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Cornell University Library 
 BR100 .B62 
 
 Christianity and the Ideal of humanit 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 234 048 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis 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/cu31924029234048 
 
CHKISTIANITY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY 
 
Printed by R. and R. Clark 
 
 FOR 
 
 DAVID DOUGLAS 
 
 LONDON . . SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. , LIM. 
 CAMBRIDGE . MACMILLAN AND BOWES. 
 GLASGOW . . JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS. 
 
CHEISTIANITY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY 
 
 IN OLD TIMES AND NEW 
 
 JOHN STUAET BLACKIE 
 
 ERITUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 EDINBUEGH 
 
 DAVID DOUGLAS, 10 CASTLE STREET 
 
 1893 
 
 [All rights reserved.] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 David, King of Israel .... 1 
 
 On Cheistian Unity . . .37 
 
 Wisdom . . . . . . .75 
 
 Women ....... 97 
 
 St. Paul and the Epistle to the Romans 133 
 The Scottish Covenanters . . .157 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is 
 cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a 
 man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely 
 person, and the Lord is with him. 
 
 1 Samuel, xvi. 18. 
 
s 
 
 s:::^=^5tS:^ 
 
 S 
 
 M 
 
 ^^ 
 
 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 Of all the fair chances that can befall a young 
 man at his first start in the race of life, the 
 greatest unquestionably is to be brought into 
 contact, and, if possible, to enter into familiar 
 relations with a truly great man. For this is 
 to know what manhood means, and a manly 
 life, not by grave precept, or wise proverb, or 
 ideal picture ; but to see the ideal in complete 
 equipment and compact reality before you, as 
 undeniably and as eflSciently as the sun that 
 sheds light from the sky, or the mountain 
 that showers waters into the glen. As when 
 the poor primeval dweller in a cave of the 
 wilderness is for the first time brought into 
 the view of a pillared Greek temple or a 
 massive Florentine palace, he leaps into a 
 new conception of what a human dwelling 
 means, and, stirred with an imitative ambi- 
 tion, proceeds forthwith to shape for himself 
 a miniature of the temple or the palace in the 
 shape of a dainty little cottage, so the young 
 man who first comes into living contact with 
 B 
 
2 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 a Caesar or an Alexander, a Shakespeare or a 
 Bacon, passes at one step, as it were, from a 
 dream of manhood to the fact of a great per- 
 sonal possibility, or at least of a noble human 
 relationship. He may never hope to become 
 a Caesar in war, or a Shakespeare in literature, 
 but certainly he has become feelingly alive to 
 the kinship which he may claim, and the 
 aspirations which he may indulge. What is 
 a great man ? A man is great amongst men, 
 just as Mont Blanc is great among Swiss, or 
 Ben Nevis among Scottish mountains ; a man 
 rising above the normal level of his kind, with 
 as marked an elevation as these heights above 
 the common reach of heaven-kissing hills, and at 
 the same time possessing all the qualities and 
 virtues that belong to terrestrial elevations 
 generally. This is a qualification that must 
 be distinctly marked. Mere height will 
 not make a Ben Nevis or a Mont Blanc, and 
 so a mere superiority in any of the special 
 qualities or positions that belong to a man 
 will not make a truly great man. The great 
 man must be a complete man, a man all 
 round, but at the same time a man in his 
 peculiar sphere of the social harmony, present- 
 ing to the general eye a superiority as marked 
 as any high Highland Ben does above its lowly 
 congeners. A great genius is not necessarily a 
 great man : he may be a Beethoven in the 
 lordship of sweet sounds, a Eaphael in the 
 cunning handling of brush and pencil, a 
 Napoleon in the well-ordered sweep of ambi- 
 tious war : but not therefore a great man. 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 3 
 
 Jove is not Jove merely as a strong launcher 
 of the thunderbolt, but as the assertor of 
 justice, the avenger of perjury, and the pro- 
 tector of innocence. Nay, so far is mere 
 special greatness of any description from 
 giving a man claim to the praise of a truly 
 great man, that, as we daily see, there is a 
 strong tendency in the cultivation of any 
 prominent specialty to defraud the other 
 capacities that belong to a well - accoutred 
 human creature, and to disturb the balance of 
 his manhood. Thus it happens that the 
 strong point in a man's professional exercise 
 becomes a weakness in his human character ; 
 his favourite virtue, like a pampered child, 
 becomes his prominent weakness ; the ex- 
 aggerated presentment of one feature destroys 
 the fair proportions, in which the beauty of an 
 sesthetical whole consists ; and in this way 
 your mere lawyer, for instance, becomes an 
 expert intellectual fencer, your mere poet a 
 blower of splendid soap-bubbles or a colourist 
 of clouds, and your mere parson a bundle of 
 sacerdotal conceit. Let us say, therefore, that a 
 great man is a man who, while in the exercise 
 of his special capacity soaring as high above 
 common men as an eagle above a barn-door fowl, 
 is deficient in no function that makes a man 
 a man. He is in all things essentially and 
 broadly human, and achieves in the exercise 
 of his one special talent the highest excellence, 
 as Shakespeare did in the drama, only by the 
 social atmosphere which he breathes, and the 
 human sympathies which he cultivates. 
 
4 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 Next to the actual contact and familiar 
 companionsliip of such thoroughly -equipped 
 specimens of our common humanity, the most 
 important thing that a young man can do to 
 furnish himself in like manner for his allotted 
 part in the drama of human life, is to make 
 himself minutely and, so to speak, personally 
 acquainted with some of the great men who 
 have headed the movements of the age to which 
 they belonged and stamped their names on its 
 history ; names in fact without which all 
 history would be a body without a soul, or a 
 drama without the central figure— the play of 
 Hamlet without the part of Hamlet, if such a 
 thing might be. Such names are Luther and 
 Knox in the history of the Church, and in the 
 jDolitical world Nelson and Bismarck. In the 
 Greek and Roman world, of course, there 
 are not a few names, such as Socrates and 
 Plato, Cicero and Caesar, that dominate the 
 epochs to which they belong, as the monu- 
 mental pillar does the battle-field, or the 
 cathedral the Episcopal province. The He- 
 brews in like manner, by the superior force 
 of their moral inspiration, have gained for 
 themselves the foremost place in the heroic 
 heraldry of those to whom the world owes its 
 most notable amount of propulsive advance ; 
 and among these no doubt the Apostle Paul, 
 at once by the expansiveness, the energy, and 
 the wisdom of his evangelical aggression, will 
 be universally accepted as the head. Happih- 
 also we know more of him, both from the 
 general history of the first apostolical preaching 
 
DAVID, KIi\G OF L^iLiEL 5 
 
 and from his epistles to the particular churches, 
 than we know of any other of that adventurous 
 brotherhood ; but there is one man, the most 
 prominent among the heroes of the Old 
 Testament, whom we know more minutely 
 and more familiarly than even St. Paul, and 
 that is King David, whom I have therefore 
 chosen to place before my fellow Scots as the 
 pattern of a truly great man ; and not only as 
 an example but as a warning ; for as nothing 
 human is perfect, so a great man, like the son 
 of Jesse, may at an unguarded moment, and 
 under peculiar temptations, commit a great 
 sin : a sin so great as might justly have 
 caused his name to be erased from the roll of 
 the truly great of all ages, had he not himself 
 been forward to atone for this ignoble sin by 
 the only act which can work such atonement, 
 a noble repentance. 
 
 A single verse from the First Book of 
 Samuel contains a pretty complete indication 
 of the rare union of special gifts and wise 
 conduct with great results which justify us in 
 ranking this son of the Bethlehemite Jew 
 as one of the greatest men that the history 
 of the world can boast. 
 
 " Then answered one of the servants, and said, 
 Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Beth- 
 lehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty 
 valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in 
 matters, and a comely person, and the Lord is 
 with him." — 1 Sam. xvi. 18. 
 
 The first point in this delineation is, that, 
 
6 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 like our James I. of Scotland, he was a musi- 
 cian, cunning in handling the harp, a stringed 
 instrument, like the harp of our medieval 
 ballad-singers, used by the Hebrews from the 
 earliest times, and specially as the accom- 
 paniment of joyful song, whether at the social 
 board or in the sacred service of the temple.^ 
 And that he was no ordinary proficient in this 
 noble art is evident from the occasions and 
 the circumstances that caused the historian to 
 make special mention of it. Saul, the first 
 king of the united clans of the Hebrews, 
 though a man of gigantic stature and a very 
 proper person to deal an effective blow in 
 the first rank of battle against the Philistines, 
 was a man of uncertain temper, and as ready 
 to fall into fits of sullen despondency as on 
 other occasions he was susceptible of being 
 lifted into the atmosphere of sacred passion at 
 the touch of music from a band of sacred 
 choristers : so much so indeed that it became 
 a proverbial expression among the Jews of his 
 time, " Is Saul also among the prophets 1 " ^ 
 On one of these occasions of mental depression 
 when an evil spirit troubled him, the moody 
 monarch at the suggestion of his attendants 
 sent for the son of Jesse the Bethlehemite to 
 drive away the bad spirit by the power of the 
 good one voicing forth grace from the sacred 
 harp. That the man thus publicly called to 
 exercise the exorcising power of the musical 
 art, must not only have been a good player on 
 
