regularly assembled 
 his household night and morning for the purpose of family 
 worship, and led in their devotions : we had seen many 
 such instances in the low country. But it did somewhat 
 surprise us to find the practice universal in the parish. In 
 every family had the worship of God been set up. One 
 could not pass an inhabited cottage in the evening, from 
 which the voice of psalms was not to be heard. On Sab- 
 bath morning, the whole population might be seen wending 
 their way, attired in their best, along the blind half-green 
 paths in the heath, to the parish church. The minister was 
 greatly beloved, and all attended his ministrations. We still 
 remember the intense joy which his visits used to impart to 
 the household of our relative. This worthy clergyman still 
 lives, though the infirmities of a stage of life very advanced 
 have gathered round him; and at the late disruption, 
 choosing his side, and little heeding, when duty called, that 
 his strength had been wasted in the labour of forty years, 
 and that he could now do little more than testify and suffer 
 in behalf of his principles, he resigned his hold of the tem- 
 poralities as minister of Dornoch, and cast in his lot with 
 his brethren of the Free Church. And his venerable suc- 
 cessor in Lairg, a man equally beloved and exemplary, and 
 now on the verge of his eightieth year, has acted a similar 
 part. Had such sacrifices been made in such circumstances 
 for other than the cause of Christ had they been made 
 
4 o8 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 under some such romantic delusion as misled of old the 
 followers of the Stuarts the world would have appreciated 
 them highly ; but there is an element in evangelism which 
 repels admiration, unless it be an admiration grounded in 
 faith and love ; and the appeal in such cases must lie, 
 therefore, not to the justice of the world, but to the judg- 
 ment-seat of God. We may remind the reader, in pass- 
 ing, that it was the venerable minister of Lairg who, on 
 quitting his manse on the Disruption, was received by 
 his widowed daughter into a cottage held of the Duke 
 of Sutherland, and that for this grave crime the crime of 
 sheltering her aged father the daughter was threatened 
 with ejection by one of the Duke's creatures. Is it not 
 somewhat necessary that the breath of public opinion 
 should be let in on this remote country ? But we digress. 
 
 A peculiar stillness seemed to rest over this Highland 
 parish on the Sabbath. The family devotions of the morn- 
 ing, the journey to and from church, and the public services 
 there, occupied fully two-thirds of the day. But there re- 
 mained the evening, and of it the earlier part was spent in 
 what are known in the north country as fellowship meetings. 
 One of these was held regularly in the ' ha' ' of our relative. 
 From fifteen to twenty people, inclusive of the family, met 
 for the purposes of social prayer and religious conversation, 
 and the time passed profitably away, till the closing night 
 summoned the members of the meeting to their respective 
 homes and their family duties. We marked an interesting 
 peculiarity in the devotions of our relative. He was, as we 
 have said, an old man, and had worshipped in his family 
 long ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic translation of the Scriptures 
 had been introduced into the county; and as he was sup- 
 plied in those days with only the English Bible, while his 
 domestics understood only Gaelic, he had to acquire the 
 art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the time, of translating 
 the English chapter for them, as he read, into their native 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 409 
 
 tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready 
 fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than 
 a Gaelic work from which he was reading. It might have 
 been supposed, however, that the introduction of Dr. 
 Stewart's edition would have rendered this mode of trans- 
 lation obsolete ; but in this and many other families such 
 was not the case. The old man's Gaelic was Sutherland- 
 shire Gaelic. His family understood it better, in conse- 
 quence, than any other ; and so he continued to translate 
 from his English Bible, ad aperturam libri, many years after 
 the Gaelic edition had been spread over the county. The 
 fact that such a practice should have been common in 
 Sutherland, says something surely for the intelligence of 
 the family patriarchs of the district. That thousands of 
 the people who knew the Scriptures through no other 
 medium, should have been intimately acquainted with the 
 saving doctrines and witnesses of their power (and there 
 can be no question that such was the case), is proof enough, 
 at least, that it was a practice carried on with a due per- 
 ception of the scope and meaning of the sacred volume. 
 One is too apt to associate intelligence with the external 
 improvements of a country with well-enclosed fields and 
 whitewashed cottages; but the association is altogether a 
 false one. As shown by the testimony of General Stewart 
 of Garth, the Sutherland regiment was not only the most 
 eminently moral, but, as their tastes and habits demon- 
 strated, one of the most decidedly intellectual under the 
 British Crown. Our relative's cottage had, as we have 
 said, its bookcase, and both his sons were very intelligent 
 men ; but intelligence derived directly from books was not 
 general in the county ; a very considerable portion of the 
 people understood no other language than Gaelic, and 
 many of them could not even read ; for at this period about 
 one-tenth of the families of Sutherland were distant five or 
 more miles from the nearest school. Their characteristic 
 
410 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 intelligence was of a kind otherwise derived : it was an 
 intelligence drawn from these domestic readings of the 
 Scriptures and from the pulpit j and is referred mainly to 
 that profound science which even a Newton could recog- 
 nise as more important and wonderful than any of the 
 others, but which many of the shallower intellects of our 
 own times deem no science at all. It was an intelligence 
 out of which their morality sprung ; it was an intelligence 
 founded in earnest belief. 
 
 But what, asks the reader, was the economic condition 
 the condition with regard to circumstances and means of 
 living of these Sutherland Highlanders ? How did they 
 fare ? The question has been variously answered : much 
 must depend on the class selected from among them as 
 specimens of the whole, much, too, taking for granted the 
 honesty of the party who replies, on his own condition in 
 life, and his acquaintance with the circumstances of the 
 poorer people of Scotland generally. The county had its 
 less genial localities, in which, for a month or two in the 
 summer season, when the stock of grain from the previous 
 year was fast running out, and the crops on the ground not 
 yet ripened for use, the people experienced a considerable 
 degree of scarcity, such scarcity as a mechanic in the 
 south feels when he has been a fortnight out of employ- 
 ment. But the Highlander had resources in these seasons 
 which the mechanic has not. He had his cattle and his 
 wild pot-herbs, such as the mugwort and the nettle. It has 
 been adduced by the advocates of the change which has 
 ruined Sutherland, as a proof of the extreme hardship of 
 the Highlander's condition, that at such times he could 
 have eaten as food a broth made of nettles, mixed up with 
 a little oatmeal, or have had recourse to the expedient of 
 bleeding his cattle, and making the blood into a sort of 
 pudding. And it is quite true that the Sutherlandshire 
 Highlander was in the habit, at such times, of having 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 411 
 
 recourse to such food. It is not less true, however, that 
 the statement is just as little conclusive regarding his con- 
 dition, as if it were alleged there must always be famine in 
 France when the people eat the hind legs of frogs, or in 
 Italy when they make dishes of snails. We never saw 
 scarcity in the house of our relative, but we have seen the 
 nettle broth in it very frequently, and the blood-pudding 
 oftener than once \ for both dishes were especial favourites 
 with the Highlanders. With regard to the general comfort 
 of the people in their old condition, there are better tests 
 than can be drawn from the kind of food they occasionally 
 ate. The country hears often of dearth in Sutherland now : 
 every year in which the crop falls a little below average in 
 other districts, is a year of famine there ; but the country 
 never heard of dearth in Sutherland then. There were 
 very few among the holders of its small inland farms who 
 had not saved a little money. Their circumstances were 
 such, that their moral nature found full room to develope 
 itself, and in a way the world has rarely witnessed. Never 
 were there a happier or more contented people, or a people 
 more strongly attached to the soil ; and not one of them 
 now lives in the altered circumstances on which they were 
 so rudely precipitated by the landlord, who does not look 
 back on this period of comfort and enjoyment with sad and 
 hopeless regret. We have never heard the system which 
 has depopulated this portion of the country defended, with- 
 out recurring to our two several visits to the turf cottage 
 in Lairg, or without feeling that the defence embodied an 
 essential falsehood, which time will not fail to render evident 
 to the apprehensions of all. 
 
 We would but fatigue our readers were we to run over half 
 our recollections of the interior of Sutherland. They are 
 not all of a serious cast. We have sat in the long autumn 
 evenings in the cheerful circle round the turf-fire of the ha', 
 and have heard many a tradition of old clan feuds pleasingly 
 
4 i2 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 told, and many a song of the poet of the county, Old Rob 
 Bonn, gaily sung. In our immediate neighbourhood, by 
 the side of a small stream small, but not without its 
 supply of brown trout, speckled with crimson there was a 
 spot of green meadow land, on which the young men of the 
 neighbourhood used not unfrequently to meet and try their 
 vigour in throwing the stone. The stone itself had its 
 history. It was a ball of gneiss, round as a bullet, that had 
 once surmounted the gable of a small Popish chapel, of 
 which there now remained only a shapeless heap of stones, 
 that scarce overtopped the long grass amid which it lay. 
 A few undressed flags indicated an ancient burying-ground ; 
 and over the ruined heap, and the rude tombstones that 
 told no story, an ancient time-hallowed tree, coeval with 
 the perished building, stretched out its giant arms. Even 
 the sterner occupations of the farm had in their very variety 
 a strong smack of enjoyment. We found one of the old 
 man's sons engaged, during our one visit, in building an 
 outhouse, after the primitive fashion of the Highlands, and 
 during our other visit, in constructing a plough. The two 
 main cupples of the building he made of huge trees, dug out 
 of a neighbouring morass ; they resembled somewhat the 
 beams of a large sloop reversed. The stones he carried 
 from the outfield heath on a sledge ; the interstices in the 
 walls he caulked with moss ; the roof he covered with sods. 
 The entire erection was his workmanship, from foundation 
 to ridge. And such, in brief, was the history of all those 
 cottages in the interior of Sutherland, which the poor High- 
 landers so naturally deemed their own, but from which, 
 when set on fire and burnt to the ground by the creatures 
 of the proprietor, they were glad to escape with their lives. 
 The plough, with the exception of the iron work, was alto- 
 gether our relative's workmanship too. And such was the his- 
 tory of the rude implements of rural or domestic labour which 
 were consumed in the burning dwellings. But we anticipate. 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 413 
 
