Cornell University Library AC8.M65 U 1870 Leadincj articles on vari^^^^^^^^ 3 1924 029 633 090 olln Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029633090 LEADING ARTICLES ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE. V/H-M'Tatln^LtH'Eain HUGH MILLER ':L^^^C€>--_^>C^9'/'l.<^---^.-f-\^./.y' ;t>X«-^-1 xi",^ -Tya^e^ Jo 9^ Leading Articles ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. BY HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF *THE OLD KED SANDSTONE/ KTC ETC EDITED BY HIS SON-IN-LAW, THE REV. JOHN D;AVIDSON. EDINBURGH: WILLIAM P. NIMMO. PREFACE. The 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 rply. 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. THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION, LORD BROUGHAM, THE SCOTT MONUMENT, THE LATE MR. KEMP, ANNIE M'DONALD AND THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER, A HIGHLAND CLEARING THE POET MONTGOMERY, CRITICISM — INTERNAL EVIDENCE, THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER, .... THE LATE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART, THE CALOTYPE, THE tenant's true QUARREL, .... CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN, PERIODICALISM, ' ANNUS MIRABILIS,' EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION ON COLONIZATION, FINE-BODYISM, ORGANSHIP, PAGE I los III 119 146 161 190 199 206 215 223 232 240 VIU CONTENTS. BAILLIE'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS, i. FIRST PRINCIPLES, ..... AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH, DISRUPTION PRINCIPLES, . CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR, THE POETS OF THE CHURCH, THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, A VISION OF THE RAILROAD, THE TWO MR. CLARKS, PULPIT DUTIES NOT SECONDARY, DUGALD STEWART, .... OUR TOWN COUNCILS, SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS ; OR, HOW A COUNTRY MAY BE RUINED, PAGE 262 269 280 293 302 337 3S8 369 378 388 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, ill 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 i 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 liudge you with most chaotic admonition ; you will be flung half-frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or jostled into shivers by your iceberg INTROD UCTOR 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 natio'nal 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 ' 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 whorn 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 agaiust 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 ro^e 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 eff"ectually ^vrought 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, tha;t tftere 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.i 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 inter rest in the teachers of Scotland and of the Free Church really is. Certainly not, indifferent to their comfort as men, ' Some of the reasonings of both the Established and Free Church courts on this matter would be amusing were they not so sad. ' Feed niy lambs,' said our Saviour, after His resurrection, to Peter ; and again twice over, 'Feed my sheep.' Now, let us suppose some zealou? 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 sermons, 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 veiy least!' exclaims the zealous clergyman. ' Until Christianity was fairly established in the v^orld, 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 yoij 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 S.cott 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 woald 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. INTRODUCTORY 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 completes! 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 ' Cotnmons^ 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 10 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 Qther document on the subject ever written :— ' It were the best state of things, that we had a Parlia- ment sufficiently theological to discriminate between thq right and the wrong in religion, and to encourage or endow ^.ccordingly. 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= duciijg 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 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. 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 their 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 haH 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 QUESTION. 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 arid 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. ' r. 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 r^ponsibility, 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 oifer 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 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 bafHed; 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 u THE EB-UCATIONAL 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 riot 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, he returned, 1 6 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 & fresh 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 toio. 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.^ 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, cateris paribus, they would have preferred a serious shoemaker or tailor to a non-reli- gious maker of shoes or clothes ; 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 aflfections 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, B 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 com.parative 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 ED UCA TIONAL QUESTION. 1 9 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 EngUsh, and for tlie time at least had forgot its meaning. Ordinal Hon 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. ' 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, apd 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 caUing 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.^ The fine linen and the purplfe, 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 Comm.is- 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 ether principal domestics.' We again saw Chalmers, and, in a comer 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 fiilly 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 was 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 induct tio7i 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.i There is a sort of perfection in everything; and perfection once reached, deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the phrases infidel and infidelity^ike 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 frfequently 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 hadj 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 Catneronianism, 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, an<^ especially so to men who cannot fulfil their obligations or pa^ their debts without it. But Chalmers had looked beyon([ 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.^^ First, l^t 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 he 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- * See Introduction. THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 2$ 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 beencalled 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 ol 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 — i 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, Laueiston Lane, March 5, 1850. My dear Me., Miller, — ^When such conflicting state- ments were advanced as to the bearmg 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 i)y 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, iS^o. 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 21st 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 tte 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 ;"■ 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 1 What ought the General Assembly to do at the present Crisis ? (1833-) THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 29 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 letires 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 thS 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 30 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 sXibject, 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 x)f 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,' Ae may, notwithstanding, demand that his fees should be received as the representative of Ais 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 disregardedj 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 ON 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 observeH, 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 qualificaj 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 itenj 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 lainely to the item ' life; ' 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. 33 succeeded in rescuing several curious passages in his his- tory, and in finding that, though not one among them doubted the sincerity of his rehgion, 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 inter- meddleth 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 ofBce-bearer who, in his official character, or in any cha- racter or capacity whatever, has a right authoritatively to 36 THOUGHTS Oisr challenge our rejection, on our own parental resporisibilitf, of the religious teaching of even a converted schoolmaster, on purely reasonable grounds such as thesp ? Or where is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has an authoritative right to challenge our yet weightier Free Chiirch 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 ; an,d 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 we 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 EDUCATIONAL QUESTION. 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 fra.nchise to all those householders of Scotland who inhabif 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 hved and laboured among them ; and very rarely have we failed to find the thatched domicile, of 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 botia 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 iniportant 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 their 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 quali^ed 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 bpposition 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 reUcs 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 coifers 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.' * All is lost, Mr. Combe justly infers, on the non-religious side of the . ' ' The sixth resolution [of the Educational Manifesto], in which the opinion of Dr. Chahners 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 resoliitionists 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 Pariiament ; 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, dino- tnination 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 seculaV 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.' — Later 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 z. 