THE QUESTION IN SCOTLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.
I. One of my earliest recollections is the rattle of the
muskets when a company of soldiers, marched into Easter Ross to keep down the
excited population in 1843, grounded their arms in the High Street of the old
burgh of Tain. They were drawn up in front of the grey tower on the Castle
hill, which half hid the long blue line of Sutherlandshire hills, while far to
the right our horizon showed the ruined Keep of Lochslin, the birthplace of the
Bloody Mackenzie. It was the centre of a district in which the display of some
military force had become necessary. About a year before, the Church of
Scotland had solemnly undertaken to disestablish itself; and that promise had
now to be fulfilled, but by a very different process from the comfortable
euthanasia of retaining a life-interest in the benefices. Most of the Northern
ministers adhered to their pledge; but each of them still held that the church
of the parish belonged to its congregation, and the congregations (who were
with them almost unanimously) held still more strongly that the manse ought to
be left with the outgoing minister.
That was not to be. It was found
not easy to drive the Gaelic congregations from the low grey walls of the
Easter Ross churches, each surrounded by the generations of its dead. And
though it was easy enough to send out from his home each minister and his
family, the actual accomplishment of this, which was now going on, filled every
household in the Highlands with a dangerous mixture of anguish and indignation.
In this particular district there were special reasons for strong feeling. The
people were not under the control of one great proprietor, ducal or otherwise;
but still there were attempts to terrorise. A powerful landholder in the
neighbourhood announced that no labourer should be permitted to do a stroke of
work on his estates, unless on the previous Sunday he had attended the
religious service provided by the State. The labourers, backed by their friends
in the towns, stood shoulder to shoulder, and escaped the whole evil so
threatened. But their spiritual leaders, the ministers in town and country, did
not escape from any part of what had hung over them.
Accordingly, a
stranger scene than even that which Ross-shire peasants and burghers now gazed
upon had been transacted a few days before in the metropolis of Scotland. It
was a grey and cloudy afternoon on the ridge of the new town of Edinburgh,
where masses of spectators gathered in breathless expectation round the tall
spire of St. Andrew's Church. Into its interior, crowded since early dawn with
a like eager multitude, the members of Assembly and the glittering cortege of
the Queen's Commissioner had just disappeared. The doors were now shut, and all
Scotland seemed to wait outside. Suddenly they were broken open, and a roar of
acclamation rent the air as the ex-Moderator in his robes, and by his side the
venerable face of Chalmers, were seen to appear. For following these two came
the leaders of the Evangelical revival in the Church of Scotland from Highlands
and Lowlands alike. The crowd surged in emotion around them, so as to make the
old men in front the head of an involuntary procession. It took a few steps
westward, and then, turning to the right, moved down the steep brow of that
long slope which connects northern Edinburgh with the sea. One by one the
ministers then in Edinburgh, who had resolved to cast in their lot with the
Church, fell into the moving line. But after them marched a train of young men,
" licentiates" or candidates, who had looked forward to its benefices, but who
(like all its missionaries without exception in foreign lands) chose now to
belong to this its forlorn hope. Together they set their faces to the long
descent into that valley of humiliation. Before them the waters of the firth
gleamed under the blue and bitter north, and beyond it stretched many a moor
and strath, with the manses which the old men were in a few weeks to leave and
the young men were never to enter.
To one of those manses I had paid an
unseasonable morning visit two months before. There was a bright March sunrise,
and I had jumped early out of bed, for my head was full of marbles and
peg-tops, and a dozen or so of games before breakfast has, at that age, its
attractions. To my astonishment, I found my father down before me; indeed, he
had evidently been there for some time, for the moment I appeared he folded up
the newspaper in which he had been so unseasonably engaged, and - with a break
in his voice indicating an emotion that was unaccountable to me - asked me to
take it at once over to the manse, with his compliments to his friend the
minister. I went very readily, for the hedgerows were full of young birds upon
whom legitimate hostilities could be waged in passing. But as I went I
reflected on the austere and stately, image of our pastor, - a man everywhere
venerated, but whose face inspired awe rather than love in the beholder - (had
I not seen the town-boys break and scatter round one corner of the street as he
appeared at the other ?) - and I resolved that my interview with him should be
short. It was shorter than I expected, for I had scarcely got out of the
sunshine into the manse evergreens, when I found him in the porch and when I
offered him the newspaper, he showed me that he had already got the Times by
some unusual express, and as he spoke he patted my head and smiled - but such a
smile, so full of radiant kindliness! I was confounded; and as I went back
between the hedges the birds sang unheeded while I thought what could have
happened to the minister. Had anybody left him a fortune? or had he met one of
the Shining Ones walking among the hollies in that early dawn? And it was not
for some weeks that I found out that this was what had happened - the newspaper
that morning had brought him the vote of the House of Commons, finally refusing
an inquiry into the affairs of the Scottish Church, and so making it certain
that within a few weeks he and his aged mother would leave for ever the home,
at the door of which I found him.
But the "gentleness and gaiety" of
heart with which we are told, in a memorable passage of Lord Cockburn, that the
country ministers faced the coming of the crisis, did not free them from having
to go through with it afterwards in all its grinding detail. This was the point
of one of the most striking reminiscences of Dr. Thomas Guthrie at a later date; "I
remember passing a manse on a moonlight night, with'the minister who had left
it, for the cause of truth. No light shone from the house, and no smoke arose.