 There is little of gaiety or enjoyment among the High- 
 landers of Sutherland now. We spent a considerable time 
 for two several years among their thickly-clustered cottages 
 on the eastern coast, and saw how they live, and how it 
 happens that when years of comparative scarcity come on 
 they starve. Most of them saved, when in the interior, as 
 we have said, a little money; but the process has been re- 
 versed here : in every instance in which they brought their 
 savings to the coast-side has the fund been dissipated. Each 
 cottage has from half an acre to an acre and half of corn 
 land attached to it just such patches as the Irish starve 
 upon. In some places, by dint of sore labour, the soil has 
 been considerably improved ; and all that seems necessary 
 to render it worth the care of a family, would be just to in- 
 crease its area some ten or twelve times. In other cases, 
 however, increase would be no advantage. We find it 
 composed of a loose debris of granitic water-rolled pebbles 
 and ferruginous sand, that seemed destined to perpetual 
 barrenness. The rents, in every instance, seem moderate ; 
 the money of the tenant flows towards the landlord in a 
 stream of not half the volume of that in which the money 
 of the landlord must flow towards the tenant when the poor- 
 laws shall be extended to Scotland. But no rent, in such 
 circumstances, can be really moderate. A clergyman, when 
 asked to say how many of his parishioners, in one of these 
 coast districts, realized less than sixpence a-day, replied, 
 that it would be a much easier matter for him to point out 
 how many of them realized more than sixpence, as this more 
 fortunate class were exceedingly few. And surely no rent 
 can be moderate that is paid by a man who realizes less 
 than sixpence a-day. It is the peculiar evil produced by 
 the change in Sutherland, that it has consigned the popula- 
 tion of the country to a condition in which no rent can be 
 moderate to a condition in which they but barely avoid 
 famine, when matters are at the best with them, and fall 
 
4i4 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 into it in every instance in which the herring fishing, their 
 main and most precarious stay, partially fails, or their crops 
 are just a little more than usually scanty. They are in such 
 a state, that their very means of living are sources, not of 
 comfort, but of distress to them. When the fishing and 
 their crops are comparatively abundant, they live on the 
 bleak edge of want ; while failure in either plunges them 
 into a state of intense suffering. And well are these High- 
 landers aware of the true character of the revolution to 
 which they have been subjected. Our Poor-Law Commis- 
 sioners may find, in this land of growing pauperism, thou- 
 sands as poor as the people of Sutherland ; but they will 
 find no class of the population who can so directly contrast 
 their present destitution with a state of comparative plenty 
 and enjoyment, or who, in consequence of possessing this 
 sad ability, are so deeply imbued with a too well-grounded 
 and natural discontent. 
 
 But we have not yet said how this ruinous revolution was 
 effected in Sutherland, how the aggravations of the mode, 
 if we may so speak, still fester in the recollections of the 
 people, or how thoroughly that policy of the lord of the 
 soil, through which he now seems determined to complete 
 the work of ruin which his predecessor began, harmonizes 
 with its worst details. We must first relate, however, a 
 disastrous change which took place, in the providence of 
 God, in the noble family of Sutherland, and which, though 
 it dates fully eighty years back, may be regarded as pregnant 
 with the disasters which afterwards befell the country. 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 415 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SUCH of our readers as are acquainted with the memoir 
 of Lady Glenorchy, must remember a deeply melancholy 
 incident which occurred in the history of this excellent 
 woman, in connection with the noble family of Sutherland. 
 Her only sister had been married to William, seventeenth 
 Earl of Sutherland, ' the last of the good Earls ;' ' a noble- 
 man,' says the Rev. Dr. Jones, in his Memoir, ' who to the 
 finest person united all the dignity and amenity of manners 
 and character which give lustre to greatness.' But his sun 
 was destined soon to go down. Five years after his mar- 
 riage, which proved one of the happiest, and was blessed 
 with two children, the elder of the two, the young Lady 
 Catherine, a singularly engaging child, was taken from him 
 by death, in his old hereditary castle of Dunrobin. The 
 event deeply affected both parents, and preyed on their 
 health and spirits. It had taken place amid the gloom of 
 a severe northern winter, and in the solitude of the High- 
 lands ; and, acquiescing in the advice of friends, the Earl 
 and his lady quitted the family seat, where there was so 
 much to remind them of their bereavement, and sought 
 relief in the more cheerful atmosphere of Bath. But they 
 were not to find it there. Shortly after their arrival, the 
 Earl was seized by a malignant fever, with which, upheld by 
 a powerful constitution, he struggled for fifty-four days, and 
 then expired. ' For the first twenty-one days and nights of 
 these,' says Dr. Jones, ' Lady Sutherland never left his bed- 
 side j and then at last, overcome with fatigue, anxiety, and 
 grief, she sank an unavailing victim to an amiable but ex- 
 cessive attachment, seventeen days before the death of her 
 
416 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 lord.' The period, though not very remote, was one in 
 which the intelligence of events travelled slowly; and in 
 this instance the distraction of the family must have served 
 to retard it beyond the ordinary time. Her Ladyship's 
 mother, when hastening from Edinburgh to her assistance, 
 alighted one day from her carriage at an inn, and, on 
 seeing two hearses standing by the wayside, inquired of an 
 attendant whose remains they contained? The remains, 
 was the reply, of Lord and Lady Sutherland, on their way 
 for interment to the Royal Chapel of Hotyrood House. 
 And such was the first intimation which the lady received 
 of the death of her daughter and son-in-law. 
 
 The event was pregnant with disaster to Sutherland, 
 though many years elapsed ere the ruin which it involved 
 fell on that hapless county. The sole survivor and heir of 
 the family was a female infant of but a year old. Her 
 maternal grandmother, an ambitious, intriguing woman of 
 the world, had the chief share in her general training and 
 education ; and she was brought up in the south of Scot- 
 land, of which her grandmother was a native, far removed 
 from the influence of those genial sympathies with the 
 people of her clan, for which the old lords of Sutherland 
 had been so remarkable, and, what was a sorer evil still, 
 from the influence of the vitalities of that religion which, 
 for five generations together, her fathers had illustrated and 
 adorned. The special mode in which the disaster told first, 
 was through the patronages of the county, the larger part of 
 which are vested in the family of Sutherland. Some of the 
 old Earls had been content, as we have seen, to place 
 themselves on the level of the Christian men of their parishes, 
 and thus to unite with them in calling to their churches the 
 Christian ministers of their choice. They knew, what re- 
 generate natures can alone know with the proper emphasis, 
 that in Christ Jesus the vassal ranks with his lord, and 
 they conscientiously acted on the conviction. But matters 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 417 
 
 were now regulated differently. The presentation sup- 
 planted the call, and ministers came to be placed in the 
 parishes of Sutherland without the consent and contrary to 
 the will of the people. Churches, well filled hitherto, were 
 deserted by their congregations, just because a respectable 
 woman of the world, making free use of what she deemed 
 her own, had planted them with men of the world who 
 were only tolerably respectable ; and in houses and barns 
 the devout men of the district learned to hold numerously- 
 attended Sabbath meetings for reading the Scriptures, and 
 mutual exhortation and prayer, as a sort of substitute for 
 the public services, in which they found they could no 
 longer join with profit. The spirit awakened by the old 
 Earls had survived themselves, and ran directly counter to 
 the policy of their descendant. Strongly attached to the 
 Establishment, the people, though they thus forsook their 
 old places of worship, still remained members of the national 
 Church, and travelled far in the summer season to attend 
 the better ministers of their own and the neighbouring 
 counties. We have been assured, too, from men whose 
 judgment we respect, that, under all their disadvantages, 
 religion continued peculiarly to flourish among them ; a 
 deep-toned evangelism prevailed ; so that perhaps the visible 
 Church throughout the world at the time could furnish no 
 more striking contrast than that which obtained between 
 the cold, bald, commonplace services of the pulpit in some 
 of these parishes, and the fervid prayers and exhortations 
 which give life and interest to these humble meetings of the 
 people. What a pity it is that differences such as these the 
 Duke of Sutherland cannot see ! 
 