 ^ Gen. iv. 21, xxxi. 27, and Ps. xxxiii. 2. 
 - 1 Sam. xix. 24. 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 7 
 
 the national instrument, but the man the 
 most distinguished master of the art at that 
 time within the call of the throne, is quite 
 evident, just as our gracious Sovereign at the 
 present hour, when resident in her Highland 
 sojourn on the banks of the Dee, and wishing 
 to recreate her social hours with strains of 
 national melody, calls up only those sweet 
 singers of Scottish and Gaelic song whom the 
 public voice has stamped as singers of first- 
 rate excellence. At the call of the king, of 
 course, the son of the Bethlehemite peasant 
 appeared, and with the cunning touch of a prac- 
 tised hand drove the evil spirit from the heart 
 of the Lord's anointed. From this moment 
 young David stood on a new platform in the 
 eye of all Israel ; and as court musician and 
 armour-bearer to the monarch he was in a 
 position to rise to the highest social dignity, 
 if circumstances were favourable to a rising 
 man with wisdom to use them. And this 
 wisdom he certainly hadj for he is expressly 
 said to have been " prudent in matters," which 
 means that he combined in his person the 
 generally incompatible qualities that make a 
 great musical genius, a lyrical poet, and a 
 politician. For that he was not merely an 
 accomplished harper, but a sacred poet, the 
 maker of the songs which he sung, is as much 
 a part of the catholic tradition of modern 
 times as the faith which connects the name 
 of Homer with the wrath of Achilles and the 
 wanderings of Ulysses. In reference to the 
 phrase " prudent in matters," which no doubt 
 
8 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 refers to public life just as irpayfjLaTa does in 
 classical Greek, it is worth while to notice 
 that the Septuagint uses two distinct quali- 
 fying words where we have only one; for 
 " prudent " it uses crweros, which means 
 sensible, wise in matters of public action : 
 but not content with this it adds immediately 
 o-o<^os Ady(j), wise in discourse — significantly 
 enough ; for, if a man is a fool, he is hasty, as 
 the wise man says, to proclaim himself by his 
 words ; and though, of course, sound ideas lie 
 at the root of all public action, to a politician 
 above all men it is vitally necessary that he 
 shall know both what to say and what not to 
 say, and always to tune his phrase to the 
 appetite of the moment and the temper of his 
 audience. In the next place, we are told here 
 that David was not merely a musician, a poet, 
 and a statesman, but a mighty valiant man, 
 and a man of war, a great soldier as we say — a 
 profession which, even now in these compara- 
 tively peaceful days, presents an ample field 
 for the display of the virtues of honesty and 
 honour, frankness, courage, and self-devotion, 
 which make up the larger half of what the 
 Greeks called dvSpda, or manliness ; but a 
 profession in those days of contested claims, 
 as in the medieval manhood of our Highland 
 clanship, absolutely necessary to make a man 
 a good citizen, a noble gentleman, and an 
 influential member of society. AVhat more 1 
 The historian adds that he was a man, not 
 indeed like Saul of great stature, but " of a 
 comely person," and more specially in a 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 9 
 
 previous verse of the chapter, that he \yas 
 "ruddy, and withal of a beautiful counte- 
 nance, and goodly to look on." This ruddy, 
 in the Greek iryppiKo^ and the Hebrew 
 DhN, does not mean, I am afraid, as I should 
 have wished, our own Scotch "yellow-haired 
 laddie," but only of a ruddy countenance, 
 cheeks glowing with the fulness of healthy 
 life, as the Hebrew word occurs also in the 
 Song of Solomon, v. 1 0, where a separate verse 
 is devoted to the dark locks, and the general 
 brightness of the countenance is expressed by 
 XevKos Kal TTvppoi, a pleasant interflow of white 
 and red. Probably also the beautiful counte- 
 nance refers specially to the bright and lively 
 eyes — KaWos 6(j>6a\fiiav, as the Septuagint 
 has it, just as yXavKMiri,';, and other com- 
 pounds of (Lxj/, carry from their root oTrrojuat 
 a more special reference to the brightness of 
 the eye. Finally, we are told in the con- 
 cluding touch of this interesting delineation, 
 that the Lord was with him ; which is simply 
 a pious Hebrew way of saying that, though 
 he had often to stand on slippery places, and 
 to face no common difficulties, yet in the end 
 he came firm-footed and victorious out of them ; 
 as indeed in the general case where an im- 
 posing person, original genius, great strength 
 of arm, and great wisdom in affairs are com- 
 bined, popular favour is sure to greet the 
 start, and substantial success to crown the 
 close of a distinguished career. 
 
 To understand in the present case the differ- 
 ent stages of this career, we must bear in mind 
 
10 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 that when David was born, and in the days of 
 his early boyhood, there was no king in Israel, 
 but, to use the phrase more than once used in 
 the book of Judges, " every man did that which 
 was right in his own eyes." What does this 
 mean ? Not of course that there was no govern- 
 ment, but only that there was no formally 
 constituted and firmly fixed head of the body 
 social to which all the members of the body 
 could look invariably for direction and leader- 
 ship. In all matters which concerned the 
 general good, this condition of the people was 
 pretty much what we may imagine the state 
 of the Highland clans to have been before they 
 were formed into a nation by Kenneth M'Alpine 
 in the middle of the ninth century ; that is to 
 say, a distinctly marked number of tribes or 
 tribal associations acting in common circum- 
 stances with perfect independence, but ready 
 to combine together under some leading chief 
 as often as a common interest or an urgent 
 danger should make common action necessary. 
 In the first period of settlement of the seed of 
 Abraham in the promised land, the military 
 character of the conquest, of course, kept the 
 general-in-chief permanently at the head of the 
 invading people, and made him practically a 
 king without the title ; this was the position of 
 Joshua, parallel to that of Napoleon in his early 
 Italian campaign before he was publicly acknow- 
 ledged as the head of the great French empire. 
 But Joshua, though he lived to the extraordinary 
 age of one hundred and ten years, never aspired 
 to the seat of supreme authority so splendidly 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL U 
 
 assumed by the ambitious Corsican ; and 
 after Ms death we are simply told that the 
 Lord raised up Judges, who delivered the 
 Israelites out of the hand of the hostile 
 peoples whom the sweep of Joshua's sword 
 had not been able to reach. The position and 
 functions of these Judges are not easy in the 
 exact terms of our modern political language 
 to define ; but from the position which the 
 invading tribes occupied in the country, and 
 from the details of the narrative, we see clearly 
 the general character of the political situation. 
 So long as no external danger pressed, each of 
 the twelve tribes could manage matters for 
 itself, under the guidance of its local elders, 
 or wise old men of experience such as formed 
 the Spartan yepova-ia, the Roman Senatus, and 
 the wpe&^vrepoi of the Early Christian Church, 
 and were naturally called upon to direc^and 
 guide the younger and less experienced members 
 of the community. But when Philistines from 
 the south coast, or Moabites from the land 
 side, assumed an aggressive attitude, then the 
 eye of the affiliated tribes was necessarily 
 fixed on some prominent person, whose energy 
 and wisdom could inspire the associated 
 tribes with that unity which in all cases of 
 common action is essential to success. This 
 was the Judge; and in the turbulent times 
 that belonged to an infant settlement in a new 
 country, the position of such a leader of the 
 people was practically that of a king ; so much 
 so indeed that after the death of one of the 
 most distinguished of their number, Gideon, 
 
12 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 we find that a bold stroke and a bloody stroke 
 was made by one of his sons to turn the per- 
 sonal presidency of the Judge into a hereditary 
 kingship. But this stroke did not succeed ; 
 and the blushless monarch, who had for a year 
 and a day raised himself to the highest dignity 
 in Israel by wholesale fratricide, had his own 
 skull smashed ingloriously by a millstone from 
 the hand of a woman.^ After his death matters 
 went on in the old lines of a popular judgeship, 
 according to the need, without any continuous 
 fixity of tenure till the time of Samuel, who, 
 in the double character of prophet or inter- 
 preter of the divine will and supreme magis- 
 trate in civil matters, was judge of Israel 
 during the youthhood of David. The tend- 
 ency to a hereditary exercise of power is so 
 great, that as in the case of Gideon so we read 
 of Samuel, that he made his sons judges over 
 Israel. But these sons proved themselves un- 
 worthy of the trust reposed in them by a 
 fond father ; they were altogether unfit for the 
 moral attitude that belonged to a good ruler ; 
 they ran after filthy lucre, and took bribes, and 
 perverted judgment. So the people who suf- 
 fered under this abuse of power sought for a 
 cure of the social cancer by dispensing with 
 the government of judges altogether, and adopt- 
 ing, after the fashion of the neighbouring 
 nations, monarchy as the regular and fixed 
 form of government. This rebound from the 
 comparative freedom of the mixed democracy 
 and aristocracy of the judges to the absolute 
 ^ Judges ix. 2. 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 13 
 
 power implied in the person of an Oriental 
 monarch, in those times, could not please 
 Samuel, accustomed as he was to act on the 
 principle of suasion rather than of absolute 
 command ; so he sought counsel of the Lord, 
 and in obedience to the divine command, laid 
 before the people the price which they must 
 pay for the honour and the show of having a 
 king over them ; and the price was this, that 
 they should cease to be free men, and become 
 not only in matters of military discipline, but 
 in the whole range of social and domestic life, 
 the slaves of an absolute master. The fashion 
 of this slavery he sets before them in striking 
 detail ; but, like multitudes of men, when pos- 
 sessed by a favourite idea, they refused to 
 hear any contradiction even from a man of 
 such weight and authority as Samuel, crying 
 out, " Nay ; but we idll have a king over us ; 
 that we also may be like all the nations ; and 
 that our king may judge us, and go out before 
 us, and fight our battles." And so the kingship 
 was decided ; and Saul, the son of Kish, of 
 the tribe of Benjamin, a mighty man of power, 
 Saul, " a choice young man, and a goodly," as he 
 is described,^ and a man of an imposing per- 
 sonality, "from his shoulders and upwards, 
 higher than any of the people," was formally 
 anointed and installed as the absolute sovereign 
 of the people of Israel. 
 