Pointing to it in the moonlight, I said, Oh, my friend, it was a noble
thing to leave that house.' Ah, yes,' he replied; it was a noble
thing, but for all that it was a bitter thing. I shall never forget the night I
left that house till I am laid in my grave. When I saw my wife and children go
forth in the gloaming; when I saw them for the last time leave our own door;
and when in the dark I was left alone, with none but my God in that house; and
when I had to take water and quench the fire on my own hearth, and put out the
candle in my own house, and turn the key against myself, and my wife, and my
little ones that night - God in His mercy grant that such a night I may never
again see!"
Those who left their homes at once, as most in Ross-shire
were now doing, had perhaps the best of it. But some were gladly allowed to
linger on till the early Northern winter. "One minister writes to us that he
left the manse with his family in a snow storm, when the mountain was white
with snow, and the sky was black with drift; but that he never knew so much of
the peace of God as he did that night, when following his wife and children as
they were carted over the mountain, without knowing where they were to find a
place to dwell in. Some of our ministers write that they live in crofters'
houses; some in places as damp as cellars, where a candle will not burn. One
says he sits with his great coat on; another that the curtains of his bed shake
at night like the sails of a ship in a storm. One minister, a friend of mine,
lives in a house which every wind of heaven blows through. On getting up one
morning he found the house all comparatively comfortable, and wondered what
good genius had been putting it in order, when he discovered that a heavy
shower of snow had fallen, and stopped up the crevices of the roof."
It
must always be remembered that the country, and especially the Highlands, were
different in this respect from the great towns, even after that first winter of
1843. It was some years before the Northern manses were built, and
homelessness, added to poverty, pressed heavily on the ejected ministers. I
remember how, as a boy, I used to watch one of them, a scholarly, and in his
college days a rather distinguished man, who after 1843 was unable to find a
home within his own parish, and who besides now laboured under a weak chest and
a threatening of heart complaint. Yet week after week, as each Sunday morning
came round, he persisted in driving away for miles through those inclement
winters to meet his congregation; and I can remember to this day his keen,
delicate face set to meet a heavy snow-storm from the northwest, while a
hacking cough shook his whole frame as he set out on his journey, four miles of
which must pass ore he caught sight of the well-sheltered and well-remembered
manse. But those who, like him, found shelter in a town dwelling, however
humble, were not worst off. The great difficulty was in the country, even when
harbouring the minister was not forbidden by the great landlords. But in many
cases, and occasionally over whole districts or counties, it was forbidden. And
where a foot of ground was forbidden to the minister, as well as to his
congregation, the results, always depressing to him, and cruelly distressing to
his family, sometimes reached a pitch of strange and memorable oppression. I
have myself often conversed with the minister of " Small Isles " - four
inhabited rocks clustering together out in the wild Atlantic - whose ministry,
forbidden on those morsels of the land, was carried on in the boat upon the
billow which his school friend, Hugh Miller, celebrated as the Floating Manse.
(see Intrusion for more, and some pictures)
And I stood as a boy in the mighty cavern near Cape Wrath beside the
pure-hearted pastor who, when ejected with his people from their church and
manse on the ground of a site-refusing Duke, worshipped throughout the winter
under those humid arches, while the only "iife interests" conceded him were in
the savage rock and resounding shore.
In the awakening of thought which
such scenes stirred in the young, there was a strong moral element, not
stimulating only, but animating. "All good things have not kept aloof, nor
wandered into other ways," was the irrepressible feeling of lads who had been
drifting on towards the dull afternoon of the century, and were suddenly
surrounded by this illuminating glow. Apparently then, their country, too, was
to have a future as well as a past. For it was plain, oven in 1843, that the
great event of that year was essentially transitional. It left Scotland in a
state of unstable equilibrium, and confronted it with a problem, political no
doubt, but moral as well. And what might a history not call for in the future
which revealed such gulfs and altitudes in the present? What might such a
country not yet claim of its sons? Above all, what did it not already deserve
at their hands? Those of them who are most conscious of having failed in
obedience to the early vision, do yet, in looking back, recognise the nobility
of its call - a call which they have found most noble and most adequate
precisely when they are brought nearest to some crisis of public duty. Those,
on the other hand, who "think they pay every debt to virtue when they praise
it," have never had a comfortable time in Scotland. The occasions for not
merely admiring but imitating return too frequently. And for some time past
there has been a well-founded apprehension in all parts of the Scottish Church
that its complete freedom or its complete union may involve some of its members
in a share - say, one-sixteenth or one- sixtieth part - of the same
self-sacrifice as was shown in 1843.
That, of course, is not a plea
that can be nakedly stated, nor is it one which many men in their hcarts
entertain. The mass of the Scottish people, even when within the establishment,
hold the principles which in that year drove their brethren out of it. And the
only recent occasions, when illusory legislation in its favour has had even a
passing chance of success, were when it was promised as "on the lines of 1843,"
or as "all that was asked for" in that year. But the contact of the unsatisfied
claim of past history with the demand of present duty is far too suggestive to
be safe; and from time to time we hear, even in Scotland, unmeaning and
gratuitous protests that the Disruption happened a long time ago - that it is
now happily forgotten - and that, perhaps, to tell the truth, it never deserved
to he remembered. As Free Churchmen born in the Scottish Highlands hear these
recurrent clamours, we seem to see rising before us once more those grave
suffering faces, most of them by this time gone down into a deeper silence; and
the utterance of their stillness is not unlike that of our new Norse poet, -
And the wrong was better than
right, and hate turns into love at the last
And we strove for nothing at
all, and the gods have fallen asleep,
For so good the world is growing that
the evil good shall reap,'
Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard, and
settle the helm on thy head,
For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the
wrongfully dead."