 The marriage of the young countess into a noble English 
 family was fraught with further disaster to the county. 
 There are many Englishmen quite intelligent enough to 
 perceive the difference between a smoky cottage of turf and 
 a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgment on their 
 
 2 D 
 
4i8 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 respective inhabitants would be of but little value. Suther- 
 land, as a country of men, stood higher at this period than 
 perhaps any other district in the British empire ; but, as our 
 descriptions in the preceding chapter must have shown, 
 and we indulged in them mainly with a view to this part of 
 our subject, it by no means stood high as a country of 
 farms and cottages. The marriage of the Countess brought 
 a new set of eyes upon it, eyes accustomed to quite a 
 different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude country, 
 where all was wrong, and all had to be set right, a sort of 
 Russia on a small scale, that had just got another Peter the 
 Great to civilise it, or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an 
 energetic AH Pasha at its head. Even the vast wealth and 
 great liberality of the Stafford family militated against this 
 hapless county : it enabled them to treat it as the mere 
 subject of an interesting experiment, in which gain to them- 
 selves was really no object, nearly as little so as if they 
 had resolved on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of 
 science. It was a still further disadvantage, that they had 
 to carry on their experiment by the hands, and to watch its 
 first effects with the eyes, of others. The agonies of the dog 
 might have had their softening influence on a dissector who 
 held the knife himself; but there could be no such influence 
 exerted over him, did he merely issue orders to his footman 
 that the dissection should be completed, remaining him- 
 self, meanwhile, out of sight and out of hearing. The plan 
 of improvement sketched out by his English family was a 
 plan exceedingly easy of conception. Here is a vast tract 
 of land, furnished with two distinct sources of wealth. Its 
 shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and the 
 whole of its interior parcelled out into productive sheep- 
 farms. All is waste in its present state : it has no fisheries, 
 and two-thirds of its internal produce is consumed by the 
 inhabitants. It had contributed, for the use of the com- 
 munity and the landlord, its large herds of black cattle ; but 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 419 
 
 the English family saw, and, we believe, saw truly, that for 
 every one pound of beef which it produced, it could be made 
 to produce two pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of 
 fish in addition. And it was resolved, therefore, that the 
 inhabitants of the central districts, who, as they were mere 
 Celts, could not be transformed, it was held, into store- 
 farmers, should be marched down to the sea-side, there to 
 convert themselves into fishermen, on the shortest possible 
 notice, and that a few farmers of capital, of the industrious 
 Lowland race, should be invited to occupy the new sub- 
 divisions of the interior. 
 
 And, pray, what objections can be urged against so liberal 
 and large-minded a scheme ? The poor inhabitants of the 
 interior had very serious objections to urge against it. 
 Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing ; it was 
 they themselves who had broken in their little fields from 
 the waste ; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of 
 history, had they possessed their mountain holdings, they 
 had defended them so well of old that the soil was still 
 virgin ground, in which the invader had found only a grave ; 
 and their young men were now in foreign lands, fighting, at 
 the command of their chieftainess, the battles of their 
 country, not in the character of hired soldiers, but of men 
 who regarded these very holdings as their stake in the 
 quarrel. To them, then, the scheme seemed fraught with 
 the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice. Were it 
 to be suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of 
 revolution, that Sutherland might be still further improved 
 that it was really a piece of great waste to suffer the revenues 
 of so extensive a district to be squandered by one indi- 
 vidual that it would be better to appropriate them to the 
 use of the community in general that the community in 
 general might be still further benefited by the removal of 
 the one said individual from Dunrobin to a road-side, where 
 he might be profitably employed in breaking stones and 
 
420 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 that this new arrangement could not be entered on too 
 soon the noble Duke would not be a whit more astonished, 
 or rendered a whit more indignant, by the scheme, than 
 were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his 
 predecessor. 
 
 The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities 
 unexampled in Britain for at least a century were perpe- 
 trated in the clearing of Sutherland, there was a species of 
 at least passive resistance on the part of the people (for 
 active resistance there was none), which in some degree 
 provoked them. Had the Highlanders, on receiving orders, 
 marched down to the sea-coast, and become fishermen, with 
 the readiness with which a regiment deploys on review day, 
 the atrocities would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. 
 But though the orders were very distinct, the Highlanders 
 were very unwilling to obey; and the severities formed 
 merely a part of the means through which the necessary 
 obedience was ultimately secured. We shall instance a 
 single case, as illustrative of the process. In the month of 
 March 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders of Farr 
 and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned 
 to quit their farms in the following May. In a few days 
 after, the surrounding heaths on which they pastured their 
 cattle, and from which at that season the sole supply of 
 herbage is derived (for in those northern districts the grass 
 springs late, and the cattle-feeder in the spring months 
 depends chiefly on the heather), were set on fire and burnt 
 up. There was that sort of policy in the stroke which men 
 deem allowable in a state of war. The starving cattle went 
 roaming over the burnt pastures, and found nothing to eat. 
 Many of them perished, and the greater part of what re- 
 mained, though in miserable condition, the Highlanders 
 had to sell perforce. Most of the able-bodied men were 
 engaged in this latter business at a distance from home, 
 when the dreaded term-day came on. The pasturage had 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 421 
 
 been destroyed before the legal term, and while, in even the 
 eye of the law, it was still the property of the poor High- 
 landers ; but ere disturbing them in their dwellings, term- 
 day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then 
 began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their 
 head, entered the district, and commenced pulling down 
 the houses over the heads of the inhabitants. In an exten- 
 sive tract of country not a human dwelling was left standing, 
 and then, the more effectually to prevent their temporary 
 re-erection, the destroyers set fire to the wreck. In one day 
 were the people deprived of home and shelter, and left 
 exposed to the elements. Many deaths are said to have 
 ensued from alarm, fatigue, and cold. Pregnant women 
 were taken with premature labour in the open air. There 
 were old men who took to the woods and rocks in a state 
 of partial insanity. An aged bedridden man, named Mac- 
 beath, had his house unroofed over his head, and was left 
 exposed to wind and rain till death put a period to his 
 sufferings. Another man lying iH of a fever met with no 
 tenderer treatment, but in his case the die turned up life. 
 A bedridden woman, nearly a hundred years of age, had 
 her house fired over her head, and ere she could be extri- 
 cated from the burning wreck, the sheets in which she was 
 carried were on fire. She survived but for five days after. 
 In a critique on the work of Sismondi, which appeared a 
 few months since in the Westminster Review, the writer tells 
 us, ' it has even been said that an old man, having refused 
 to quit his cabin, perished in the flames.' But such was not 
 the case. The constituted authorities interfered; a pre- 
 cognition was taken by the Sheriff-substitute of the county, 
 and the case tried before the Justiciary Court at Inverness ; 
 but the trial terminated in the acquittal of the pannels. 
 There was no punishable crime proven to attach to the 
 agents of the proprietor. 
 
 Their acquittal was followed by scenes of a similar 
 
422 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 character with the scene described, and of even greater 
 atrocity. But we must borrow the description of one of 
 .these from the historian of the clearing of Sutherland, 
 Donald M'Leod, a native of the county, and himself a 
 sufferer in the experimental process to which it was sub- 
 jected : 
 
 ' The work of devastation was begun by setting fire to the 
 houses of the small tenants in extensive districts Farr, 
 Rogart, Golspie, and the whole parish of Kildonan. I was 
 an eye-witness of the scene. The calamity came on the 
 people quite unexpectedly. Strong parties for each district, 
 furnished with faggots and other combustibles, rushed on 
 the dwellings of the devoted people, and immediately com- 
 menced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work with 
 the greatest rapidity, till about three hundred houses were 
 in flames. Little or no time was given for the removal of 
 persons or property the consternation and confusion were 
 extreme the people striving to remove the sick and help- 
 less before the fire should reach them next struggling to 
 save the most valuable of their effects the cries of the 
 women and children the roaring of the affrighted cattle, 
 hunted by the dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and 
 the fire altogether composed a scene that completely 
 baffles description. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the 
 whole country by day, and even extended far on the sea. 
 At night, an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself 
 all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. 
 I myself ascended a height about eleven o'clock in the 
 evening, and counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, 
 many of the owners of which were my relations, and all of 
 whom I personally knew, but whose present condition I 
 could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the 
 whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking 
 ruins. During one of these days, a boat lost her way in the 
 dense smoke as she approached the shore, but at night she 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 423 
 
 was enabled to reach a landing-place by the light of the 
 flames.' 
 
 But, to employ the language of Southey, 
 
 1 Things such as these, we know, must be 
 At every famous victory.' 
 
 And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over 
 the children of the soil was signal and complete. In little 
 more than nine years a population of fifteen thousand indi- 
 viduals were removed from the interior of Sutherland to 
 its sea-coasts, or had emigrated to America. The inland 
 districts were converted into deserts, through which the 
 traveller may take a long day's journey, amid ruins that 
 still bear the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, 
 when the evening sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, 
 the half-effaced lines of the plough. The writer of the 
 singularly striking passage we have just quoted, revisited 
 his native place (Kildonan) in the year 1828, and attended 
 divine service in the parish church. A numerous and devout 
 congregation had once worshipped there : the congregation 
 now cpnsisted of eight shepherds and their dogs. In a neigh- 
 bouring district the barony of Strathnaver, a portion of the 
 parish of Farr the church, no longer found necessary, was 
 razed to the ground. The timber was carried away to be 
 used in the erection of an inn, and the minister's house con- 
 verted into the dwelling of a fox-hunter. ' A woman well 
 known in the parish,' says M'Leod, 'happening to traverse 
 the Strath the year after the burning, was asked, on her re- 
 turn, What news? "Oh," said she, " sgeul bronach, sgeiil 
 bronach ! sad news, sad news ! I have seen the timber of 
 our kirk covering the inn at Altnaharran ; I have seen the 
 kirkyard, where our friends are mouldering, filled with tarry 
 sheep, and Mr. Sage's study-room a kennel for Robert Gun's 
 dogs."' 
 
424 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 LET us follow, for a little, the poor Highlanders of Suther- 
 land to the sea-coast. It would be easy dwelling on the 
 terrors of their expulsion, and multiplying facts of horror ; 
 but had there been no permanent deterioration effected in 
 their condition, these, all harrowing and repulsive as they 
 were, would have mattered less. Sutherland would have 
 soon recovered the burning up of a few hundred hamlets, 
 or the loss of a few bedridden old people, who would have 
 died as certainly under cover, though perhaps a few months 
 later, as when exposed to the elements in the open air. 
 Nay, had it lost a thousand of its best men in the way in 
 which it lost so many at the storming of New Orleans, the 
 blank ere now would have been completely filled up. The 
 calamities of fire or of decimation even, however distressing 
 in themselves, never yet ruined a country : no calamity 
 ruins a country that leaves the surviving inhabitants to de- 
 velope, in their old circumstances, their old character and 
 resources. 
 