 We are now in a position clearly to under- 
 stand how the then state of government in 
 Israel, and the atmosphere of public life, might 
 
 > 1 Sam. ix. 2. 
 
14 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 affect the prospects and mould the fates of an 
 active and enterprising young Bethlehemite 
 such as the son of Jesse. In the first place it is 
 plain that the mere creation of an absolute 
 master could not extinguish the feeling of 
 personal independence and free scope for talent 
 which under the Judges had brought so many 
 distinguished men to the front ; and again the 
 new king, having no hereditary band of at- 
 tendants to give consistency and weight to his 
 great authority, would naturally be anxious to 
 surround himself with whatever of eminent 
 talent and prominent manhood might assert 
 itself among his subjects. On the other 
 hand there was a danger that a new monarch, 
 having no family prestige, and no feelings of 
 inherited loyalty to rest upon, might be more 
 inclined than the successor of a long line of 
 kings to look with suspicion on any rising 
 name that, in the arena of public life, might 
 compete with him successfully for the popular 
 favour, which an untried sovereign is natur- 
 ally so anxious to gain. Add to this that, 
 as a member of the little tribe of Benjamin, 
 Saul might not only be tempted to bestow 
 undue favoty; on the members of his own 
 clan, but might readily be tempted to look 
 with jealousy on any signal demonstration of 
 popular regard in favour of a member of a 
 superior tribe. We shall now trace the steps 
 in the progress which raised a humble Beth- 
 lehemite shepherd to the fatherhood of a king- 
 dom, which, though small in geographical 
 extent, performed through a line of centuries 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 15 
 
 a part no less conspicuous in the eye of a 
 catholic-minded history, than the imperial sway 
 of Rome, or the intellectual supremacy of 
 Greece. 
 
 Saul had scarcely been seated on the throne 
 when he found himself entangled in a life-long 
 series of wars with his troublesome Phenician 
 neighbours the Philistines, who prevailed so 
 strongly as even to have got hold of the ark 
 of God, and planted it in the high places of 
 their idolatry. This insult to the national 
 religion roused the spirit of a people whose 
 patriotism, like that of our Scottish Covenanters 
 in the days of the Stuarts, was rooted in their 
 piety ; and they gathered all their strength 
 together under the headship of Saul to do 
 battle against the idolaters. In those days 
 when every man was a soldier, and no man 
 . was accounted a citizen who did not stand up 
 personally with a sword in his hand to defend 
 the rights of the great social family to which he 
 belonged, the father of David, too old him- 
 seK to take part in the war, sent his eldest 
 sons to fight the national enemy, while the 
 youngest, David, a mere stripling, remained at 
 home to watch his father's sheep. He was 
 sent, however, to the camp one day, with corn 
 and loaves and cheeses for the sustainment of 
 his warrior brothers. When he arrived in the 
 camp he was met with the news that the 
 hostile armies were standing in battle array 
 ready to close, and that as a prelude to the 
 conflict, a gigantic Philistine from Gath, 
 proud of his stature and confident of victory. 
 
16 -DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 had advanced to the front and challenged the 
 Israelites to produce a combatant who would 
 dare to dispute the ground with him. This 
 challenge from such a lofty adversary com- 
 pletely cowed the whole Israelitish host ; they 
 retreated and fled ; but not willing absolutely 
 to give up all hope, the splendid reward of the 
 special favour of the king and a marriage 
 with the king's daughter was held forth to the 
 man who should come forward as the cham- 
 pion of God, and lay the champion of the 
 idolaters low. This appeal stirred the sleeping 
 soldiership in the breast of the young Beth- 
 lehemite shepherd : he advanced into the midst, 
 and in the face of the scoffs and gibes of his 
 jealous elder brother, was led before Saul, and 
 formally named, as the national champion on 
 this momentous occasion. David had had no 
 experience of regular military life ; and even 
 the armour, offensive and defensive, which was 
 offered him for the perilous encounter with 
 the gigantic foe, he flung aside, feeling himself 
 more free for the display of his force when 
 handling those weapons with which he had 
 been accustomed to assail the bears and the 
 lions that made a rush upon his father's flock. 
 He moreover trusted in the Lord and in the 
 justice of a cause which planted the one true 
 God and the one moral law against the ma- 
 terialism and sensualism of the idol-worship 
 of the Gentiles. Thus doubly armed, exter- 
 nally with the practised aim of an expert 
 slinger, and internally with the faith in a 
 divine truth, the shepherd boy marched against 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 17 
 
 the huge armed warrior, and smote him with 
 a stone in the forehead, that he died. Forth- 
 with the Philistines fled, and David, with the 
 exulting bands of his countrymen, entered 
 Jerusalem victorious, with the head of Goliath 
 in his hand. 
 
 In this way, at the very first start into 
 public life, the fortune of David, as the phrase 
 goes, was made ; and so in one sense, undoubt- 
 edly it was : this one cast of the stone from the 
 shepherd's sling had marked him out before the 
 eye of the whole people as the man more worthy 
 to be their king in the next generation than 
 Saul was in the present ; and so, as he marched 
 through the admiring crowds, the women came 
 forth to meet him with music and dance, singing 
 loudly, " Saul hath slain his thousands, and 
 David his ten thousands." True and very true ; 
 truly said, but not wisely ; not as David him- 
 self would have said, or loved to hear ; for he 
 was a man who in slippery circumstances never 
 forgot to conduct himself with wisdom and 
 modesty. Nothing more dangerous than to 
 parade the exploits of an humble citizen 
 before the eyes of a jealous sovereign. The 
 jubilant song of the daughters of Israel in 
 praise of the subject woke the jealousy of the 
 over-shadowed monarch : he must reign alone 
 in the eyes and in the hearts of his people ; 
 and from that moment the head of the state 
 determined that he would ease himself of the 
 presence of his popular rival, in any way that 
 might conveniently present itself. No doubt 
 he complied with the publicly -declared wish, 
 
18 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 and gave to the peasant's son one of Ms royal 
 daughters in marriage ; he also placed him 
 in a situation of high command among his 
 captains ; but, though he thus preserved the 
 show of gratitude which he owed to the 
 saviour of the country and the establisher of 
 his own throne, he nevertheless meant, by 
 putting him forward in posts of danger, to 
 get rid of him in a decent way ; and, if this 
 should fail, he trusted to his son Jonathan, and 
 the obedient servants who always wait on the 
 wish of an absolute master, to kill him in some 
 fashion that might excite as little public in- 
 dignation as possible. But in Jonathan he 
 was mistaken ; Jonathan loved David, as a 
 true man loves a true ; nay more, his soul 
 was knit to David with a love passing the 
 love of women ; and the faith of the noble son 
 prevailed for a season to stay the sword of 
 jealousy in the hand of the ignoble sire. But 
 the serpent was scotched only, not killed. 
 Shortly after, on occasion of another triumph 
 over the Philistines, the popularity of the son 
 of Jesse roused into action the old jealousy of 
 the son of Kish ; and moved by an evil spirit, 
 when David was playing the harp near him by 
 the wall of the palace, he flung his javelin 
 against him. The javelin missed ; but the act 
 was a plain declaration of war against the 
 intended victim. David saw that his life 
 could no longer be safe in the precincts of the 
 palace. He accordingly consulted with his 
 wife Michal, the daughter of the despot, and 
 she with woman's wisdom let him down 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 19 
 
 secretly from a window ; and he sought safety 
 amid the mountains of Naioth in Eamah, 
 where the prophet Samuel, as in the time of 
 the Judges, still held his seat as the recognised 
 interpreter of the divine will, and the dis- 
 penser of justice between man and man. In 
 this house of refuge for the moment he was 
 safe ; but safe he could not long remain, for in 
 the eye of the law, and the imperious will of 
 the lawgiver, he was an outlaw, and as such 
 forced to live, like our Wallace under the 
 tyrannous sway of the English Edward, wher- 
 ever he might find shelter. For some years he 
 wandered about from place to place, but not 
 alone. There gathered round him a mixed 
 multitude of people, bound together by a com- 
 mon discontent with the arbitrary government 
 of Saul and a common confidence in the 
 leadership of Saul's most formidable antagonist. 
 The stages of his uncertain movements, in this 
 struggle for existence against the persistent 
 hatred of his great opponent, are given with 
 interesting detail by the sacred historian, but 
 need not be particularly set forth here. Only 
 one thing deserves to be stated with due 
 prominence as illustrating the noble-minded- 
 ness, and what in our style we should call the 
 chivalrous character of the future king of 
 Israel; more than once his indefatigable pursuer, 
 in his eager haste to fall upon his victim, from 
 his less intimate knowledge of the mountainous 
 district which he travelled, found himself in a 
 situation which placed him at the mercy of the 
 man whose life with such merciless persistency 
 