Bnt may the dead not have made a heroic mistake? Was there, after all,
any reason why they should sacrifice themselves and go out? The answer must be
given; but readers who find constitutional facts too dry may pass over the next
few pages.
III
In Scotland,
which, as a whole, has been Presbyterian since the Reformation, the Church
party has generally been the popular party. What is more strange to English
ears, the Evangelical party has, on the whole, been the Church party, all
revival here of religions feeling or individual conviction tending to take
shape in public and organised action. Ten years before 1843 the General
Assembly, or representative body of the ministers and laity of the Church, had
begun to show an "evangelical majority." It at once set about the work of
Church reform, and especially of Church expansion, in two directions. The
Church, by its own authority, welcomed to a seat in its courts the pastors of
the two hundred new congregations, which had been gathered together chiefly
through the devotion and eloquence of Dr. Chalmers. At the same time,
and in the same way, it admitted a considerable number of Original Secession
and other ministers who had returned to the reviving Establishment. Church
Extension and Church Union, indeed, were supposed to be the great aggressive
duties of the new time; and the fact that ordinary Church administration has
always been left in Scotland to the Church itself - the ordinary jurisdiction
of its courts has never been intorfered with either before or after 1843 -
naturally led to the belief that Church legislation and Church development
might also be free. This was found to be a mistake, amid the refusal of places
and votes to those who had been admitted by the Ecclesiastical body was in the
long run the immediate cause of the Protest and Disruption of 1843. But the
third and earliest occasion of the quarrel with the State was the old question
of patronage, which has broken out in so many lands, and which, under the name
of Investiture, caused, in the eleventh century, the greatest conflict of
Church and State which the world has seen.
In Scotland, however, the veto
upon arbitrary nomination by a patron was now declared to belong, not to pope,
churchman, or chapter, but to the whole "congregation of the faithful people."
And this third measure was represented by the Assembly which passed it in 1834,
as a defensive rather than aggressive regulation - founded, indeed, on what was
at all times a "fundamental law of the Church." Suddenly, in the midst of so
much expansive energy and enthusiasm, a crushing blow fell upon them. All three
reforms were declared by the Law Courts to be incompetent; but what was far
more alarming was the ground on which in each case the conclusion was based. It
was, that the Scottish Establishment is absolutely subject, even in matters
ecclesiastical, to the State and to its enactments, past and future.
The present constitutional law, that the Church of Scotland is in no
sense independent of the State, but is absolutely subject to Parliament and to
Statute, was then, for the first time, solemnly laid down. Take the three heads
of the Court alone. President Hope put it thus: "That our Saviour is the Head
of the Kirk of Scotland in any temporal, or legislative, or judicial sense, is
a position which I can signify by no other name than absurdity. The Parliament
is the temporal head of the Church, from whose acts, and from whose acts alone,
it exists as the National Church, and from which alone it derives all its
powers." Again, "Who gave the Church courts any jurisdiction? The law and that
alone gave it; and the law defines what it has so given." And as the Church was
not independent, they denied the possibility of any original compact, or of any
real conflict, between Church and State, as an "indecent supposition." Even the
courts of the State were entitled to fix for the Church its separate province
granted by the State. So President Boyle: "There exists, in reality, no such
thing as a conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical courts of a country,
in which a church is established and endowed by the State." And so Lord
Justice- Clerk Hope: "I cannot admit that an Establishment can ever possess an
independent jurisdiction." And of course, on these principles, the courts made
short work of the claim, that the Church was not bound to obey Acts of
Parliament which proposed to regulate spiritual or Church actings. Several of
the judges put it that the Church is "the creature of Statute;" all of them
that it is bound to obey Statutes which regulate, or, in its own view,
interfere with, its proper church action.
Take again only two of the
utterances, and both from the chair of the court. In the third Auchterarder
case, the Presbytery had pleaded that what they were called on to do was
strictly ecclesiastical, was against their conscience, and against the commands
of the Church. Lord Justice-Clerk Hope answered that although these functions
are "strictly ecclesiastical, and to be exercised by them in their
ecclesiastical capacity, yet the obligation to perform them is statutory -
Statute imposes the duty on the Church courts of the establishment," and the
courts must enforce the statute. And when in the still higher sphere of the
House of Lords it had been pleaded in addition, that there was a "fundamental
law" of the Church of Scotland which forbade such Church action, even in
compliance with statute, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, sitting as chief
of the Jurisprudence of Scotland, enounced the general rule which has ever
since been the law, as follows: "Whether that is, or ever was, a law of the
Church of Scotland, is perfectly immaterial, if the Statutes contain enactments
and confer rights inconsistent with any such principle, or with the execution
of any such law." (Chalmers held otherwise, based on
an Act of 1600- ish, which he could quote, by which the Church of Scotland was
specifically given certain defined rights. These points were never addressed by
the Courts. - Webmaster)
It followed that the Church and its
office-bearers were bound legally, and if they accepted the law would be bound
legally and morally, to obey any statute the State might pass in the future, no
matter how inconsistent it might be with the present or past principles of the
Church - to obey it not merely passively, but actively, and as ecclesiastical
functionaries. The obligation of individuals to obey actively received great
prominence at an early stage of the decisions; but before their close it was
plain that on the principles now laid down the Church itself was in a worse
case. For, in the event of its being thereafter dissatisfied with these or any
worse incidents of its connection with the State, it would have no power either
to abandon that connection, or to treat for new terms as a party able to accept
or to refuse.