 In one of the eastern eclogues of Collins, where two 
 shepherds are described as flying for their lives before the 
 troops of a ruthless invader, we see with how much of the 
 terrible the imagination of a poet could invest the evils of 
 war, when aggravated by pitiless barbarity. Fertile as that 
 imagination was, however, there might be found new cir- 
 cumstances to heighten the horrors of the scene circum- 
 stances beyond the reach of invention in the retreat of the 
 Sutherland Highlanders from the smoking ruins of their 
 cottages to their allotments on the coast. We have heard 
 of one man, named M'Kay, whose family, at the time of 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 425 
 
 the greater conflagration referred to by M'Leod, were all 
 lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his sick children 
 on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have heard 
 of the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew 
 of some vessel wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they 
 might sustain life by the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare 
 by the ebb. Many of their allotments, especially on the 
 western coast, were barren in the extreme unsheltered by 
 bush or tree, and exposed to the sweeping sea-winds, and, 
 in time of tempest, to the blighting spray ; and it was found 
 a matter of the extremest difficulty to keep the few cattle 
 which they had retained, from wandering, especially in the 
 night-time, into the better sheltered and more fertile in- 
 terior. The poor animals were intelligent enough to read 
 a practical comment on the nature of the change effected ; 
 and, from the harshness of the shepherds to whom the care 
 of the interior had been entrusted, they served materially to 
 add to the distress of their unhappy masters. They were 
 getting continually impounded ; and vexatious fines, in the 
 form of trespass-money, came thus to be wrung from the 
 already impoverished Highlanders. Many who had no 
 money to give were obliged to relieve them by depositing 
 some of their few portable articles of value, such as bed or 
 body clothes, or, more distressing still, watches and rings 
 and pins the only relics, in not a few instances, of brave 
 men whose bones were mouldering under the fatal rampart 
 at New Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt on that 
 spot of proud recollection, where the invincibles of Napo- 
 leon went down before the Highland bayonet. Their first 
 efforts as fishermen were what might be expected from a 
 rural people unaccustomed to the sea. The shores of 
 Sutherland, for immense tracts together, are iron-bound, 
 and much exposed open on the eastern coast to the 
 waves of the German Ocean, and on the north and west 
 to the long roll of the Atlantic. There could not be more 
 
426 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 perilous seas for the unpractised boatman to take his first 
 lessons on ; but though the casualties were numerous, and 
 the loss of life great, many of the younger Highlanders 
 became expert fishermen. The experiment was harsh in 
 the extreme, but so far, at least, it succeeded. It lies open, 
 however, to other objections than those which have been 
 urged against it on the score of its inhumanity. 
 
 The reader must be acquainted with Goldsmith's remarks 
 on the herring fishery of his days. ' A few years ago,' he 
 says, ' the herring fishing employed all Grub Street ; it was 
 the topic in every coffee-house, and the burden of every 
 ballad. We were to drag up oceans of gold from the bottom 
 of the sea ; we were to supply all Europe with herrings upon 
 our own terms. At present, however, we hear no more of 
 all this ; we have fished up very little gold that I can learn ; 
 nor do we furnish the world with herrings, as was expected.' 
 We have, in this brief passage, a history of all the more 
 sanguine expectations which have been founded on herring 
 fisheries. There is no branch of industry so calculated to 
 awaken the hopes of the speculator, or so suited to disap- 
 point them. So entirely is this the case, that were we de- 
 sirous to reduce an industrious people to the lowest stage of 
 wretchedness compatible with industry, we would remove 
 them to some barren district, and there throw them on the 
 resources of this fishery exclusively. The employments of 
 the herring fisher have all the uncertainty of the ventures of 
 the gambler. He has first to lay down, if we may so speak, 
 a considerable stake, for his drift of nets and his boat in- 
 volve a very considerable outlay of capital ; and if success- 
 ful, and if in general the fishery be not successful, the take 
 of a* single week may more than remunerate him. A single 
 cast of his nets may bring him in thirty guineas and more. 
 The die turns up in his favour, and he sweeps the board. 
 And hence those golden dreams of the speculator so happily 
 described by Goldsmith. But year after year may pass, and 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 427 
 
 the run of luck be against the fisherman. A fishing gene- 
 rally good at all the stations gluts the market, necessarily 
 limited in its demands to an average supply, and, from the 
 bulk and weight of the commodity, not easily extended to 
 distant parts : and the herring merchant first, and the fisher- 
 man next, find that they have been labouring hard to little 
 purpose. Again, a fishing under average, from the eccentric 
 character of the fish, is found almost always to benefit a 
 few, and to ruin a great many. The average deficiency is 
 never equally spread over the fishermen ; one sweeps the 
 board another loses all. Nor are the cases few in which 
 the accustomed shoal wholly deserts a tract of coast for 
 years together ; and thus the lottery, precarious at all times, 
 becomes a lottery in which there are only blanks to be 
 drawn. The wealthy speculator might perhaps watch such 
 changes, and by supplementing the deficiency of one year 
 by the abundance of another, give to the whole a character 
 of average ; but alas for the poor labouring man placed 
 in such circumstances ! The yearly disbursements of our 
 Scottish Fishery Board, in the way of assistance to poverty- 
 struck fishermen, unable even to repair their boats, testify 
 all too tangibly that they cannot regulate their long runs of 
 ill luck by their temporary successes ! And if such be the 
 case among our hereditary fishermen of the north, who derive 
 more than half their sustenance from the white fishery, how 
 much more must it affect those fishermen of Sutherland, 
 who, having no market for their white fish in the depopu- 
 lated interior, and no merchants settled among them to 
 find markets farther away, have to depend exclusively on 
 their herring fishing! The experiment which precipitated 
 the population of the country on its barer skirts, as some 
 diseases precipitate the humours on the extremities, would 
 have been emphatically a disastrous one, so far at least as the 
 people were concerned, even did it involve no large amount 
 of human suffering, and no deterioration of character. 
 
428 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 One of the first writers, of unquestioned respectability, 
 who acquainted the public with the true character of the 
 revolution which had been effected in Sutherland, was the 
 late General Stewart of Garth. He was, we believe, the 
 first man and the fact says something for his shrewdness 
 who saw a coming poor-law looming through the clearing of 
 Sutherland. His statements are exceedingly valuable ; his 
 inferences almost always just. The General a man of 
 probity and nice honour had such an ability of estimating 
 the value of moral excellence in a people, as the originators 
 of the revolution had of estimating the antagonist merits of 
 double pounds of mutton and single pounds of beef. He 
 had seen printed representations on the subject tissues of 
 hollow falsehood, that have since been repeated in news- 
 papers and reviews ; and though unacquainted with the 
 facts at the time, he saw sufficient reason to question their 
 general correctness, from the circumstance that he found in 
 them the character of the people, with which no man could 
 be better acquainted, vilified and traduced. The General 
 saw one leviathan falsehood running through the whole, and, 
 on the strength of the old adage, naturally suspected the 
 company in which he found it. And so, making minute 
 and faithful inquiry, he published the results at which he 
 arrived. He refers to the mode of ejectment by the torch. 
 He next goes on to show how some of the ejected tenants 
 were allowed small allotments of moor on the coast side, of 
 from half an acre to two acres in extent, which it was their 
 task to break into corn land ; and how that, because many 
 patches of green appear in this way, where all was russet 
 before, the change has been much eulogized as improve- 
 ment. We find him remarking further, with considerable 
 point and shrewdness, that ' many persons are, however, 
 inclined to doubt the advantages of improvements which 
 call for such frequent apologies,' and that, ' if the advantage 
 to the people were so evident, or if more lenient measures 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 429 
 
 had been pursued, vindication could not have been neces- 
 sary.' The General knew how to pass from the green spots 
 themselves to the condition of those who tilled them. The 
 following passage must strike all acquainted with the High- 
 landers of Sutherland as a true representation of the circum 
 stances to which they have been reduced : 
 
 * Ancient respectable tenants who have passed the greater 
 part of life in the enjoyment of abundance, and in the exer- 
 cise of hospitality and charity, possessing stock often, twenty, 
 and thirty breeding cows, with the usual proportion of other 
 stock, are now pining on one or two acres of bad land, with 
 one or two starved cows; and for this accommodation a 
 calculation is made, that they must support their families, 
 and pay the rent of their lots, not from the produce, but 
 from the sea, thus drawing a rent which the land cannot 
 afford. When the herring fishing succeeds, they generally 
 satisfy the landlord, whatever privations they may suffer ; 
 but when the fishing fails, they fall into arrears. The her- 
 ring fishing, always precarious, has for a succession of years 
 been very defective, and this class of people are reduced to 
 extreme misery. At first, some of them possessed capital, 
 from converting their farm-stock into cash, but this has been 
 long exhausted; and it is truly distressing to view their 
 general poverty, aggravated by their having once enjoyed 
 abundance and independence.' 
 