20 DAVID, KINO OF ISRAEL 
 
 he had set himself to take. On one occasion 
 Saul had retired into a cave, in a remote corner 
 of which David and his men were already 
 lodged unseen; and the blood-thirsty mon- 
 arch stood exposed in such an attitude that his 
 adversary with a single nimble bound might 
 have stabbed him in the back, and rid him- 
 self of his murderous pursuit for ever. But 
 David was not the man to obtain a mortal 
 advantage over an enemy in this furtive style. 
 Even had his persecutor been a private indi- 
 vidual, with no show of public authority, the 
 brave young shepherd who had marched up to 
 the Giant of Gath openly, and triumphed over 
 him with a sling and a stone, would have 
 scorned to have taken his life secretly with a 
 sudden spring like a cat on a mouse ; but the 
 possible victim here was the Lord's anointed, 
 and a religious sanction acted along with 
 personal honour to save the life of his intended 
 murderer. On another occasion the watchful- 
 ness of David came suddenly down upon his 
 kingly adversary, when weary with long pur- 
 suit through the wilderness of Zip)h he had 
 lain down to rest, and was discovered sleeping 
 in the trench, and his spear stuck in the ground 
 at his bolster.^ But here again the religious 
 reverence for a royal anointed head interposed 
 to prevent the poor persecuted peasant's son 
 from following the advice of a friend who 
 stood at his right hand, and urged him to 
 seize the opportunity so providentially offered, 
 and smite his cruel persecutor with his own 
 ^ 1 Sam. xxvi. 7. 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 21 
 
 spear. " Destroy him not : " said David, " for 
 who can stretch forth his hand against the 
 Lord's anointed, and be guiltless 1 " The 
 noble generosity of character to which he owed 
 his life was intimated to Saul in the morning ; 
 who immediately exclaimed, as indeed he could 
 scarcely do otherwise, " Blessed be thou, my son 
 David : thou shalt do great things, and also 
 thou shalt prevail." 
 
 We stand now in direct vision of a point in 
 the dramatic story of Saul and David, at which 
 we might have expected that permanent peace- 
 ful relations should have been established 
 between the family of Jesse and the family 
 of Eash. But Saul was not a man to be 
 inspired permanently by any motives that 
 could have smothered the natural jealousy 
 of his temper ; he could sing like a pious 
 chorister one day, and the next be as bitter 
 as a hissing snake, and as rabid as a barking 
 cur. David had sense enough to know this ; 
 and behind all specious displays of courtly 
 favour from the man saw the lurking jealousy 
 of the monarch. He could not be safe in 
 Israel ; there was nothing for him but volun- 
 tary banishment ; and as he had previously 
 had enough of the rough life of a homeless 
 outlaw, he made up his mind to flee perma- 
 nently into the land of the Philistines. This 
 step was one equally bold and dangerous ; and 
 one that plainly required the cunning of the fox 
 to be joined with the bravery of the lion to 
 issue in any favourable result ; and David who 
 had behaved so wisely in the court of Saul, 
 
22 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 shows here that he was not destitute of the 
 policy which was necessary for dealing safely 
 with the lord of the Philistines. He made a 
 paction with Achish the king that he should 
 give him some remote place in the country to 
 dwell in ; and he would behave in such fashion 
 as to be serviceable to the king in the safe- 
 keeping of his frontiers. This offer the king 
 accepted ; and David showed his gratitude by 
 a victorious invasion of the Amalekites and 
 other tribes on his southern border who were 
 the common enemies both of the Philistines 
 and of the Jews ; and in doing this he managed 
 adroitly to leave an impression on the mind 
 of Achish that he had actually fought against 
 his own countrymen, and might henceforth 
 be trusted as identified with the Philistines. 
 The good understanding thus made apparent 
 between their own monarch and the brave 
 Hebrew fugitive naturally excited murmurs 
 among the Philistine lords ; and to appease 
 their jealousy Achish dismissed David, free 
 to seek his own fortune where he could find 
 it anywhere about the southern border. This 
 matter settled, the Philistines proceeded north- 
 ward to Jezreel ; and they were not long there 
 before they showed what stuff they were made 
 of by inflicting on the men of Israel a total 
 defeat, a defeat which the haughty son of 
 Kish felt so severely that he threw himself on 
 his sword and died on the spot ; and not only 
 he but his armour-bearer and his three sons 
 fell on the battlefield of Mount Gilboa under 
 the feet of the Philistines ; and no one who 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 23 
 
 knew his temper and had watched his career 
 could be surprised at the result. The man 
 who disowned his best friend, and drove 
 from his presence the staunchest supporter of 
 his crown, deserved to die at the feet of a 
 victorious enemy. 
 
 The way now seemed clear for the son of 
 Jesse to mount to the throne of Israel. He 
 had long lived in the eye of the people as the 
 most kingly man of his time ; and even Saul, 
 however unwillingly, had felt that God was 
 with him, and that one day at no distant date 
 the son of Jesse would sit on the throne of 
 the son of Kish. But a throne is too tempting 
 a prize to fall into the hands of the worthiest 
 without a contest. Besides his three sons 
 slain at Gilboa, there was a fourth son of Saul, 
 called Ish-bosheth, whose cause was espoused 
 by Abner, the captain of the host, and so what 
 amounted to a civil war broke out and con- 
 tinued for several years ; the people of Hebron 
 and the important tribe of Judah declaring 
 for David and formally anointing him as their 
 king, while under the direction of Abner the 
 tribe of Benjamin, and the whole of Israel north 
 of Judah, and the rocky region of Gilead 
 beyond the Jordan, stood up stoutly for Ish- 
 bosheth. Abner was a strong man, and a 
 great name over all Israel ; but in spite of his 
 name and his strength the cause of David 
 became stronger and stronger every day, and 
 the cause of Saul weaker and weaker. Add 
 to this that Ish-bosheth, not sufficiently sensible 
 of his dependent position, fell arquarrelling 
 
24 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 with the captain of the host for a certain 
 amatory preference which he laid claim to for 
 , one of his father's concubines. This interfer- 
 ence Abner resented ; and, over and above his 
 personal feeling in the matter of the concubine, 
 was perhaps only too glad to seize on this 
 offence as a pretext for deserting the falling 
 cause of the grandson of Kish altogether. He 
 accordingly did so, and would have remained 
 as faithful a servant to the house of David as 
 he had been to the house of Saul, had not the 
 violence of Joab and others of his indiscrimin- 
 ating partisans made away with Abner and 
 Ish-bosheth in an unknightly fashion that 
 displeased the generous spirit of the son of 
 Jesse. There was now nothing between David 
 and the kingship of the united kingdoms of 
 Judah and Israel but Mephibosheth, a limping 
 boy, who had lost the use of his legs by 
 a fall, and whom in those times no man 
 dreamed of creating king ; so the tribes of 
 Israel came to Hebron, and in solemn conven- 
 tion along with Judah anointed David king of 
 the undivided Hebrew people. This notable 
 instalment took place in the middle of the 
 thirtieth year of the peasant's hero son. Seven 
 years had elapsed between this crowning glory 
 and his introductory sway over the tribe of 
 Judah ; and he reigned forty years altogether, 
 and died at the normal age of seventy. He 
 stands therefore (taking Solomon at 1015 B.C.) 
 marking a chronological era in the moral history 
 of the human race, in round numbers, about 
 the year 1050 before the Christian era, 300 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 25 
 
 years before the foundation of Rome, and 
 about 500 years before the establishment of 
 Greek supremacy in the Mediterranean by the 
 battle of Marathon. 
 
 Once firmly established on the throne of 
 Israel, David performed all the functions that 
 belong to an absolute sovereign with the most 
 effective energy and the most beneficial results. 
 The first thing that he did was to drive the 
 Jebusites out of their remaining stronghold 
 in Mount Zion ; and then all the bordering 
 peoples, from the Philistines on the coast to 
 the Moabites on the south of the Dead Sea, 
 . who were most given to disturb the peace of 
 the people of God, were reduced to an atti- 
 tude of peaceful submission ; and not only so, 
 but foreign princes, such as Hiram of Tyre, 
 came forward to show their goodwill to the 
 well-omened young king, and sent cedars, and 
 carpenters, and masons, as the record has it, 
 to build David an house. But David showed 
 himself king in a much more important sphere 
 than the rough field of war, or the deft 
 management of political relations ; he was 
 within certain bounds what, in English-phrase, 
 we would call the head of the Church ; so he 
 set himself to bring the ark of the Lord from 
 its long wanderings among the Philistine 
 spoilers back to its native seat, and settled it 
 finally in the house of David. This grand act 
 of national piety was celebrated in Jerusalem, 
 with the display of music and dance and 
 sacred mirth so congenial to the Hebrew mind, 
 and so unintelligible to the grave and severe 
 