This is the present law of establishment in Scotland,
unchanged since 1843; and the principles I have quoted were laid down in great
leading cases with cumulative emphasis and solemnity. But all of them were in
themselves general statements of law, addressed to the constitutional question
of Church independence, - a question which did not depend on the special
matters of non-intrusion or Church extension, though they depended upon it.
They were given as the ground, and they were the ground, of the innumerable
decisions and orders of the court enforced against the Church. And they were
intended to settle, and they did settle, what both parties knew and confessed
to be the great constitutional question then in dependence.
How opposed
they are to the ancient theory held by the Church as to its independence I need
not here say. But the law laid down long before May 1843 would have abundantly
justified it even then in separating from the State, protesting that its
constitutional liberties had been authoritatively subverted. Fortunately for
the future of the country, it did otherwise. It appealed to the State itself,
that is, to the Legislature and the Crown, against the decision of the judicial
organs of the State. And it was only upon their neglect - and indeed rejection
- of the Claim, Declaration, and Protest of 1842, that the Free Church went out
in 1843. But when it did so, it combined the two considerations, of the
authority of the Courts on the constitutional question, and the supereminent
power of the Legislature, with great felicity, in its Protest, which ran
"Considering that the Legislature, by their rejection, etc., . . . have
recognised and fixed the conditions of the Church Establishment, as
hence-forward to subsist in Scotland, to be such as these have been pronounced
and declared by the said Civil Courts, in their several recent decisions, in
regard to matters spiritual and ecclesiastical."
The one matter on
which the Civil and Church Courts, otherwise so keenly opposed, were agreed,
was this, that the claim of the Church was really one of independence -
independence not merely of the Civil Courts, but of the State and Parliament.
Therefore it became necessary for the Civil Courts, in enforcing their decrees
against it, in matters ecclesiastical, to affirm its dependence upon both in
the broad terms we have quoted. And therefore also the Church, in taking up its
position in the Act of Assembly 1838, affirming "the independent jurisdiction,"
put it upon the ground that the "power ecclesiastical flows immediately from
God" to the Church, and not through the mediation of the State or Parliament.
But what probability was there that the Scottish Church could persuade the
Legislature of Great Britain in 1842, to affirm such an abstract proposition as
this in regard to one of its Established Churches? None whatever. Its only
chance was that the Legislature might so far interfere as to prevent the
enforcement of the orders and interdicts already based by the Court upon these
general principles. In that case the Church could perhaps have honestly stayed
in, as standing npon its own declaration of independence; the denial of which
by the Courts they would then have regarded as brutum fulmen, and no longer
authoritative, because, at least virtually, disclaimed by the State. Even early
in 1842 both parties were thus already agreed that the practical question must
decide the constitutional question. Was the Church to obey, or was it not ?
The Church made the most of its last hope in that massive and
magnificent state-paper, the Claim, Declaration, and Protest of 1842; in which,
while founding its jurisdiction not on law but on Gospel, and protesting that
it was for maintaining the Headship of Christ and not of the State over the
Church that it was called to sufifer, it laid at the same time great stress on
the limited and civil jnrisdiction of the Court of Session, And while it
enumerated here, as afterwards in its separating Protest, the long roll of
cases in which the Court enforced the State's supremacy even in
spiritualibus, - by which, "no one function of the Church," "and no one
item mentioned by the laws as belonging peculiarly to its judgment," had been
spared, - it passed over in silence the loud denials of Church independence
upon which these encroachments were based. But what it did not omit was to
affirm its own independence, and solemnly to "declare" to both Houses of
Parliament and the Crown, that the Church could not in conscience obey or
submit as the Court demanded, and that "at the risk of losing the public
advantages of an Establishment" they "must, as by God's grace they will, refuse
to do so; for, highly as they estimate these, they cannot put them in
competition with the inalienable liberties of a Church of Christ."
The
claim was rejected by the other great parties concerned with an equally fatal
explicitness. Crown and Legislature declined to interfere; and that not merely
tacitly, which would have been abundantly enough. In the answer from the
advisers of the Crown,' and in the refusal of the House of Commons to
entertain even a motion for enquiry, it was no doubt not concealed that they
were zealous for the existence of Patronage, and knew the Church to be pledged
against it. But in both of them the refusal was put explicitly upon the
constitutional question stated by the Court, by the Assembly, and in the Claim
of Rights, as the only one of chief importance; and the legislative
interference which all parties looked forward to was delayed in order, as the
Prime Minister put it expressly in the House, that the pretensions of the
Church to independence and co-ordinate jurisdiction might be first surrendered
or crushed. I know not how a constitutional question such as the future
relation of Church and State could be more solemnly and conclusively settled,
than (first) by the authoritative and repeated utterances of the Supreme
Courts, appealed against (secondly) by the National Church as fatal to its very
existence, and (lastly) confirmed upon this appeal by the supreme power of the
State as before all things necessary and right.