 Some of the removals to which we have referred took 
 place during that group of scarce seasons in which the 
 year 1816 was so prominent; but the scarcity which these 
 induced served merely to render the other sufferings of the 
 people more intense, and was lost sight of in the general 
 extent of the calamity. Another group of hard seasons 
 came on, one of those groups which seem of such certain 
 and yet of such irregular occurrence in our climate, that 
 though they have attracted notice from the days of Bacon 
 downwards, they have hitherto resisted all attempts to in- 
 
430 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 elude them in some definite cycle. The summer and 
 harvest of 1835 were the last of a series of fine summers 
 and abundant harvests ; and for six years after there was 
 less than the usual heat, and more than the usual rain. 
 Science, in connection with agriculture, has done much 
 for us in the low country, and so our humbler population 
 were saved from the horrors of a dearth of food ; but on 
 the green patches which girdle the shores of Sutherland, 
 and which have been esteemed such wonderful improve- 
 ments, science had done and could do nothing. The 
 people had been sinking lower and lower during the pre- 
 vious twenty years, and what would have been great hard- 
 ship before had become famine now. One feels at times 
 that it may be an advantage to have lived among the 
 humbler people. We have been enabled, in consequence, 
 to detect many such gross misstatements as those with 
 which the apologists of the disastrous revolution effected 
 in Sutherland have attempted to gloss over the ruin of that 
 country. In other parts of the Highlands, especially in 
 the Hebrides, the failure of the kelp trade did much to 
 impoverish the inhabitants ; but in the Highlands of Suther- 
 land the famine was the effect of improvement alone. 
 
 The writer of these chapters saw how a latft, untoward 
 year operates on the bleak shores of the north-western 
 Highlands, when spending a season there a good many 
 years ago. He found what only a few twelvemonths pre- 
 vious had been a piece of dark moor, laid out into minute 
 patches of corn, and bearing a dense population. The 
 herring fishing had failed for the two seasons before, and 
 the poor cottars were, in consequence, in arrears with their 
 rent ; but the crops had been tolerable ; and though their 
 stores of meal and potatoes were all exhausted at the time 
 of our coming among them (the month of June), and though 
 no part of the growing crop was yet fit for use, the white 
 fishing was abundant, and a training of hardship had enabled 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 431 
 
 them to subsist on fish exclusively. Their corn shot in the 
 genial sunshine, and gave fair promise, and their potatoes 
 had become far enough advanced to supplement their all 
 too meagre meals, when, after a terrible thunder-storm, the 
 fine weather broke up, and for thirteen weeks together there 
 scarce passed a day without its baffling winds and its heavy 
 chilling showers. The oats withered without ripening ; the 
 hardy bear might be seen rustling on all the more exposed 
 slopes, light as the common rye-grass of our hay-fields, 
 the stalks, in vast proportion, shorn of the ears. It was 
 only in a very few of the more sheltered places that it 
 yielded a scanty return of a dark-coloured and shrivelled 
 grain. And to impart a still deeper shade to the prospects 
 of the poor Highlanders, the herring fishery failed as signally 
 as in the previous years. There awaited them all too ob- 
 viously a whole half year of inevitable famine, unless Low- 
 land charity interfered in their behalf. And the recurrence 
 of this state of things no amount of providence or exertion 
 on their own part, when placed in such circumstances, can 
 obviate or prevent. It was a conviction of this character, 
 based on experience, which led the writer of these remarks 
 to state, when giving evidence before the present Poor-Law 
 Commissioners for Scotland, that though opposed to the 
 principle of legal assessment generally, he could yet see no 
 other mode of reaching the destitution of the Highlands. 
 Our humane Scottish law compels the man who sends 
 another man to prison to support him there, just because 
 it is held impossible that within the walls of a prison a man 
 can support himself. Should the principle alter, if, instead 
 of sending him to a prison, he banishes him to a bleak, 
 inhospitable coast, where, unless he receives occasional 
 support from others, he must inevitably perish ? 
 
 The sufferings of the people of Sutherland during the 
 first of these years of destitution (1836), we find strikingly 
 described by M'Leod : 
 
432 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 ' In this year,' says the author, ' the crops all over Britain 
 were deficient, having bad weather for growing and ripening, 
 and still worse for gathering in. But in the Highlands they 
 were an entire failure ; and on the untoward spots, occupied 
 by the Sutherland small tenants, there was literally nothing 
 fit for human subsistence. And to add to the calamity, the 
 weather had prevented them from securing the peats, their 
 only fuel ; so that, to their previous state of exhaustion, 
 cold and hunger were to be superadded. The sufferings 
 endured by the poor Highlanders in the succeeding winter 
 truly beggar description. Even the herring fishing had 
 failed, and consequently their credit in Caithness, which 
 depended on its success, was at an end. Any little pro- 
 vision they might be able to procure was of the most 
 inferior and unwholesome description. It was no un- 
 common thing to see people searching among the snow 
 for the frosted potatoes to eat in order to preserve life. 
 As the harvest had been disastrous, so the winter was un- 
 commonly boisterous and severe, and consequently little 
 could be obtained from the sea to mitigate the calamity. 
 The distress rose to such a height as to cause a sensation 
 all over the island ; and there arose a general cry for 
 Government interference, to save the people from death 
 by famine.' 
 
 Public meetings were held, private subscriptions entered 
 into, large funds collected, the ^British people responded to 
 the cry of their suffering fellow-subjects, and relief was 
 extended to every portion of the Highlands except one. 
 Alas for poor Sutherland ! There, it was said, the charity 
 of the country was not required, as the noble and wealthy 
 proprietors had themselves resolved to interfere ; and as 
 this statement was circulated extensively through the public 
 prints, and sedulously repeated at all public meetings, the 
 mind of the community was set quite at rest on the matter. 
 And interfere the proprietors at length did. Late in the 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 433 
 
 spring of 1837, after sufferings the most incredible had 
 been endured, and disease and death had been among the 
 wretched people, they received a scanty supply of meal 
 and seed-corn, for which, though vaunted at the time as 
 a piece of munificent charity, the greater part of them had 
 afterwards to pay. 
 
 In the next chapter we shall endeavour bringing these 
 facts to bear on the cause of the Free Church in Suther- 
 land. We close for the present by adding just one curious 
 fact more. We have already shown how the bleak moors 
 of Sutherland have been mightily improved by the revolu- 
 tion which ruined its people. They bear many green patches 
 which were brown before. Now it so happened that rather 
 more than ten years ago, the idea struck the original im- 
 provers, that as green was an improvement on brown, so 
 far as the moors were concerned, white would be an equally 
 decided improvement on black, so far as the houses were 
 concerned. An order was accordingly issued, in the name 
 of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, that all the small 
 tenants on both sides the public road, where it stretches on 
 the northern coast from the confines of Reay to the Kyle 
 of Tongue, a distance of about thirty miles, should straight- 
 way build themselves new houses of stone and mortar, 
 according to a prescribed plan and specification. Pharaoh's 
 famous order could not have bred greater consternation. 
 But the only alternative given was summed up in the magic 
 word removal ; and the poor Highlanders, dejected, tamed, 
 broken in spirit as in means, well knew from experience 
 what the magic word meant. And so, as their prototypes 
 set themselves to gather stubble for their bricks, the poor 
 Highlanders began to build. We again quote from 
 M'Leod : 
 
 ' Previous to this, in the year 1829, I and my family had 
 been forced away, like others, being particularly obnoxious 
 to those in authority for sometimes showing an inclination 
 
 2 E 
 
434 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 to oppose their tyranny, and therefore we had to be made 
 examples of to frighten the rest ; but in 1833 I made a tour 
 of the district, when the building was going on, and shall 
 endeavour to describe a small part of what met my eye on 
 that occasion. In one locality (and this was a specimen of 
 the rest) I saw fourteen different squads of masons at work, 
 with the natives attending them. Old grey-headed men, 
 worn down by previous hardship and present want, were 
 to be seen carrying stones, and wheeling them and other 
 materials on barrows, or conveying them on their backs to 
 the buildings, and with their tottering limbs and trembling 
 hands straining to raise them on the walls. The young 
 men also, after toiling all night at sea endeavouring for 
 subsistence, were obliged to yield their exhausted frames to 
 the labours of the day. Even female labour could not be 
 dispensed with ; the strong as well as the weak, the delicate 
 and sickly, and (shame to their oppressors) even the preg- 
 nant, barefooted and scantily clothed, were obliged to join 
 in those rugged, unfeminine labours. In one instance I 
 saw the husband quarrying stones, and the wife and chil- 
 dren dragging them along in an old cart to the building. 
 Such were the building scenes of that period. The poor 
 people had often to give the last morsel of food they 
 possessed to feed the masons, and subsist on shell-fish 
 themselves. This went on for several years, in the course 
 of which many hundreds of these houses were erected on 
 unhospitable spots unfit for a human residence.' 
 We add another extract from the same writer : 
 ' It might be thought,' adds M'Leod, ' that the design of 
 forcing the people to build such houses was to provide for 
 their comfort and accommodation, but there seems to have 
 been quite a different object, which, I believe, was the true 
 motive, and that was to hide the misery that prevailed. 
 There had been a great sensation created in the public 
 mind by the cruelties exercised in these districts ; and it 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 435 
 
 was thought that a number of neat white houses, ranged on 
 each side of the road, would take the eye of strangers and 
 visitors, and give a practical contradiction to the rumours 
 afloat. Hence the poor creatures were forced to resort to 
 such means, and to endure such hardships and privations 
 as I have described, to carry the scheme into effect. And 
 after they had spent their remaining all, and more than 
 their all, on the erection of these houses, and involved 
 themselves in debt, for which they have been harassed and 
 pursued ever since, what are these erections but whitened 
 tombs ! many of them now ten years in existence, and still 
 without proper doors or windows, destitute of furniture and 
 of comfort, the unhappy lairs of a heart-broken, squalid, 
 fast-degenerating race.' 
 
