Читать книгу Norman Macleod - John Wellwood - Страница 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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