And yet this was not
all - not nearly all. It might have been a mere abstract question that was thus
solemnly settled. But this abstract question was to be settled, as we have
seen, - by the practical method of enforced obedience, and the constitutional
disturbance attending it amounted to a long agony. Even before 1842 the Church
and its Courts had solemnly protested that it could not obey the State in
spiritualibus in the matters already enjoined it. And so during the
eighteen months that followed, while it made its vain appeal to the
Legislature, the mace of the law fell heavily and cruelly upon every part of
the ecclesiastical body. In Perthshire, in Ayrshire, in Aberdeenshire, in every
corner of the country, the principle of subjection to a civil statute in
ecclesiastical matters was enforced by fines and interdicts, until the Church
at last went out bruised in every quivering limb.
But these sufferings
- and even tbe fines and expenses which some of the houseless ministers had to
pay, after being turned out of their livings - were not felt so much by the
Church as the taunts which accompanied them. The Court of Session, in utterance
as well as action, refused to tolerate even that interim refusal to obey while
the Church was making its appeal to the Legislature. "I wish," said Lord
President Hope, speaking as the bead of the Court, "to speak with all respect
of the General Assembly, of which body I was for so long a period a member; but
if any other body of men, or if any individuals had done what they have done, I
should feel constrained to designate their conduct as profligate. The
Presbytery of Auchterarder came to this Court and pleaded here. Judgment went
against them. The General Assembly sanctioned and directed an appeal to the
House of Lords. . . . But the decision of the House of Lords affirmed the
decision of this Court, and these same Church Courts absolutely refuse to give
obedience to the judgment. To conduct like this I have already given its
appropriate designation. In point of candour and fairness it is no better than
the old shuffle, Odds I win, evens you lose.'" And this terrible
imputatien of dishonesty, flung from the judgment-seat against those who should
continue to eat the bread of the State, and yet refuse the legal conditions of
establishment, was repeated more decorously again and again as the case went
on. "If these gentlemen," said President Hope in the second Auchterarder Case,
"wish to maintain the situation of what they call a Christian Church, they
would be no better off than the Catholic Church, or the Episcopal Church, or
the Burghers or Anti- Burghers; but when they come to call themselves the
Established Church, the Church of Scotland, what makes the Church of Scotland
but the Law?"
And the House of Lords was equally intolerant of men claiming
to be free who remained in this law-made Church. "It is fit," said Lord
Brougham in the same case in the House of Lords, "that these men at length
learn the lesson of obedience to the tribunals which have been appointed over
them; a lesson which all others have long acquired, and which they, on learning
it, should also practise." And this obedience, Lord Campbell went on
immediately to explain, could not be evaded by those "who continue members of
the Establishment" abandoning tbe temporalities to the State or the patron.
Disestablishment was the only honest remedy. "While the appellants remain
members of the establishment, they are, in addition to their sacred character,
public functionaries appointed and paid by the State, and they must perform the
duties which the law of the land imposes on them. It is only a voluntary body,
such as the Relief or Burgher Church in Scotland, self-founded and
self-supported, that can say they will be entirely governed by their own
rules." Now all these, whether we call them kindly suggestions or cruel taunts
or statements of principle, came from the Supreme Courts as parts of their
solemn judgments, and were authoritative. We need not therefore recall the far
more violent attacks on the Church in the Legislature, the demand of the
Moderate League, that the Government should choose which of the two parties was
to remain in the Establishment, and the bitter inculpation of the Whig
government by the Conservatives generally, and Lords Aberdeen and Brougham in
particular, for its hesitation to enforce the new constitutional law.
For the great strength of these hostile utterances during that last
lingering year of the controversy, was that they were true - that the Church
knew them to be true, and had made them part of its principles. The right of
the State to fix its own conditions of establishment, whether those conditions
be right or wrong, had been admitted in the most absolute way in the Church's
Claim, Declaration, and Protest of 1842, and is made the foundation of the Free
Church Protest in 1843. We, looking back, may be disposed to think that the
denial of Church independence and the demand of subjection to Statute, affirmed
by the Courts in and before 1842, were final conditions of Establishment oven
then, and that they might have come out before. But it is not for us harshly to
judge Churchmen, who at the cost of uninterrupted taunts and insults, clung to
the State till every method of appeal was exhausted - till, in fact (as comes
out so curiously in the Protest of 1843), waiting in for a quarter of an hour
longer had become practically and morally impossible. For thus it was that the
constitutional question of subjection, now broadly separated from the previous
one of patronage, and already decided by the Supreme Courts, was with due
solemnity referred by the National Church to the Crown and Legislature, and was
deliberately decided by the Legislature and the Crown.
There are
countries in which even this accumulation of reasons would not amount to reason
f or revolution; for in these lands the original independence of the Christian
Church has faded out of the convictions of men. But in a country with such a
history as Scotland, the Disruption was a necessity of conscience. It was not
the less a memorable self-sacrifice. A quarter of an hour after it happened the
news was brought to Lord Jeffrey as he sat in his room, and the old judge,
springing from his seat, exclaimed, "I am proud of my country; there is not
another upon earth where such a deed could have been done!"