26 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 religiosity of our modern Calvinistic churches. 
 No doubt there were some persons in the 
 Hebrew court in those times, among whom 
 Michal, Saul's daughter, is specially named, 
 who thought it undignified in a crowned 
 monarch to clothe himself in a lin6n ephod, 
 and dance in public procession amid a crowd 
 of priests and ' priestlings and maid -servants 
 of the common people ; but David was a man 
 and a poet, that is, a sympathiser with men, 
 and not a mere crowned monarch, and as such 
 knew that, on whatever courtiers and danglers 
 about the throne may plume themselves, the 
 true dignity as well as the safety of an abso- 
 lute ruler lies in his readiness to share the 
 innocent joys and pleasures of the meanest 
 of his people — a people whom he desires to 
 look on habitually, not with the stern eye of a 
 master but with the kindly regard of a father. 
 One point more remained to satisfy the ambi- 
 tion of the monarch who, with all his military 
 success, was at bottom more a saint than a 
 soldier ; and as such it struck him as an 
 unworthy state of things that while he, the 
 lord of earthly affairs, dwelt in a house of 
 cedar, a splendid palace, the Lord of that 
 lord, and of all the lordships of the world, 
 should dwell within curtains, like a wandering 
 Arab, in a tent. David would build a temple 
 to the Lord in such lofty style that no build- 
 ing in the bounds of Israel, from Dan to 
 Beersheba, could compete with it in grandeur. 
 This thought was altogether worthy of the 
 man who carried the Lord's name before him 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 27 
 
 in all battles, and fought not for his own 
 glory, but for the glory of the great Spirit, to 
 ■whom all creatures are only servants for the 
 execution of His omnipotent and all-wise will. 
 But however noble the conception, the time 
 was not yet come for its realisation on a 
 worthy scale ; and so Nathan the prophet, 
 and spiritual adviser of the king, interposed 
 his veto, reserving the temple for the next 
 generation, as at once a grateful monument 
 to the piety of the father and the most 
 significant expression of the sovereignty of 
 the son. 
 
 Thus far we have followed the fate of this 
 truly great man through many stages, from 
 the lowly holder of a shepherd's staff to the 
 mighty wielder of a sovereign's sceptre. The 
 gray morning had been followed by a bright 
 noon ; but the sun of his career was not 
 destined to set cloudless. Not only clouds, 
 but storms and tempests and swelling deluges 
 broke with a wild force over his closing years, 
 and changed his brilliant triumph into a doleful 
 tragedy. The two last scenes of his life were 
 a gross personal sin, and a grievous family 
 misfortune. It is impossible to cover with any 
 species of apologetic phrase the true character 
 of the sin of David, in the matter of Bathsheba, 
 as recorded by the impartial historian. That 
 he fixed his lustful eye on the wife of one of 
 his most gallant captains and sent him into the 
 front of battle in a post of danger, that he 
 might get rid of him in such fashion as to" 
 avoid the public scandal of living in open 
 
28 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 adultery with another man's wife is undeniable. 
 That he made use of his despotic power to get 
 his rival out of the way, was an act in nothing 
 less dishonourable than the conduct of Saul 
 towards himself had once and again been. It 
 has been said that the sins of the saints are 
 the consolation of the sinners ; and, if any 
 modern sinner should feel himself moved to 
 seek consolation from the case of a distinguished 
 ancient saint, he could not find a more significant 
 example than in the affair of the son of Jesse 
 with the wife of Uriah the Hittite. It would 
 be wiser, however, in the modern sinner to 
 keep a watchful guard on his own besetting 
 sin, rather than to console himself with a 
 complaisant eye of self-gratulation that he 
 is free from the besetting sin of some sorely- 
 tempted saint in times far away. Every man 
 has his besetting sin ; and temperament and 
 circumstance will not unfrequently conspire to 
 lead a great man into the commission of the 
 sin to which he is specially prone. And, 
 though neither temperament nor circumstance 
 should induce the impartial spectator to throw 
 a veil over the blackness of the offence, still, 
 even in the worst cases, a human brother will 
 be willing to take into kindly consideration 
 any plea that may be advanced in extenua- 
 tion of the offence of a human brother. In 
 extenuation of the sin of David in this affair 
 two things may be said ; first, that as a lyrical 
 poet like Eobert Burns the psalmist was 
 specially liable to be smitten by the charm of 
 female beauty, and again, it must ever be borne 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 29 
 
 in mind that as an absolute monarch, in a country 
 where many wives and not a few concubines 
 were looked upon as the natural appendage of 
 a crown, a king might imagine that, by taking 
 into his connubial circle any fair lady, he was 
 raising her social position and throwing open 
 a field for her charms which in a lower station 
 must have been denied her. Add to this, 
 that, so far as appears from the story in this 
 case, the lady did not make any resistance to 
 the advances of the monarch. The monarch 
 was a handsome man, the most popular king 
 and the most notable hero of the hour ; possibly 
 also her husband was a soldier, fonder of the 
 broad field of bloody warfare with Moabites, 
 Ammonites, and other habitual enemies of the 
 state, than of the gentle domesticities of the 
 drawing-room and the parlour. Considera- 
 tions of this kind might readily have passed 
 through the mind of the royal ofi'ender when 
 he advanced to the perpetration of his great 
 offence ; but no extenuations of this descrip- 
 tion to a mind naturally noble could act per- 
 manently as an opiate to the conscience that 
 watched over an act so essentially ignoble. 
 Nathan the prophet, the king's confidential 
 adviser, with the courage that belongs to the 
 prophet's ofSce, came and openly rebuked the 
 royal offender. At his rebuke the conscience 
 of the sinner started from its temporary torpor. 
 The pious parable of the prophet, with its 
 significant close, "Thou art the man/" struck 
 David as with Jove's thunderbolt. He con- 
 fessed his sin and repented in dust and 
 
30 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 ashes ; and the God who knows the weak- 
 ness of human flesh graciously received the 
 penitent. 
 
 The other tragic scene that clouded the 
 latter days of the royal hero, was as has been 
 said, his misfortune and not his fault. It is 
 one of the evils of polygamy, that it creates a 
 numerous family ' less under the influence of 
 the kindly feeling of family devotion than 
 when the fatherhood is less dissipated, and the 
 motherhood more confined. Besides, as history' 
 testifies, an elective monarchy, which in the 
 case of David the Hebrew kingship certainly 
 had been, leaves the probabilities of a family 
 succession always more or less incalculable, 
 and the temptation to ambitious scheming and 
 selfish conspiracy becomes greater. Among the 
 sons of David, born while he was still in 
 Hebron, was Absalom, whose mother was 
 Maacah, the daughter of the king of Geshur. 
 Between this man and his elder brother Amnon 
 a quarrel had arisen which ripened to a 
 murderous conclusion. Absalom, in the fashion 
 of that wild age, murdered his brother Amnon 
 as the penalty for the force offered to his 
 sister, and this fratricide in its turn produced 
 a coolness which lasted for three years between 
 the offending son and the offended father. 
 The sin of Amnon no doubt was great ; but the 
 brother had no right to take the father's place 
 in exacting so bloody a penalty from a brother. 
 After three years, however, by the intervention 
 of Joab, the king's chief captain, a reconcilia- 
 tion was effected. Absalom came to Jerusalem 
 
VAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 31 
 
 and bowed himself on his face to the ground 
 before the king, and the king kissed Absalom. 
 This looked well ; but Absalom was essentially 
 a bad boy, and on such boys paternal grace 
 is always bestowed in vain. Absalom had 
 murdered his brother, and now, as the natural 
 sequence to such notable want of family 
 affection, he conspired to dethrone his father. 
 His father was now getting old, and not able 
 probably to be so much in the public eye as a 
 king required to be in those times ; so Absalom 
 was glad to be allowed to exercise judicial 
 functions in his father's place. In this capacity 
 he contrived by being more kindly than just 
 sometimes to make himself extremely popular 
 with the people. To this end his extremely 
 handsome personal appearance not a little 
 contributed ; for, as Goethe observes, the 
 world is governed by wisdom, authority, and 
 show, and where wisdom is wanting show often 
 comes forward, and by occupying the public 
 eye prevents the lack of the more dominant 
 quality from being felt for a season. "Wisdom 
 was not in the compass of a man of Absalom's 
 hasty and violent temper ; but with his comely 
 person and gracious manners, he had contrived 
 so to gain the hearts of the people that a 
 strong party of them were willing, from 
 various motives, to follow him in an act of 
 open rebellion against his father. This civil 
 war made a great show at starting, but it 
 could not end well. David, indeed, was forced 
 at the outbreak of such an unnatural revolt 
 to vacate the capital, and pass over the brook 
 
32 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 Kidron, and go the way to the wilderness ; 
 but the plain justice of his case and the strong 
 arm of Joab in the end prevailed ; and in 
 a great hostile encounter Absalom was left 
 hanging on the branches of an old oak tree by 
 those very beautiful locks which he had used 
 as a snare to charm the gaze of the unstable 
 populace. And here the hand of Joab found 
 him and pierced him through and through 
 with three darts : and thus ended, as it 
 well deserved, this unfilial revolt. But the 
 sorrow of the father could not end with the 
 penalty paid by the son ; and the cry of 
 David was heard above the shouts of vic- 
 tory, moaning pitifully — "0 my son Ab- 
 salom ! my son, my son Absalom ! would God 
 I had died for thee, Absalom, my son, my 
 son ! " 
 