436 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 WE have exhibited to our readers, in the clearing of Suther- 
 land, a process of ruin so thoroughly disastrous, that it 
 might be deemed scarce possible to render it more com- 
 plete. And yet, with all its apparent completeness, it ad- 
 mitted of a supplementary process. To employ one of the 
 striking figures of Scripture, it was possible to grind into 
 powder what had been previously broken into fragments, 
 to degrade the poor inhabitants to a still lower level than 
 that on which they had been so cruelly precipitated, 
 though persons of a not very original cast of mind might 
 have found it difficult to say how ; and the Duke of Suther- 
 land has been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one 
 proper expedient for supplementing their ruin. All in 
 mere circumstance and situation that could lower and 
 deteriorate, had been present as ingredients in the first 
 process ; but there still remained for the people, however 
 reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that 
 consoles and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with 
 their humanizing influences ; and, under the teachings of 
 the gospel, the poor and oppressed looked longingly forward 
 to a future scene of being, in which there is no poverty and 
 no oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery, 
 something positively good, of which it was possible to 
 deprive them ; and hence the ability derived to the present 
 lord of Sutherland, of deepening and rendering more signal 
 the ruin accomplished by his predecessor. 
 
 Napoleon, when on the eve of re-establishing Popery in 
 France, showed his conviction of the importance of national 
 religions, by remarking that, did there exist no ready-made 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 437 
 
 religion to serve his turn, he would be under the necessity 
 of making one on purpose. And his remark, though per- 
 haps thrown into this form merely to give it point, and 
 render it striking, has been instanced as a proof that 
 he could not have considered the matter very profoundly. 
 It has been said, and said truly, that religions of stamina 
 enough to be even politically useful cannot be made : that 
 it is comparatively easy to gain great battles, and frame 
 important laws ; but that to create belief lay beyond the 
 power of even a Napoleon. France, instead of crediting 
 his manufactured religion, would have laughed at both him 
 and it. The Duke of Sutherland has, however, taken upon 
 himself a harder task than the one to which Napoleon 
 could refer, probably in joke. His aim seems to be, not 
 the comparatively simple one of making a new religion 
 where no religion existed before, but of making men already 
 firm in their religious convictions believe that to be a 
 religion which they believe to be no such thing. His 
 undertaking involves a discharging as certainly as an inject- 
 ing process, the erasure of an existing belief, as certainly 
 as the infusion of an antagonistic belief that has no exist- 
 ence. We have shown how evangelism took root and 
 grew in Sutherland, as the only form of Christianity which 
 its people could recognise ; how the antagonist principle of 
 Moderatism they failed to recognise as Christianity at all ; 
 and how, when the latter was obtruded into their pulpits, 
 they withdrew from the churches in which their fathers had 
 worshipped, for they could regard them as churches no 
 longer, and held their prayer and fellowship meetings in 
 their own homes, or travelled far to attend the ministrations 
 of clergymen in whose mission they could believe. We 
 have shown that this state of feeling and belief still per- 
 vades the county. It led to an actual disruption between 
 its evangelized people and its moderate clergy, long ere the 
 disruption of last May took place : that important event has 
 
438 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 had but the effect of marshalling them into one compact 
 body under a new name. They are adherents of the Free 
 Church now, just because they have been adherents to its 
 principles for the last two centuries. And to shake them 
 loose from this adherence is the object of his Grace ; to 
 reverse the belief of ages ; to render them indifferent to that 
 which they feel and believe to be religion ; and to make 
 them regard as religion that which they know to be none. 
 His task is harder by a great deal than that to which 
 Napoleon barely ventured to advert ; and how very coarse 
 and repulsive his purposed means of accomplishing it ! 
 
 These harmonize but too well with the mode in which 
 the interior of Sutherland was cleared, and the improved 
 cottages of its sea-coasts erected. The plan has its two 
 items. No sites are to be granted in the district for Free 
 churches, and no dwelling-houses for Free Church ministers. 
 The climate is severe ; the winters prolonged and stormy ; 
 the roads which connect the chief seats of population with 
 the neighbouring counties dreary and long. May not mini- 
 sters and people be eventually worn out in this way ? Such 
 is the portion of the plan which his Grace and his Grace's 
 creatures can afford to present to the light. But there are 
 supplementary items of a somewhat darker kind. The 
 poor cottars are, in the great majority of cases, tenants at 
 will ; and there has been much pains taken to inform them, 
 that to the crime of entertaining and sheltering a protesting 
 minister, the penalty of ejection from their holdings must 
 inevitably attach. The laws of Charles have again re- 
 turned in this unhappy district; and free and tolerating 
 Scotland has got, in the nineteenth century, as in the 
 seventeenth, its intercommuned ministers. We shall not 
 say that the intimation has emanated from the Duke. It is 
 the misfortune of such men that there creep around them 
 creatures whose business it is to anticipate their wishes j 
 but who, at times, doubtless, instead of anticipating, misin- 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 439 
 
 terpret them ; and who, even when not very much mis- 
 taken, impart to whatever they do the impress of their own 
 low and menial natures, and thus exaggerate in the act the 
 intention of their masters. We do not say, therefore, that the 
 intimation has emanated from the Duke ; but this we say, 
 that an exemplary Sutherlandshire minister of the Protest- 
 ing Church, who resigned his worldly all for the sake of his 
 principles, had lately to travel, that he might preach to his 
 attached people, a long journey of forty-five miles out- 
 wards, and as much in return, and all this without taking 
 shelter under the cover of a roof, or without partaking of 
 any other refreshment than that furnished by the slender 
 store of provisions which he had carried with him from his 
 new home. Willingly would the poor Highlanders have 
 received him at any risk ; but knowing from experience 
 what a Sutherlandshire removal means, he preferred en- 
 during any amount of hardship, rather than that the hospi- 
 tality of his people should be made the occasion of their 
 ruin. We have already adverted to the case of a lady of 
 Sutherland threatened with ejection from her home because 
 she had extended the shelter of her roof to one of the 
 protesting clergy an aged and venerable man, who had 
 quitted the neighbouring manse, his home for many years, 
 because he could no longer enjoy it in consistency with his 
 principles j and we have shown that that aged and vener- 
 able man was the lady's own father. What amount of 
 oppression of a smaller and more petty character may not 
 be expected in the circumstances, when cases such as 
 these are found to stand but a very little over the ordinary 
 level ? 
 
 The meannesses to which ducal hostility can stoop in this 
 hapless district impress with a feeling of surprise. In the 
 parish of Dornoch, for instance, where his Grace is for- 
 tunately not the sole landowner, there has been a site 
 procured on the most generous terms from Sir George 
 
440 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 Gun Munro of Poyntzfield ; and this gentleman believing 
 himself possessed of a hereditary right to a quarry, which, 
 though on the Duke's ground, had been long resorted to 
 by the proprietors of the district generally instructed the 
 builder to take from it the stones which he needed. Here, 
 however, his Grace interfered. Never had the quarry been 
 prohibited before ; but on this occasion a stringent inter- 
 dict arrested its use. If his Grace could not prevent a 
 hated Free Church from arising in the district, he could at 
 least add to the expense of its erection. We have even heard 
 that the portion of the building previously erected had to 
 be pulled down, and the stones returned. 
 
 How are we to account for a hostility so determined, and 
 that can stoop so low ? In two different ways, we are of 
 opinion, and in both have the people of Scotland a direct 
 interest. Did his Grace entertain a very intense regard for 
 Established Presbytery, it is probable that he himself would 
 be a Presbyterian of the Establishment. But such is not 
 the case. The Church into which he would so fain force 
 the people has been long since deserted by himself. The 
 secret of the course which he pursues can have no connec- 
 tion therefore with religious motive or belief. It can be 
 no proselytizing spirit that misleads his Grace. Let us 
 remark, in the first place, rather, however, in the way of 
 embodying a fact than imputing a motive, that with his 
 present views, and in his present circumstances, it may not 
 seem particularly his Grace's interest to make the county 
 of Sutherland a happy or desirable home to the people of 
 Sutherland. It may not seem his Grace's interest that the 
 population of the district should increase. The clearing of 
 the sea-coast may seem as little prejudicial to his Grace's 
 welfare now, as the clearing of the interior seemed adverse 
 to the interests of his predecessor thirty years ago ; nay, it 
 is quite possible that his Grace may be led to regard the 
 clearing of the coast as the better and more important clear* 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND JS. 441 
 
 ing of the two. Let it not be forgotten that a poor-law 
 hangs over Scotland ; that the shores of Sutherland are 
 covered with what seems one vast straggling village, in- 
 habited by an impoverished and ruined people ; and that 
 the coming assessment may yet fall so weighty, that the 
 extra profits derived to his Grace from his large sheep- 
 farms, may go but a small way in supporting his extra 
 paupers. It is not in the least improbable that he may 
 live to find the revolution effected by his predecessor tak- 
 ing to itself the form, not of a crime for that would be 
 nothing but of a disastrous and very terrible blunder. 
 