A quarter of a
century after it happened Mr. Gladstone, speaking as Prime Minister in his
place in Parliament, proclaimed that to the moral attitude of the new-born
Church "scarcely any word weaker or lower than that of majesty, is, according
to the spirit of historical criticism, justly applicable." But the more that
Scotland rocognises the deed of 1843 as flowing from her previous history and
ancient convictions, the less will she be disposed to dwell upon it in any mood
of transient exultation. Rather she will hear its voice at the close of the
half-century as the same great Saga speaks it, -
"Wilt thou do the deed and repent
it? Thou had'st better never been born.
Wilt thou do the deed and exalt it?
Then thy praise shall be outworn.
Thou shalt do the deed and abide it, and
sit on thy throne on high,
And look on to-day and to-morrow as those that
never die!"
(William Morris' Sigurd the
Volsung.)
IV
But, in truth, the deed of 18th May, 1843, is
one which will never need to be repeated. What must in some form be repeated,
and what may in many forms require to be imitated or improved upon - what,
therefore, now deserves study not from Churchmen or Scotsmen alone - is the
re-construction by which that deed was followed. For the reconstruction was the
act of the people. "Contrary to all anticipations, the people had forsaken the
establishment in a much higher ratio as to numbers than the ministers; and it
would have required more than seven hundred churches to accommodate the
congregations who were ready to attach themselves to the Free Church." Around
us in the Highlands this side of the thing came out very strongly. Where the
minister had resigned his living, the people followed him enthusiastically;
where he did not, they left him in a body.
But in the Highlands, as
much as in the Lowlands, an almost hopeless problem remained. In some places
the people were numerous, but they were poor. In others they were a little
better off, but they were few. But neither in the Highlands nor in the Lowlands
had they been trained to act for themselves. It was a feudal country, and the
natural leaders of the people - the chiefs in the north, like the lairds in the
south - had in this matter failed them. Local self-government was not yet
thought of. Voluntary parochial union had been evoked by Dr. Chalmers, and was
one of the things now being crushed. But mere parochial union could not solve
the problem how things were to be carried on upon a national scale, and for all
time to come. In previous national efforts Scotsmen had the civil law of the
nation behind thorn, obliging all citizens to religious union, and
appropriating to the uses of the majority, in the name of their common country,
the fruits and possessions of those who should refuse to obey. In the present
ease that law was no longer at their back; in so far as it survived, it worked
now to enfeeble arid impoverish them.
The experiment, whether a whole
people could be banded together to work out by means of individual
self-sacrifice one great common and permanent result, was to be tried under new
conditions. And some of the conditions were not only new, but hard.
For all
over Scotland the congregations called to this problem were left houseless in
one day. In one class of cases alone they earnestly attempted to save
themselves. The Church Extension edifices had been raised chiefly, in some
cases almost wholly, by the money of those who were now members of the Free
Church, and the ministers officiating in them had been denied recognition by
the Courts on the ground that they and their congregations were wholly a
creation of the Church. But even these churches were now taken by the Courts
from the Church which had erected them, and that on the paradoxical ground that
they had been erected for the Church of the State. In south and north alike the
congregations had thus to seek immediate shelter from the elements, as well as
sites for more permanent homes of worship.
But in south and north even
sites for building were very often denied them. And this brought up, for the
second time in this century, that inevitable Land Question which, in the
previons generation, had been stirred in our Highlands by the bitterly
remembered "clearances." The amazing power which our law entrusts to private
landholders, of excluding a whole community from purchasing a foot of ground in
their own parish, or even their own county, came ont now for the first time in
its intolerable extent. The clearances had sometimes swept out whole bodies or
communities. "I stood on the top of that hill when the evictions were going
on," an old Sutherlandshire woman said to me, speaking of her youthful days,
"and I saw sixty cottages burning in the strath at one time." And I well
remember the consternation in the Gaelic congregation to which in her age she
belonged, when, one morning after 1843, the announcement of an interdict drove
them out from an ancient churchyard - a churchyard, too, distant half a mile
from the parish church - amid whose moss-grown stones the people had met for
many and many a sacrament before that mournful day.
The preacher, who
was that Sabbath to address four or five thousand Gaelic hearers, was Dr. John
Macdonald of Ferintosh; and he pointed ont, whother by way of defence or of
aggravation, that the ground from which the people of the parish were so driven
out was common and parochial property. The more usual case was that which
happened, at almost the same time, to Dr. Thomas Guthrie of Edinburgh.
In this case the Duke - Janet Fraser's Duke - was proprietor of the parish, and
as landlord refused a site. The miserable people quietly withdrew to a waste
spot of barren moor, and met there in the open air. The Duke's factor and agent
instantly served an interdict on the trespassers, evicting them from even their
open-air meeting on the waste. Henceforth they had no place on which to worship
except the cross-roads on the public highway, and one Monday morning, after
preaching to them there, Dr. Guthrie sat down to tell his experiences. "Well
wrapped up, I drove out yesterday morning to Canobie, the hills white with
snow, the roads covered ankle deep in many places with slush, the wind high and
cold, thick rain lashing on, and the Esk by our side all the way, roaring in
the snowflood between bank and brae. We passed Johnnie Armstrong's Tower, yet
strong even in its ruins, and after a drive of four miles, a turn of the road
brought me in view of a scene which was overpowering, and would have brought
the salt tears into the eyes of any man of common humanity." Dr. Guthrie's
driver broke into sobs as he explained that the five hundred people waiting
under some leafless trees on the turnpike road were the congregation who bad
been refused first a site to build, and then a site to stand upon; and who now
waited on for hours under the driving rain till they had sung their last psalm
on that fierce February day. It was not there only. So late as 1847 there were
still thirty-one cases in Scotland in which sites were absolutely refused;
besides many others in which very inconvenient and humiliating places were
deliberately offered - offered, toe, to tenants who frequently had the threat
of eviction held over them if they ventured to build even upon these.