 The remaining scenes in the varied life drama 
 of the son of Jesse,though free from the double 
 blot of personal guilt and family ingratitude 
 just described, were not altogether such as to 
 recall the early brightness and the noonday 
 glory of his career. No doubt, with the help 
 of his brave men of war, David though now 
 waxing old and faint maintained his ground 
 firmly, and conquered the sons of the giant of 
 Gath in four successive battles against the 
 hereditary enemy of his people. But there 
 was a famine in the land for three years, and 
 after that a pestilence, which cast a dark 
 shade over the latest years of his reign. It is 
 heart-cheering, however, to see the head of the 
 hoary old poet-warrior rising triumphantly 
 
DAVID, KIXG OF ISRAEL 33 
 
 above these multiplied sorrows, and voicing 
 forth with his usual reverential hilarity and 
 grateful piety the soul-stirring strains that in 
 his early youth had charmed the evil spirit out 
 of Saul. "The Lord is my rock, and my 
 fortress, and my deliverer : The God of my 
 rock ; in Him will I trust : he is my shield, and 
 the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and 
 my refuge, my Saviour : He saveth me from 
 violence."! And in the last hours of his 
 career, we find him on his death-bed displaying 
 that " prudence in matters " which, even in his 
 early youth, he had known to combine with 
 the fervid emotion of the poet and the stout 
 energy of the soldier. Foreseeing the bitter 
 strife and competition that would naturally 
 arise amongst his sons for the possession of a 
 throne in which there was no fixed order of 
 succession, on the motion of Nathan the 
 prophet, he called the beautiful Bathsheba to 
 his presence, and before his spiritual adviser 
 solemnly named her son Solomon as the 
 successor to the throne. Adonijah, the brother 
 of Absalom, had already with the aid of Joab 
 planted himself before the people for the 
 honour of the imminent vacancy ; * but the 
 wisdom of Nathan, by which David had always 
 been guided, prevailed; and so with the 
 sanction of the dying monarch, young Solomon 
 was set on King David's mule and rode through 
 the streets of the city in solemn procession, 
 amid piping of pipes and great joy of the 
 people ; and at the close of the procession, in a 
 .12 Sam. xxii. 2. 
 D 
 
34 DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 
 
 low part of the city called Gihon, Zadok the 
 priest came forward and solemnly anointed 
 him as King of Israel : and all the people 
 shouted forth GoD Save the King ! There 
 was nothing now to be done but for the dying 
 father to call the hopeful son to his bed and 
 commend him to the keeping of the God of 
 Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in whose service 
 there is safety and in keeping of whose 
 commandments there is great reward. Then 
 David bowed his head and died, and was 
 buried and slept with his fathers in the city of 
 David. But his memory did not sleep with 
 him ; and though the earthly kingdom which 
 his prowess had established was shortly after- . 
 wards rent in twain, and finally obliged to 
 yield submissively to the sway of Babylonian, 
 Persian, Grecian, and Roman dynasties in the 
 East, the spiritual empire which his inspired 
 genius created has lived through the ages in the 
 brotherhood of the Christian Churches, of which 
 it may justly be regarded as the prophecy. The 
 psalms of David, though not all certified 'as 
 from his Muse, all certainly instinct with his 
 spirit, are sung now, nearly three thousand 
 years after they were composed, over the wide 
 earth, from the Ganges to the Mississippi and 
 from the North Pole to the African cape, 
 wherever the form of a civilised humanity 
 joyfully presents itself ; are sung, we say, and 
 will be sung, so long as the multifarious sons 
 of men shall know to own piously a common 
 heavenly Father, and to look loyally in the 
 face of Jesus as the Sun of the moral world, 
 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL 35 
 
 without whose light and warmth, with all its 
 breadth of outward pomp and grandeur, it 
 would resolve into a chaos of confusion, a 
 battlefield of blood, and a hell of inextinguish- 
 able hatred. 
 
II 
 
 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 M.ifxiplfTTai o XpicTTOsy 
 
 Is Christ divided? 
 
 1 CoK. i. 13. 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 There is nothing more certain, whether in 
 the physical or the moral world, than that 
 unity is the indispensable condition of all 
 common action ; it is absolutely impossible 
 that any orderly action or definite result should 
 proceed from any number of units, acted upon 
 by any number of forces, without a central 
 dominating ever-present power operating in 
 such a fashion as to make all the units and all 
 the forces co-operate for the production of a cal- 
 culated end. No battle with permanent results 
 was ever gained without a concerted plan of 
 campaign, proceeding from an authoritative 
 centre of command. The most brilliant single 
 victory, as of the Covenanters at Drumclog, 
 may remain fruitless, if, as at Bothwell Bridge 
 a few months afterwards, it is followed by 
 divided counsels in the leaders of the party ; 
 and even the death of a single leader of a 
 party, as of Claverhouse at Killiecrankie, may 
 turn a brilliant victory into a dismal retreat. 
 Specially, in the start of a popular insurrection, 
 or the preaching of a new gospel, unity of 
 
40, ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 counsel and consistency of i^rocedure are 
 necessary ; for in all such movements the con- 
 servative power which resists all innovation 
 stands by a firm bond of unity which no 
 succession of dissipated and uncalculated ■ 
 forces can hope to disturb. How then could 
 that strange new moral force, the Christian 
 gospel, hope to conquer the whole world of 
 Eoman policy, Greek wisdom, and Jewish 
 sacerdotalism, without such a compact unity 
 of attack as might compensate for its lack of 
 that multitudinous' array of banded forces 
 which was the strength of its opponents ? Of 
 course, only by the intensity of its own force 
 and the persistent strength with which it was 
 wielded, — a force which, however strong, 
 required to be handled with the certainty of 
 Jupiter's thunderbolt before it could hope to 
 make any impression on the stiff old strong- 
 holds of heathenism. And accordingly we 
 find the Apostle Paul, not only in the Epistle 
 to the Corinthians from which our motto is 
 taken, but in the Galatians and in his Epistle 
 to Timothy, for the ordering of church matters 
 in Ephesus, admonishing the Asiatic churches 
 in the strongest terms to beware of the 
 damnable divisions called heresies,^ which had 
 
 ^ It should be particularly noted that the word aipctris 
 is Greek, and as used in the New Testament has a moral 
 rather than a doctrinal significance, and that unreasonable 
 quarrels, spites, and jealousies between different branches 
 of the Church of Christ holding the same creed, are much 
 more heinous in the apostolic sense than any difference on 
 purely doctrinal points, such as that between Unitarians 
 and Trinitarians. 
 
O.V CHEISTIAN UNITY 41 
 
 sprung up among themselves ; and to the 
 same effect Peter lifts his voice even louder 
 against the false prophets and false teachers 
 who were rising up in their midst, and marring 
 the fair front of the gospel with vices than 
 which heathenism, even in its most beastly 
 character, could present nothing more revolt- 
 ing. To the same purpose Jude speaks in 
 his noble burst of indignation against filthy 
 dreamers who defile the fiesh, despise dominion, 
 and speak evil of dignities. Let us, therefore, 
 in the first place, consider what were the 
 special forms of disorderly individualism and 
 private conceit that tended in the earliest 
 stages of Christian life to break up the unity 
 of the Church, and weaken the force of its 
 attack on the common enemy. 
 
 Looking at the nature of the case, arid 
 the indications not doubtful in the epistolary 
 writings, the unity of the Christian Church in 
 its earliest stage was disturbed by two promi- 
 nent forms of sectarian division. The first is 
 the appearance within the Church, as we have 
 just noted, of sensualism in the systematic 
 practice of some of the lowest vices over 
 which only the lowest forms of Polytheism 
 could cast a reputable gloss. This abuse, as 
 is evident from the strong language of St. 
 Paul in a familiar chapter of this epistle, arose 
 naturally out of the carnal logic by which 
 certain converts concluded that, being by the 
 grace of the gospel made free from the bonds 
 of the law, they were therefore at liberty to 
 indulge themselves in whatever direction their 
 
42 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 dominant passion or unbridled lusts might 
 point. This low form of Christian heresy- 
 seems to have shone forth also in modern 
 times, when in the theologic battle between 
 Popish works and Protestant faith it passed 
 under the .name of antinomianism. It is, 
 however, so contrary to the genius of Chris- 
 tianity, and plants itself so directly in the 
 teeth of its plainest precepts, that, though a 
 disturbing element in the infancy of the 
 Church, it does not appear to have been able 
 to maintain itself in the form of what might 
 be called a separate sect. The same remark 
 applies to the political perversion of the 
 doctrine of Christian freedom in the form of 
 what, in the language of the present day in 
 this country, we are accustomed to call ex- 
 treme Radicalism, or the assertion of the 
 Eight of the Individual, as we see it in 
 Ireland, to " speak evil of dignities," and 
 refuse obedience to the constitutional laws of 
 the country in which they live ; for, though 
 in modern times the Cameronians have gone 
 so far as to make the disownment of the con- 
 stituted authorities in certain cases a promi- 
 nent article of their formulated creed, it does 
 not appear that, in the early ages of the 
 Church, any such revolt against submitting to 
 legal authority went beyond the fancy of a 
 few ill-regulated individuals. It was rather 
 an occasional disease within the Church than 
 a formal secession from it. Indeed, so long 
 as apostolic presence and influence remained 
 it is difficult to imagine the religious differ- 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 43 
 
 ences in the Church taking any definite shape 
 in the fashion of our separate modern churches. 
 -They present the type of dissensions within 
 the bosom of a common family, under a common 
 father, rather than that of separate and inde- 
 pendent social organisations. The third form of 
 strongly accentuated self-assertion which broke 
 the compact front of the Church in its infant 
 stage was formalism or legalism. This of 
 course came directly from the Jews, of whom 
 the nucleus of the earliest churches was com- 
 posed; and from St. Paul's Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians it appears to have presented itself here 
 and there in a very formidable shape. But the 
 Jews, who everywhere brought with them the 
 evil repute of having crucified the Head of the 
 Christian Church, were not the men to assert 
 themselves permanently as founders of a dis- 
 tinct Christian body. The differential badge 
 of their nationality — circumcision — coupled, 
 as it was, with a sacred contempt for the 
 unoircumcised, was too glaring a contradiction 
 to the spiritual ideal of the Christian faith to 
 keep its ground beside any congregation of 
 the disciples of Jesus Christ. Those who 
 insisted on circumcision showed plainly that 
 they were Jews in their heart, and had not 
 learned the first postulate of a faith whose 
 religion was of the spirit, not of the letter. 
 For persons so fettered with the dead letter of 
 symbolism it was better that they should 
 remain Jews than ally themselves with an 
 ethical association which started from an 
 absolute ignoring of all such consecration of 
 