 There is another remark which may prove not unworthy 
 the consideration of the reader. Ever since the completion 
 of the fatal experiment which ruined Sutherland, the noble 
 family through which it was originated and carried on have 
 betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real results made 
 public. Volumes of special pleading have been written on 
 the subject; pamphlets have been published; laboured 
 articles have been inserted in widely - spread reviews ; 
 statistical accounts have been watched over with the most 
 careful surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press 
 could have altered the matter of fact, famine would not 
 have been gnawing the vitals of Sutherland in every year 
 just a little less abundant than its fellows, nor would the 
 dejected and oppressed people be feeding their discontent, 
 amid present misery, with the recollections of a happier 
 past. If a singularly well-conditioned and wholesome dis- 
 trict of country has been converted into one wide ulcer of 
 wretchedness and wo, it must be confessed that the sore 
 has been' carefully bandaged up from the public eye ; that 
 if there has been little done for its cure, there has at least 
 been much done for its concealment. Now, be it re- 
 membered that the Free Church threatens to insert a tent 
 into this wound, and so keep it open. It has been said 
 that the Gaelic language removes a district more effectually 
 
442 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 from the influence of English opinion than an ocean of 
 three thousand miles, and that the British public know 
 better what is doing in New York than what is doing in 
 Lewis and Skye. And hence one cause, at least, of the 
 thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the miseries 
 which the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the 
 oppressions to which he has been subjected. The Free 
 Church threatens to translate her wrongs into English, and 
 to give them currency in the general mart of opinion. She 
 might possibly enough be no silent spectator of conflagra- 
 tions such as those which characterized the first general 
 improvement of Sutherland, nor yet of such Egyptian 
 schemes of house-building as that which formed part of the 
 improvements of a later plan. She might be somewhat apt 
 to betray the real state of the district, and thus render 
 laborious misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect 
 a diversion in the cause of the people, and shake the 
 foundations of the hitherto' despotic power which has so 
 long weighed them down. She might do for Sutherland 
 what Cobbett promised to do for it, but what Cobbett had 
 not character enough to accomplish, and what he did not 
 live even to attempt. A combination of circumstances 
 have conspired, to vest in a Scottish proprietor, in this 
 northern district, a more despotic power than even the 
 most absolute monarchs of the Continent possess ; and it 
 is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor should be 
 jealous of the introduction of an element which threatens, 
 it may seem, materially to lessen it. And so he struggles 
 hard to exclude the Free Church, and, though no member 
 of the Establishment himself, declaims warmly in its behalf. 
 Certain it is, that from the Establishment, as now con- 
 stituted, he can have nothing to fear, and the people 
 nothing to hope. 
 
 After what manner may his Grace the Duke of Suther- 
 land be most effectually met in this matter, so that the 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 443 
 
 cause of toleration and freedom of conscience may be main- 
 tained in the extensive district which God, in His provi- 
 dence, has consigned to his stewardship? We shall in 
 our next chapter attempt giving the question an answer. 
 Meanwhile, we trust the people of Sutherland will continue, 
 as hitherto, to stand firm. The strong repugnance which 
 they feel against being driven into churches which all their 
 better ministers have left, is not ill founded. No Church 
 of God ever employs such means of conversion as those 
 employed by his Grace : they are means which have been 
 often resorted to for the purpose of making men worse, 
 never yet for the purpose of making them better. We know 
 that, with their long-formed church-going habits, the people 
 must feel their now silent Sabbaths pass heavily ; but they 
 would perhaps do well to remember, amid the tedium and 
 the gloom, that there were good men who not only antici- 
 pated such a time of trial for this country, but who also 
 made provision for it. Thomas Scott, when engaged in 
 writing his Commentary, used to solace himself with the 
 belief that it might be of use at a period when the public 
 worship of God would be no longer tolerated in the land. 
 To the great bulk of the people of Sutherland that time 
 seems to have already come. They know, however, the 
 value of the old divines, and have not a few of their more 
 practical' treatises translated into their own expressive 
 tongue : Alleine's Alarm, Boston's Fourfold State, Dod- 
 dridge's Rise and Progress, Baxter's Call, Guthrie's Saving 
 Interest. Let these, and such as these, be their preachers, 
 when they can procure no other. The more they learn to 
 relish them, the less will they relish the bald and miserable 
 services of the Residuary Church. Let them hold their 
 fellowship and prayer meetings ; let them keep up the 
 worship of God in their families; the cause of religious 
 freedom in the district is involved in the stand which they 
 make. Above all, let them possess their souls in patience. 
 
444 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 We are not unacquainted with the Celtic character, as de- 
 veloped in the Highlands of Scotland. Highlanders, up 
 to a certain point, are the most docile, patient, enduring of 
 men; but that point once passed, endurance ceases, and 
 the all too gentle lamb starts up an angry lion. The spirit 
 is stirred that maddens at the sight of the naked weapon, 
 and that, in its headlong rush upon the enemy, discipline 
 can neither check nor control. Let our oppressed High- 
 landers of Sutherland beware. They have suffered much ; 
 but, so far as man is the agent, their battles can be fought 
 on only the arena of public opinion, and on that ground 
 which the political field may be soon found to furnish. 
 Any explosion of violence on their part would be ruin to 
 both the Free Church and themselves. 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 445 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 How is the battle of religious freedom to be best fought in 
 behalf of the oppressed people of Sutherland ? We shall 
 attempt throwing out a few simple suggestions on the sub- 
 ject, which, if in the right track, the reader may find it easy 
 to follow up and mature. 
 
 First, then, let us remember that in this country, in 
 which opinion is all-potent, and which for at least a century 
 and a half has been the envy of continental states for the 
 degree of religious freedom which it enjoys, the policy of 
 the Duke of Sutherland cannot be known without being 
 condemned. The current which he opposes has been 
 scooping out its channel for ages. Every great mind pro- 
 duced by Britain, from the times of Milton and Locke 
 down to the times of Mackintosh and of Chalmers, has 
 been giving it impetus in but one direction ; and it is scarce 
 likely that it will reverse its course now, at the bidding of 
 a few intolerant and narrow-minded aristocrats. British 
 opinion has but to be fairly appealed to, in order to declare 
 strongly in favour of the oppressed Highlanders of Suther- 
 land. What we would first remark, then, is, that the policy 
 of his Grace the Duke cannot be too widely exposed. The 
 press and the platform must be employed. The frank and 
 generous English must be told, that that law of religious 
 toleration which did so much at a comparatively early 
 period to elevate the character of their country in the eye 
 of the world, and which, in these latter times, men have 
 been accustomed to regard as somewhat less, after all, than 
 an adequate embodiment of the rights of conscience, has 
 
446 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 been virtually repealed in a populous and very extensive 
 district of the British empire, through a capricious exercise 
 of power on the part of a single man. Why, it has been 
 asked, in a matter which lies between God and conscience, 
 and between God and the conscience only, should a third 
 party be permitted to interfere so far as even to say, * I 
 tolerate you? I tolerate your Independency your Epis- 
 copacy your Presbyterianism : you are a Baptist, but I 
 tolerate you ?' There is an insult implied, it has been said, 
 in the way in which the liberty purports to be granted. It 
 bestows as a boon what already exists as a right. We 
 want no despot to tell us that he gives us leave to breathe 
 the free air of heaven, or that he permits us to worship 
 God agreebly to the dictates of our conscience. Such are 
 the views with which a majority of the British people regard, 
 in these latter times, the right to tolerate; and regarding 
 a right NOT to tolerate, they must be more decided still. 
 The Free Church, then, must lay her complaint before 
 them. She must tell them, that such is the oppression to 
 which her people are subjected, that she would be but too 
 happy to see even the beggarly elements .of the question re- 
 cognised in their behalf ; that she would be but too happy 
 to hear the despot of a province pronounce the deprecated 
 * I tolerate you,' seeing that his virtual enunciation at pre- 
 sent is, f I do NOT tolerate you,' and seeing that he is 
 powerful enough, through a misapplication of his rights 
 and influence as the most extensive of British proprietors, 
 to give terrible effect to the unjust and illiberal determina- 
 tion. The Free Church, on this question, must raise her 
 appeal everywhere to public opinion, and we entertain no 
 doubt that she will everywhere find it her friend. 
 
 But how is its power to be directed ? How bring it to 
 bear upon the Duke of Sutherland ? It is an all-potent 
 lever, but it must be furnished with a fulcrum on which to 
 rest, and a direction in which to bear. Let us remark, 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 447 
 
 first, that no signal privilege or right was ever yet achieved 
 for Britain, that was not preceded by some signal wrong. 
 From the times of Magna Charta down to the times of the 
 Revolution, we find every triumph of liberty heralded in by 
 some gross outrage upon it. The history of the British 
 Constitution is a history of great natural rights established 
 piecemeal under the immediate promptings of an indigna- 
 tion elicited by unbearable wrongs. It was not until the 
 barrier that protected the privileges of the citizen from the 
 will of the despot gave way at some weak point, that the 
 parties exposed to the inundation were roused up to re- 
 erect it on a better principle and a surer foundation. Now, 
 the Duke of Sutherland (with some of his brother proprie- 
 tors) has just succeeded in showing us a signal flaw in our 
 scheme of religious toleration, and this at an exceedingly 
 critical time. He has been perpetrating a great and pal- 
 pable wrong, which, if rightly represented, must have the 
 effect of leading men, in exactly the old mode, to arouse 
 themselves in behalf of the corresponding right. If a 
 single proprietor can virtually do what the sovereign of 
 Great Britain would forfeit the crown for barely attempting 
 to do if a single nobleman can do what the House of 
 Lords in its aggregate capacity would peril its very exist- 
 ence for but proposing to do then does there exist in the 
 British Constitution a palpable flaw, which cannot be too 
 soon remedied. There must be a weak place in the bar- 
 rier, if the waters be rushing out; and it cannot be too 
 soon rebuilt on a surer plan. Here, then, evidently, is the 
 point on which the generated opinion ought to be brought 
 to bear. It has as its proper arena the political field. It 
 is a defect in the British Constitution, strongly exemplified 
 by the case of Sutherland, that the rights of property may 
 be so stretched as to overbear the rights of conscience 
 that though toleration be the law of the land generally, it 
 may be so set aside by the country's proprietary, as not to 
 
448 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 be the law in any particular part of it ; and to reverse this 
 state of things to make provision in the Constitution that 
 the rights of the proprietor be not so overstretched, and 
 that a virtual repeal of the toleration laws in any part of 
 the country be not possible are palpably the objects to 
 which the public mind should be directed. 
 