Now what was the problem which the laymen of this Scottish Church,
itself universally left houseless, had first of all to face? It was not their
own support, but that of their ministers and of many besides. The income of
every Free Church minister ceased at Whitsunday, 1843, and at the same date
ceased his tenancy of the "manse" or parsonage, with its "glebe" of four acres
of parochial ground. But along with them one hundred and thirty "probationers,"
or preachers waiting for appointments, had, on the same day, thrown up all
their prospects. The foreign missionaries sent out to India., with Dr. Duff at
their head, had likewise, without exception, sent in their adherence to the
disendowed community. An old statute obliged all teachers, within or without
the Universities, to be members of the Establishment, and the theological
professors who, like Dr. Chalmers, had moved with the Church, were by this
enactment obliged to resign their posts.
A more cruel case remained. Every
parish schoolmaster throughout Scotland who adhered to the Church going out was
ejected from his small house, and deprived of his income. Ministers,
missionaries, probationers, schoolmasters, and professors were in a day reduced
to beggary. A small army of educated men, with their families, were left
destitute and houseless, and thrown upon the congregations whose own
necessities we have seen. In the days to come many hard questions will have to
be dealt with in our own and other lands. The rights of labour, the claims of
the poor, the division of the soil, the education of the young, the home-rule
of our young empires, and the self-support of the Church - all these will bring
round many a crisis in many a family of Western man. But can any of them ever
present a harder problem than our fathers in Scotland had that day to solve?
Yet it was done - by Christian enthusiasm, no doubt.
But that
enthusiasm found or made fit channels for its flow. And among these we may
mention first what is familiar in Scotland, but most strikes the observer
outside. "The Kirk," Sir Roundell Palmer told the House of Commons in 1869,
"had her Kirk Sessions, her Presbyteries, her Synods, her General Assemblies,
each step of self-government rising above the other, so that she had been well
exercised in the whole art and power of self-government, self-legislation, and
self-expansion, no State power coming in to prevent her Syneds from meeting.
There the great men who afterwards became the leaders in the Free Church
movement had as much liberty of speech as we have in this place. There they
formed their parties; there they organised their system; there they collected
together such a power and bond of moral public opinion as enabled them to go
forth triumphantly, even when leaving all which in this world they possessed."
It is a lesson for us all. For in Scotland, as elsewhere, there are now men
who hate the whole system of Parliamentarism, in Church and State alike; men
who would rather shelter under any form of epicurean despotism than take their
share of the risks and responsibilities of self-government. But that system has
great tasks still to accomplish in the future, and there is no surer omen of
its victory in these than that under it, in 1843, the terrible crisis of
Disestablishment was carried through. It was carried through, indeed, with
scarcely any constitutional change. The Church remained the same, except as now
founded on its Protest for freedom. The Presbyteries which had sat the week
before as Courts of the Church of Scotland established, sat this week again -
with frightful gaps and rents no doubt - but as Courts of the same Church
unestablished. Legislation was held now, as before, to belong to its General
Assembly, with consent of the Presbyteries; for the refusal of the State to
permit this, the Church had met by the last remedy.
And none of these
Church Courts are mere "convocations of the clergy;" in all of them the
representative layman, elected by the whole members of the congregation,
decides upon the most sacred matters, with a vote equal to that of the
Churchman at his side. And as with "self government" and "self-legislation," so
with the third function assigned to our classic hierarchy by Lord Selborne - "
self-expansion." Its rights of creating new congregations, recognising new
ministers, and incorporating with itself other religious bodies - all repressed
with fines and prohibitions only a few months before - were now exercised
freely. It was all within the common law of Presbyterianism - a code of
authoritative principles, whose breadth, forgotten so long as our branch of the
system flowed in a merely national and statutory channel, was soon to be
restored to the view of all in the ecumenical assemblies or Councils of the
communion.
But the feature in the new organisation of most interest,
not so much in the past as for the future of our own and other lands, was what
Dr. Chalmers, with his usual passion for sonorous phraseology, called a
Sustentation Fund.' It was, in truth, a new and great experiment in altruism or
Christian solidarity. The local enthusiasm which had everywhere arisen of
course received fit embodiment. Long before the Disruption Dr. Chalmers had
given forth as his watchword, "Organise, organise, organise!" And while in
response congregational associations were everywhere instituted, and great
numbers of women collectors gathered weekly the contributions of the faithful,
the old order of deacons was revived for what was supposed to have been in
apostolic times their exclusive function - the receiving and administering of
the monies of the local church.