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 Solway, 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 contendings 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 IVee 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 npr 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 j 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. 50 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 office-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, fhe 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.'^ Leaving, however, to profounder intellects than our own the adjustinent 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- • 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 : — ' \st. 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 grant J to local eflforts more flexible, and admitting of far more liberal aid in desti- tute localities, as compared with those which are in a better condition. ' 2id, 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. • 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 tea'chers. 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 Presb);terians ; 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 Puseyi^m 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 aQquiring 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, firom 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 j^ and whatever judg- ' Such are the proportions laid down in the official document for Scotland of the Committee of Her lyiajesty's Privy Council on Educa- tion. We understand, however, that the Government inspectors possess certain modifying powers, through which the Government S6 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 ' doom 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 asted 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 S8 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 £,\^ and £,2Q 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 £,\$ salaries at the reduced rate of ;^io, and its £,^0 salaries at the rate of ^13, 13s. 4d. ; and those embarrassments, of which the reduction was a consequence, have borne with distressful effect on the Committee's employh. 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 — ' Owe 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 reahze 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 soj 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-' 6o 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 hterary quahfi- 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 ;^io,ooo to ;^i2,ooo yearly for educational purposes, she would require to realize some .;^5ooo or ;^6ooo more in order to qualify her to meet her existing liabilities, estimated at the very moderate rates laid down in the programme. The ;^sooo 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 £,^0Q0 or J[fiooo short of supplying the two- thirds, and some ;£6ooo or ;^7ooo 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 ED UCA TIONAL Q UESTION. 6 1 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 if 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 Govermnent Inquiry — * O for an hour of Knox I* I That higher order of farm-servants which are known techni" cally in Mid-Lothian as ' sowefs 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 ' 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 Igwer 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 jQi^ and ;£^2o scale of salaries: these are now paid with ;£^io and;^i3, 13s. 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 .;^io or ;^i3 she will receive ulti- mately only the worth of ;^io or £1^. 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 j but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick fast 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 £t.Z 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 ;^io 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 j 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 ;^io and £1^ 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 slie 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 bum 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 j 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 gre^t 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.^ 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 fighting 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 homceopathically 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 ■ 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. 68 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, the^- 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 tlie 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 //%«> 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.'* There is at least one point on which we think all Free • ' 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 70 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 distridts, 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, \st, 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 ; 2d, into the condition, character, and teaching of all the share indeed. And can it possibly be held that the sham& and guilt of such an arrangement can be obviated by the votes of Synods or Assemblies ? or that, wdth 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, vire 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 denominational. We know a little regarding this matter ; for in our joumeyings 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 controvei-sy. '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^o. 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 walks 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 J but there are perhaps many half, and third, and quarter parishes in which no. such materials exist. Further, the housel]olders 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 tlie 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 ex officio; the Lord iProvost 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 tipphng, 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 Constantino; 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 detertoine 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 dishonesty 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 Cromart}' during the incumbency of the lamented Mr. Stewart. The people of the town and parish, possessing the educational franchise, would meet ; their committee would deUberate ; there would be a teacher chosen, — in all probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher .of ihe town ; and every man would feel that he had exercised in the election his own judgment on his own proper re- sponsibihty. 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 manceuvre — 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 theire 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 o^vn level, would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impos- sibility.^ 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- ductifig' 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.^ And then, after teaching our * 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 herirom doing her duty. Let the Free Church but take her stand on this argument, and straightway her rectors, her masters in academies, and ber 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 'coUedge, 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 100 THOUGHTS OK made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial those who came from landward,' and were '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 enoiiglj 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 ■;^io to ;£'i3, 13s. 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 ' parchinent, 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 DiscipHne. 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 earher, 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. loi 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.^ But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is palpably not the condition of the meriibeirship 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 httle as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along conteniplated, 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 misstanary lahonrs 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, ' charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool,' 102 THOUGHTS ON which she has deliberately laid upon them taean 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 boldest 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 j 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 Taies 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 teUs that, when grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like 104 THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION: Robert the Bruce, and to ' fight in the battle of Scotland.' 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 ii.) 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 raerchants,-i-' 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. 'Jenkins' had as yet manifested their contempt for the aristocracy ; nor had the ' 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 accompHshed 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 Inverness 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 HazUtt 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 petulani 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 feeUngs, the nobler aims, neutralizes even his intellect. He publishes 1 10 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 demar>ds 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. July 8, 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 SCOTT MONUMENT. whether art or nuture 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 poeni. 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. 