44 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 mere external rites. As with circumcision, so 
 it fared ■with Sabbaths, and new moons, and 
 all external observances on which the law 
 had stamped a value, which a purely ethical 
 gospel must by its very nature disown. A 
 Christian in later times might have no objec- 
 tion to the consecration of the first day of the 
 week for spiritual services, with an abstinence 
 from the laborious routine of secular work, 
 but to observe a strict and severe Sabbath 
 observance as an essential part of Christian 
 ethics was contrary to the essential genius of 
 his faith, and could have no place in his creed. 
 To the Jews, therefore, it was relegated, and 
 with the Jews it remained. There was no 
 sect of Sabbatarians within the brotherhood 
 of the Christian Church. It has been reserved 
 for the severe and sour religiosity of certain 
 Presbyterian Churches beyond the Grampians 
 to stamp a special value on a Pharisaic observ- 
 ance of a Sabbath, contrary alike to express 
 passages of Scripture, to common sense, and to 
 the genius of the religion which they profess. 
 
 Another point with regard to the unity of 
 the early Christian Churches deserves special 
 notice. There were no disputes about Church 
 government ; no claims on the part of the 
 overseers or superintendents — iiruTKOTroi — of 
 the congregation for a special form of managing 
 Church business, as an essential element in a 
 healthy Christian Church ; no sacerdotal con- 
 tentions about two orders or three, whether 
 the government of the Church was to be 
 democratic, autocratic, or monarchical ; all this 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 45 
 
 was looked upon as outside the organism of 
 an essentially spiritual brotherhood. Some 
 form of government of course was necessary 
 for conducting business in a decent and 
 orderly fashion, and as a matter of fact 
 the form of social existence which the early 
 
 , Church assumed was that which naturally 
 belongs to a brotherly association, democratic ; 
 but this, though plainly recognised by the 
 apostle, was recognised as a natural growth 
 of circumstances, not prescribed as a regu- 
 lative form essential to the constitution of 
 a Christian Church. All, that the apostles 
 required was that all things should be 
 done decently and in order, and not fitfully 
 and at random ; and for this they found the 
 government by elders or presbyters, already in 
 operation among the Jews,'- sufficient for all 
 
 [ practical purposes. The proof of this, for any 
 person of common sense, stands patent in all 
 passages of the New Testament where the 
 form of Church government is alluded to. 
 Allusions indeed are not many, but where 
 they do occur they contain not the least hint 
 of ecclesiastical differences on the question. 
 Anything like the sacerdotalism of the He- 
 brews, the ancient Egyptians, and not a few 
 naodern Churchmen, nowhere appears. All 
 Christians are a spiritual brotherhood under 
 the headship in heaven of their Divine 
 Founder, and on earth under the fatherly 
 guidance of their natural seniors, ' elders, 
 presbyters, or overseers (eTrio-Koirot). For 
 ^ Levit. iv. 16. 
 
46 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 secondary ministration in matters secular con- 
 nected with the Church, a second order, called 
 deacons, naturally arose. What then of the 
 bishops forming a third or highest order in 
 the early growth of the Church t Did not 
 this new presentation of a spiritual church to 
 the outward world give occasion to a division 
 in the Church, to the creation of a badge of 
 sectarian difference, as we encounter it largely 
 in our modern ecclesiastical organisation ? In 
 no wise. This also was a mere natural growth, 
 arising mainly from the aristocratic atmosphere 
 which the political world then breathed, and 
 which prevented both Greece and Rome from 
 offering any points of affiliation with a purely 
 democratic Church ; and so the elder or over- 
 seer of the principal town in a Christianised 
 district naturally claimed, or rather naturally 
 found conceded to him, a certain superiority 
 in the management of Church affairs, such 
 as belonged in civil matters to the civil 
 governor of the province. Nay more, in later 
 times, when the seat of government was trans- 
 ferred from Eome to Constantinople, the 
 Greek churches in Asia Minor and elsewhere, 
 under the influence of the same secular con- 
 tagion, found it convenient to concede to the 
 bishop of the great Byzantine metropolis a 
 certain spiritual supremacy, signified to the 
 outward world by the term traTpia.pyrfj's, or 
 chief overseer ; but, as in the modern English 
 Church, it does not appear that this dignity 
 was anything more than a sort of compli- 
 mentary acknowledgment, growing up, like 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 47 
 
 the bishops, out of surrounding circumstances, 
 and could not, as a growth allowed and even 
 demanded by public opinion, give any cause 
 for the creation of a distinct sect. The form 
 of government of the Church general still 
 remained aristocratic. This for the East. In 
 the West a growth of a much more notable 
 kind, a monstrous growth overshadowing and 
 overbearing the principle of brotherhood on 
 which the Church was founded, Popery arose, 
 a purely monarchical form of government, 
 growing, as we have seen so often in civil 
 history, out of a pure democracy. This por- 
 tentous growth, however natural in the circum- 
 stances, as human nature is constituted, could 
 not exist without causing a division and a 
 rupture. No doubt the mere form of 
 monarchical government in the Church is no 
 more essentially anti-Christian ' than the aris- 
 tocracy of the Eastern Church ; but the check, 
 so necessary in all spheres to the abuse of 
 power, which the Eastern Church found at 
 Constantinople through the long series of the 
 Middle Ages, did not exist in Rome. After 
 the fall of the Western Empire in the latter 
 end of the fifth century, there was no power 
 in the State potent enough to control the 
 tendency to abuse so natural to the head of a 
 priestly aristocracy ; and so arose the mon- 
 strous claim to sacerdotal infallibility which 
 manifested itself in an open rupture between 
 the Greek Church in the east and the Latin 
 Church in the west ; worldly ambition natur- 
 ally, more than theological differences, made 
 
48 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 the gap caused by this rupture more power- 
 fully felt ; but there it was, as the history of 
 the Christian Church in the period immediately 
 preceding the taking of Constantinople by the 
 Turks amply proves ; there it was, and there 
 it is still, a well-marked biform type of 
 Christian Church order, as distinctly differ- 
 entiated as any legal or sensualistic separation 
 under the apostolic rebuke of St. Paul in the 
 Corinthian and the Galatian Churches ; and 
 were that truly great man and Catholic-hearted 
 Christian to appear in our midst, bearing in his 
 mind the East and West forces of the early 
 Christian Church, once united under his over- 
 sight, might he not have ample cause, casting 
 an indignant glance now at the Western 
 pontiff and then at the Eastern patriarch, to 
 exclaim. Is Christ divided ? Were you bap- 
 tised in the name of a Roman high-priest or 
 of a Byzantine patriarch ? I thank Heaven 
 that I preached among you no gospel of bap- 
 tismal waters, whether from Eome or Con- 
 stantinople, but a new creature. 
 