 We have said that the Duke of Sutherland has suc- 
 ceeded in showing us this flaw in the Constitution at a 
 peculiarly critical time. A gentleman resident in England, 
 for whose judgment we entertain the highest respect, told 
 us only a few days since, that the rising, all-absorbing party 
 of that kingdom, so far at least as the Established Church 
 and the aristocracy are concerned, still continues to be the 
 Puseyite party. If Puseyism does not bid fair to possess 
 a majority of the people of the country, it bids fair at least 
 to possess a majority of its acres. And we need scarce 
 remind the reader how peculiarly this may be the case with 
 Scotland, whose acres, in such large proportions, are under 
 the control of an incipient Puseyism already. In both 
 countries, therefore, is it of peculiar importance, in a time 
 like the present, that the law of toleration should be placed 
 beyond the control of a hostile or illiberal proprietary so 
 placed beyond their control, that they may be as unable 
 virtually to suspend its operation in any part of the country, 
 as they already are to suspend its operation in the whole of 
 the country. We are recommending, be it remembered, no 
 wild scheme of Chartist aggression on the rights of pro- 
 perty we would but injure our cause by doing so : our 
 strength in this question must altogether depend on the 
 soundness of the appeal which we can carry to the natural 
 justice of the community. We merely recommend that that 
 be done in behalf of the already recognised law of toleration, 
 which Parliament has no hesitation in doing in behalf of 
 some railway or canal, or water or dock company, when, 
 for what is deemed a public good, it sets aside the absolute 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 449 
 
 control of the proprietor over at least a portion of his pro- 
 perty, and consigns it at a fair price to the corporation 
 engaged in the undertaking. The principle of the scheme 
 is already recognised by the Constitution, and its legislative 
 embodiment would be at once easy and safe. Property 
 would be rendered not less, but more secure, if, in every 
 instance in which a regularly-organized congregation of any 
 denomination of Christians to which the law of toleration 
 itself extended, made application for ground on which to 
 erect a place of worship, the application would be backed 
 and made effectual, in virtue of an enacted law, by the 
 authority of the Constitution. There is no Scotch or Eng- 
 lish Dissenter no true friend of religious liberty in Britain 
 or Ireland who would not make common cause with the 
 Free Church in urging a measure of this character on Par- 
 liament, when fairly convinced, by cases such as that of 
 Sutherland, how imperatively such a measure is required. 
 
 Unavoidably, however, from the nature of things, the 
 relief which ultimately may be thus secured cannot be other 
 than distant relief. Much information must first be spread, 
 and the press and the platform extensively employed. Can 
 there be nothing done for Sutherland through an already 
 existing political agency ? We are of opinion there can. 
 Sutherland itself is even more thoroughly a close county 
 now, than it was ere the Reform Bill had swamped the 
 paper votes, and swept away the close burghs. His Grace 
 the Duke has but to nominate his member, and his member 
 is straightway returned. But all the political power which, 
 directly or indirectly, his Grace possesses, is not equally 
 secure. Sutherland is a close county; but the Northern 
 Burghs are not rotten burghs ; on the contrary, they possess 
 an independent and intelligent constituency ; and in scarce 
 any part of Scotland is the Free Church equally strong. 
 And his Grace derives no inconsiderable portion of his 
 political influence from them. The member for Sutherland 
 
 2 F 
 
450 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 is virtually his Grace's nominee, but the member for the 
 Northern Burghs is not his Grace's nominee at all ; and yet 
 certain it is that the gentleman by whom these burghs are 
 at present represented in Parliament is his Grace's agent 
 and adviser in all that pertains to the management of 
 Sutherland, and has been so for many years. His Grace's 
 member for Sutherland sits in Parliament in virtue of being 
 his Grace's nominee ; but the sort of prime minister through 
 which his Grace governs his princely domains, sits in Par- 
 liament, not in virtue of being his Grace's nominee, but in 
 virtue of his being himself a man of liberal opinions, and 
 an enemy to all intolerance. He represents them in the 
 Whig interest, and in his character as a Whig. His Grace 
 would very soon have one member less in Parliament, did 
 that member make common cause with his Grace in sup- 
 pressing the Free Church in Sutherland. Now, the bruit 
 shrewdly goeth, that that member does make common cause 
 with his Grace. The bruit shrewdly goeth, that in this, as 
 in most other matters, his Grace acts upon that member's 
 advice. True, the report may be altogether idle: it may be 
 utterly without foundation ; instead of being true, it may be 
 exactly the reverse of being true ; but most unquestionable 
 it is, that, whether true or otherwise, it exists, and that 
 that member's constituency have a very direct interest in it. 
 He represents them miserably ill, and must be a very diffe- 
 rent sort of Whig from them, if he hold that proprietors 
 do right in virtually setting aside the Toleration Act. The 
 report does one of two things, it either does him great in- 
 justice, or it shows that he has sat too long in Parliament 
 for the Northern Burghs. It is in the power, then, of the 
 highly respectable and intelligent Whig constituency of this 
 district to make such a diversion in favour of the oppressed 
 people of Sutherland, as can scarce fail to tell upon the 
 country, and this in thorough consistency with the best and 
 highest principles of their party. Let them put themselves 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 451 
 
 in instant communication with their member, and, stating 
 the character of the report which so generally exists to his 
 prejudice, request a categorical answer regarding it, let 
 them request an avowal of his opinion of the Duke's policy, 
 equally articulate with that opinion which the Hon. Mr. 
 Fox Maule submitted to the public a few weeks ago in the 
 columns of the Witness, and then, as the ascertained 
 circumstances of the case may direct, let them act, and that 
 publicly, in strict accordance with their principles. Of one 
 thing they may be assured, the example will tell. 
 
 In order to raise the necessary amount of opinion for 
 carrying the ulterior object the enactment of a law there 
 are various most justifiable expedients to which the friends 
 of toleration in the country should find it not difficult to 
 resort. Petitions addressed to the Lower House in its 
 legislative capacity, and to the members of the Upper 
 House as a body of men who have, perhaps, of all others 
 the most direct stake in the matter we need scarce say 
 how ought, of course, to take a very obvious place on the 
 list. Much, too, might be done by deputations from the 
 General Assembly of the Free Church, instructed from time 
 to time to ascertain, and then publicly to report on, the 
 state of Sutherland. Each meeting of the Assembly might 
 be addressed on the subject by some of its ablest men, in 
 which case their statements and speeches would go forth, 
 through the medium of the press, to the country at large. 
 The co-operation and assistance of all bodies of evangelical 
 Dissenters, both at home and abroad, should be sedulously 
 sought after, and correct information on the subject circu- 
 lated among them extensively. There has been much 
 sympathy elicited for the Church, during her long struggle, 
 among good men everywhere. Her cause has been tried, 
 and judgment given in her favour, in France, Holland, and 
 America, and in not a few of the colonies. In the case of 
 Sismondi 'On the Clearing of Sutherland,' we see the 
 
452 SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 
 
 opinion of a continental philosopher re-echoed back upon 
 our own country, not without its marked effect ; and it 
 might be well to try whether the effect of foreign opinion 
 might not be at least equally influential ' On the Suppres- 
 sion of the Toleration Laws in Sutherland.' There is one 
 great country with which we hold our literature in common, 
 and which we can address, and by which we can be in turn 
 addressed, in our native tongue. Unluckily, what ought to 
 have existed as a bond of union and amity has been made 
 to subserve a very different purpose ; and we cannot con- 
 ceal from ourselves the fact, that our own country has been 
 mainly to blame. The manners, habits, and tastes of the 
 Americans have been exhibited, by not a few of our popular 
 writers, in the broadest style of caricature ; they have been 
 described as a nation of unprincipled speculators, devoid 
 not only of right feeling, but even of common honesty, and 
 remarkable for but their scoundrelism and conceit. Even 
 were such descriptions just, which they are not, most 
 assuredly would they be unwise. It is the American 
 people, rather than the American government, who make 
 peace and war ; and the first American war with England 
 will be one of the most formidable in which this country 
 has yet been engaged. The bowie-knife is no trifling 
 weapon ; and the English writer laughs at a very consider- 
 able expense, if his satires have the effect of whetting it. 
 At present, however, the war between the two countries is 
 but a war of libel and pasquinade, and the advantage 
 hitherto has been on the side of the aggressor. America 
 has not been happy in her retaliation. We would fain 
 direct her to aim where her darts, instead of provoking 
 national hostility, or exciting a bitter spirit among the 
 entire people of a country, would but subserve the general 
 cause of liberty and human improvement. It is but idle to 
 satirize our manners and customs ; we think them good. 
 There is nothing to be gained by casting ridicule on our 
 
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS. 453 
 
 peculiar modes of thinking ; they are the modes to which 
 we have been accustomed, and we prefer them to any 
 others. But there are matters of a different kind, regarding 
 which the country bears a conscience, and is not quite at 
 its ease ; and there we are vulnerable. We speak often, 
 we would fain say, of slavery in your country, literati of 
 America, and justly deem it a great evil. It might do us 
 good were you to remind us, in turn, that there are exten- 
 sive districts in our own, in which virtually there exists no 
 toleration law for the religion of the people, though that 
 religion be Protestantism in its purest form. Cast your 
 eyes upon the county of Sutherland. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, 
 TRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE. 
 
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