113 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 jhe 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 114 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 hterature 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 mognshine, ' 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 httle 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 j 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 Waverley — seems to have been less intensely imbued with the love of country. It is quite possible for a foreigner to luxuriate over l\is 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 indiiference which the first slight misunderstanding converts into hostility. It is something towards a more general diffusion of goodwill to be enabled ii6 THE SCOTT 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 defined 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. 117 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 ii8 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, a,nd Uy 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 j 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 Momingside, 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 123 THE LATE MR. KEMF. 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 blinking 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 eon- tended, was wonderfiiUy 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 133 124 ANNIE WDONALD 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 j 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 huniblest 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. Her 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 FIFESHIRE 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 iiito 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 Bums, 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 WDONALD AND The story of Annie M'Donald is such an one as a poet of Wordsworth's cast would delight to tell. She was bom 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 j 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 Hipti.' 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 j 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, 128 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 th? 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 soUtude 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 FIFESffIRE 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 elidure, 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 tlie 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 Jher 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 toj 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 j 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 FIFESHJRB 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 M'DONALD 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 cotnposition ; 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.' ' 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'JDONALD 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 i 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 mom till close of day — The standish, and the pen With which she noted, as they rose. Her thoughts upon the joys, the woes. The iinal 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 faithfiil 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 ; And though they wept, theu- tears expressed Joy for her time-worn frame at rest — Her soul with mercy crowned. August 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.* 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 Clencalvie, by John Robertson, Esq. (article in the Glasgow National, August 1844). — Ed. 13G 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 ilocks 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 v'th 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 inj 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 wi'eath 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 com. 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. Rpbertson relates both the peculiar circumstances in which it has been issued, and the feehngs 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 £,SSj 13s- 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 untitled 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 simphcity, 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 140 A HIGHLTlND 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 j 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 ; 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 onej 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 pfece, 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 ; 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 wooH" "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 clear him' ixom 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 j 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 CLEANING. 143 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 iii the thatch of the feal cabin — the hearths of their loves and their hves 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 Ac 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 ^ 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 20th October 1841. 146 THE POET MONTGOMER Y. 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 ' clear bald polish of the honoured head j' 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 MONTGOMER Y. 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 httle 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 MONTGOMERY. 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 ; many of them — embodying feelings which all the truly devout experience, but which only a poet could express — ISO THE POET MONTGOMER Y. have been made vehicles for addressing to the Creator the emotions of many a grateful heart j 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. ■2,%th 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 £nglish Dictionary, not only because no other man in the world at the time could have written it, but also because he afBxed 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 Cumming 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 Qompositions he affixes his name, — a thing very few men would have the courage to do ; and thus are we assured 16X 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 Fraser'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 * 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. Peircevals 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. Cumming 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 '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 ' 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 leam 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. IVEr. Gumming, though emphatically powerful in declamation, has never practised argument, — a mean and undignified art, which he leaves to men such as Mr. Gunningham, 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 d, 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 accompHshed,' and their Ghurch '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 Ghurch as ' radical subverters of Church and State, who claim the Covenanters as precedents iS6 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. Cumming wished to exemjDlify, 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 willprove 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. Cumming 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 sive 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 arid 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 11., that Presbyterianism is no fit religion iS8 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 httle 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 flo.cks 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.' i6o 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 ' 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 lO, 1841. THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER. TO THE EDITOR OF THE WITNESS. Sir, — Upon hearing read aloud your remarks* 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 S&s First Impressions of England andiis People, ch. 11.— Ed. L 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 28th ult. 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 appUes to them as it apphed, 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 *s 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 MATTER. that their belief in their sacredness is not a real belief, but a piece of mere pretence. In the north transept oif 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 compUance 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 beliet 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 j 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 i66 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 hohness 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 eome, 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 ol fine Christian churches which occurs in history j-^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 the increasing multitudes of wor^ shippers, splendid edifices were erectedin 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 Christiarf 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,' — 1 68 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 regar*! which we involun- tarily pay to the meanest relique of a roan great and illus- trious, is intended as an inoUement to laboiu", and an encouragement to' expect the-^ame rerueJwn if it be sought by the same virtues.' We fi^d 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 Tias 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 no THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. i?i 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 ^ 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 originaUty 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 abihty 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 sS-ge of the olden time, THE LATE REV. ALEX. STEWART. 173 to whom the mysterious inscription was biit 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 origiriating the most vivid illustrations. In some instances a single stroke pro- duced a figure that swept across the subject-tnatter' 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 qut, 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 ilui'red 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 mjtn 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 fuU- 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 eompel 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 humari 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 178 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 ! N