But through all these organisations
there passed the breath of one new life, when, in autumn 1842, it was proposed
that they should no longer retain their own contributions for their separate
benefit, hut should send the mass of them on to one central fund for the Church
as a whole, to be again divided equally from that centre among all the
ministers. The idea was almost new then, but in that time of common suffering
it commended itself irresistibly; and it has ever since been acted on to an
extraordinary extent. Some Free Church congregations send to the Sustentation
Fund annually from £1,000 to £3,000; others in poorer districts can
only send from £10 to £50. But the small and the large contribution
go alike into the common purse, and, as the time of annual division comes
round, the minister of the poorer congregation receives from it the same amount
as the minister of the greater - no less, and no more.
This national
voluntaryism, as Dr. Chalmers pointed out, really becomes an establishment of
the Church from its own resources, and while it "coincides in principle" with
that former method of support, it is free from some of its obvious
disadvantages. In particular, it leaves to the Church itself the more
complicated adjustment of the remaining question, how the salary from this
equal dividend may be locally added to. For, as Dr. Chalmers originally urged,
mere equality would not be justice where one minister with city burdens was
giving up a stipend of £1,000 a year, and another in the country lost
only £200. Besides, it is not even desirable that the minister of a
congregation, however he may be protected by the Central Fund from the
possibility of being starved out, should be removed from the stimulus which
most other workers have in the prospect of a larger income for successful work.
How all this was met by the institution of congregational supplements, - a
variable accretion of local voluntaryism, added on to the solid nucleus of the
Church's own establishment in the Sustentation Fund ; - and how the two
combined have, through many years of not yet ended experiment, become a
backbone to the Free Church (a back bone whose value seems to be owing nearly
equally to its firmness and its flexibility), we need not here inquire.'
What is important to notice is, that the idea which it embodies, which
men have new come to speak of as a kind of national altruism, pressed outwards
at the same time in many other directions, and beyond all merely patriotic
bounds. We have seen the houselessness of the congregations in every county
throughout the hard north. But a hundred thousand pounds were subscribed for
building even before the Disruption day dawned, and within the first year five
hundred churches were erected. Then came the effort necessary to provide manses
or pastorages for the ministers. And then it was recollected that the evicted
schoolmasters and their children were homeless too. Yet all this concerned no
city Scotsman who doubted whether he were his brother's keeper, and who
reflected that the raising of such edifices implied a certain obligation in all
time coming to those for whom they were built. Almost the only enterprise
indeed, in which the centres were not able to sacrifice themselves for those
outside, was the raising of the three colleges - two of them soon permanently
endowed by private munificence, and the third now, with all its imperfections,
the most fully equipped theological institute in theological Scotland.
But the impulse was one which, in its own nature, could not be
restricted to self-regarding or self-conserving effort. All the missionaries
had joined the Church in its conflict, and, as might be expected, all now
fulfilled their pledge. But the disestablished Church, instead of recalling
them, commenced to double, and more than double, the sum previously sent out to
maintain them. Missions to spread Christianity among the Jews followed, and
missions to fan the flame of evangelism in Catholic countries. New missions to
colonies, where Scotsmen so abound, could scarcely be called outside
enterprises; and these bring us back to the special funds instituted for the
Highlands and Islands, and to the new and great enterprise of a Home Mission,
partly consisting of Extension Charges throughout the country, and partly of
Territorial Charges, "excavated," to use Dr. Chalmers' word, in our great
towns.
For instead of gradually abandoning the stations whose support
was forced upon it in 1843 by the necessities of its local adherents, the
pastoral charges of the Free Church have by this time nearly doubled. In view
of the openings which the future is certain to bring to other communities, not
necessarily in similar forms, nor, indeed, in religious relations at all, the
study of some of these various channels and moulds as they were filled at once
by one glowing enthusiasm, will always be important. But for my purposes, and
with a view to the suggestion that in the future the Free Church too may
hopefully hear itself called to a renewal of self-sacrifice, and that not in
one form but in many, it is well to pause upon the results of the half-century.
Three years before its close the Christian givings of this fragment of
a poor country, stripped in one day to the very bone, had already amounted to
more than twenty millions. Yet during the first half of the half-century they
reached only about eight millions. From time to time the figures have varied,
as represented by the following, which gives the amount for the opening year of
each of its decades
1843 . . . . £363,871
1853 . . . .
£289,670
1863 . . . . £343,626
1873 . . . . £511,084
1883 . . . . £628,222
The leap to the higher platform, which is
here so visible at one point, happened, strange to say, just about the time
when the last of the old Disruption leaders was taken away, and the glory of
the separate communion they formed might seem to have departed. But, in truth,
it happened in accordance with all the deeper instincts of history - at the
very time when that communion announced a resolve to sacrifice its long-prized
separation, to refuse the bribe of re-establishment, and to claim henceforward
part in the whole burdens of our country's future. And the result was in no
respect strange. For the future of a country is to its Church "such a burden as
wings are to a bird." The Free Church and its Sustentation Fund embody ideas
important for Presbyterianism, and even for Congregationalism, in America and
our Colonies and many a distant hand. But their first duty is to their own
country. And it seems to me that the time has at last come when the finance and
other schemes of the Church of 1843 may frankly assume the aspect of
provisional and experimental scaffolding - scaffolding in whose construction
those now without should be consulted or considered as much as those within,
because the Building which already rises behind it is one in which all Scottish
Presbyterians have a right to dwell.
From
"Studies in Scottish History" by A.Taylor Innes, Hodder and Stoughton, London
1892.
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