 From this hasty review of the fortunes 
 of the Christian Church in respect of schism, it 
 plainly appears that, for the first 300 years 
 the injunction of the great apostle as to 
 the necessity of unity, at least in the grand 
 outline, was successfully carried out. How- 
 ever strong, and however well justified the 
 language was in which all the apostles from 
 fervid Paul to gentle John denounced the 
 anti-Christian beliefs and functions that were' 
 parading themselves in " the latter days," the 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 49 
 
 result showed that the good ship Church had 
 been enabled to steer through the rocks of 
 those " perilous times " without any great 
 damage. It was not in human nature, however, 
 in the long run, to crush altogether the germs 
 of dissension that lay in the very constitution 
 of so large and miscellaneous a fraternity. One 
 force indeed that worked strongly to preserve 
 unity, in the early ages of the Church, was 
 persecution ; for nothing tends more to con- 
 centrate the action of a mixed body than the 
 necessity of conspiring to resist an antagonistic 
 force. Of this the strongly emphasised Cal- 
 vinism of the Scottish Covenanters in their 
 struggle against the Episcopal aggression of 
 the Stuarts gives a striking proof. But before 
 following out in detail the divisions that rent 
 the Church, after the ■ unifying action of 
 heathen persecution had ceased by the conver- 
 sion of Constantine, we must take care that we 
 understand clearly what unity means. There 
 are two kinds of unity : external, and internal ; 
 a unity of spiritual harmony, and a unity of 
 organic presentation ; of these the former only 
 is primary and vital, the latter secondary and 
 more connected with the convenient order of 
 business than with the purity and potency of 
 inward grace ; insomuch that it is quite easy 
 to conceive a well-marshalled order of forces, 
 acting triumphantly together under some 
 unifying power, but from elements of internal 
 discord falling asunder the moment that uni- 
 fying force ceases to act. Of this, the disper- 
 sion of the Highland clans who fought for 
 
 E 
 
50 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 King James so brilliantly at Killiecrankie, above 
 alluded to, by the single accident of the death 
 of their leader, presents a speaking example. 
 We may say, therefore, justly, that the moment 
 the common bond of suffering and martyrdom 
 ceased to act, the tendency to one-sided self- 
 assertion, from which schism arises, would find 
 an open field for its display. And so it did. 
 The external form of unity by bishops, 
 whether acting personally in their own 
 districts, or collectively in general councils, 
 or assemblies of the churches then univer- 
 sally recognised, was carefully preserved ; 
 but within this circle a restless soul was 
 working which in the fourth century produced 
 a rank harvest of dissensions and civil war. 
 The form which ecclesiastical individualism 
 took in this first great internal dissension 
 was a rage for metaphysical curiousness, in 
 fixing the type of strictly theological dogma : 
 a rage which received nourishment no less from 
 the subtlety of Greek intellect on the one 
 hand, than from the formalism of Roman law 
 on the other. In this way Christian faith, 
 which, as St. John in his epistles again and 
 again declares, was a matter of faithful service 
 by a loving life to a teacher whose gospel was 
 love, this loving faith was translated into a 
 form of intellectual niceness, in matters often 
 beyond the compass of the finite intellect 
 scientifically to define ; and so arose the 
 lamentable schism on nice points of intellectual 
 subtlety known under the name of Trini- 
 tarian orthodoxy and Aryan heteredoxy which 
 
ON GHBISTIAN UNITY 51 
 
 took form ultimately in that most damnatory, 
 and in spirit essentially anti-Christian expres- 
 sion of a purely intellectual faith commonly 
 called the Athanasian creed. The stamping of 
 one side of this batch of theological subtleties 
 with the name of Orthodox produced the good 
 result of presenting one unwavering front of 
 Church theology to the outward world, and in 
 the then crude state of religious thought this 
 result was good. But the unity of front thus 
 presented to imperial insolence and crude 
 opinion was bought at a dear price ; the price 
 of substituting a blind belief in an intellectual 
 dogma for a living faith in an ethical Saviour. 
 And thus the spiritual unity of the Church, 
 which consists in breathing the atmosphere 
 of an ethical brotherhood, was sacrificed to the 
 conceit of raising up a barrier of metaphysical 
 formalism against all variety of individual 
 conviction. As under an absolute despotism, 
 the Church saved its unity but lost its freedom, 
 in the region of thought its members were not 
 freemen but slaves, not men but puppets. 
 And this tyrannical dogmatism of the church- 
 men in council assembled, combined with two 
 other causes to bring the Church into an 
 intolerable state of moral as well as intellectual 
 slavery, which had its necessary result in the 
 Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. 
 These two causes were sacerdotalism and secu- 
 larity. By being allowed for so many centuries 
 to exercise supreme governmental authority 
 in all Church matters, and being called on as a 
 court of final appeal to settle all questions of 
 
52 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 disputed doctrine, the clergy naturally began 
 to look upon themselves as the chosen channels 
 of all divine communications to the human 
 race, and the mysterious conductors of all 
 spiritual agency. They conceited themselves 
 to be practically infallible ; and a good member 
 of a Christian church could no more dare to 
 deny their conclusions than a good citizen may 
 set the law at defiance in matters of civil 
 government. In this way practically personal 
 thinking and personal action in religion became 
 a crime, or at least a superfluity and a danger ; 
 better not to know the law and the prophets 
 directly than to know them with the danger 
 of interpreting them in a sense which might 
 differ from that of the authorised interpreters. 
 Along with this conceit of infallibility, proceed- 
 ing from the magnification of their sacred 
 functions, came the secular authority, which, 
 in the disintegration of the Western Empire, 
 had accresced to the bishop of the Eoman 
 Church. This continuation of supreme power 
 in Church and State in the hands of one person 
 was too much for human nature to wield 
 without oppression. The loving father of a 
 spiritual family thus became the proud head of a 
 secular oligarchy, the most selfish, as Aristotle 
 has it, of all forms of government. The moderate 
 democracy, which was the original form of 
 church organism in the earliest ages, was no 
 longer known, or known only as a masqued form of 
 rebellion against the legitimate authority of the 
 Church; and any expression of personal opinion 
 -on religious matters was regarded in the same 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 53 
 
 light that a watchful police would regard the 
 practice of a druggist who should sell arsenical 
 or other poisons for healthful drugs ; and as a 
 gardener who makes a bonfire of the weeds that 
 encumber the ground and prevent the growth 
 of a healthy vegetation, so, whether in London, 
 at Prague, or in Florence, or at St. Andrews, the 
 men who best deserved the name of Christians 
 in their several ages, suffered a more atrocious 
 martyrdom at the hands of their Christian 
 office-bearers than the Christians of the early 
 ages had suffered from their heathen persecutors. 
 This was too much. It looked as if the 
 shepherd of the flock had taken the wolf into 
 partnership, and shared with him the bloody 
 spoil of the fold. To talk of unity in such 
 a case was to talk of the unity of prostration 
 of the best men of a country under the hoof 
 of a lawless invader. A great schism was now 
 necessary. Better to break up the army ^nd 
 desert the service than follow a general who 
 could not distinguish his friends from his foes, 
 and whose plan of campaign was to lead his 
 men to the scaffold of a criminal, and himself to 
 the throne of a usurper. The Reformation came. 
 The theses placed publicly on the face of 
 the church at Wittemberg in 1517 proclaimed 
 schism, a splitting of the general Christian 
 army into two hostile camps in a fashion that 
 had never been seen before. No doubt its 
 original form was only a protest, but a protest 
 against the authority of centuries in matters 
 of faith, which, as human nature is constituted, 
 could not but lead to an irreconcilable rupture 
 
54 ON GHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 and a declaration of war. It is not in the 
 nature of things that men, whether taken 
 individually, or massed in a corporate unity, 
 should leap from their throne and demit their 
 authority at the call of any private speculator 
 whose fancy or whose philosophy might lead 
 him to refuse the tribute of loyalty to a 
 generally recognised authority. All power is 
 naturally tenacious of its hold ; and especially 
 ecclesiastical power. Religion is the most 
 conservative of all human affections ; and 
 the submission of the finite reason to the 
 infinite self- existent Intelligence in which it 
 is rooted, is easily transferred to the finite 
 ministers, office-bearers, and authorised inter- 
 preters of the infinite wisdom. So in absolute 
 monarchies loyalty to the supreme head of 
 the State implies loyal acceptance of his 
 will through the mouth of his authorised 
 office-bearers. Eooted thus in the strongest 
 and most radical instincts of the human soul, 
 Popery could not dream of coming to terms 
 with any open contradiction to its authority. 
 As soon might a father renounce authority 
 over his family, or a schoolmaster over the 
 scholars, as an autocratic head of the Church 
 submit to be questioned by a moody monk 
 of the cloister, or a curious student of the 
 university. This was the Papal point of 
 view, and could not be altered. So war 
 ensued ; and war on no doubtful issues. To 
 the absolute authority claimed by the sacer- 
 dotal council, headed by the Pope, the 
 thovightful German monk could oppose the 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 55 
 
 antecedent and unquestioned authority of 
 tte great Founder of the Church. Popes 
 might denounce and kings might conspire ; 
 but with the ipdssima verba of the great 
 Head of the Church handed down in uncor- 
 rupted integrity before us, and the speech 
 and a,ction of his evangelistic messengers 
 consentient thereto, such denunciations, 
 whether with crozier or sword in hand, 
 were as ineffective against a solitary Saxon 
 monk as blasts of a stormy gale, or bolts 
 of Jove's irate thunder, to tear up the ever- 
 lasting mountains by the roots. The Bible 
 
 IS THE RELIGION OF PROTESTANTS. What 
 
 could the highest sacerdotal authority in the 
 churches, or the wisest head that ever was 
 crowned with a triple tiara in Kome, say to 
 that ? On this issue was war declared ; war, 
 which for more than three hundred years 
 has split the originally one Church of Christ 
 into two armies as distinct as east is from 
 the west, as hostile as a cold blast from the 
 north is to a warm breeze from the south ; 
 a war which, after three centuries of sacred 
 wrath, still continues, if not so bloody in 
 outward show, as stiff in principle, and as 
 irreconcilable in hatred as in the days when 
 Central Europe was laid waste and trodden 
 under foot of Pope and Kaiser for thirty 
 years, in order that a race of servile mortals 
 might have the privilege of bowing in abject 
 submission before an infallible Head of the 
 Church of Christ in Eome. But one point 
 has been gained ; an outward unity of the 
 
56 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 Church bought by blood and murder is now 
 impossible. The insolent priest who failed 
 to extirpate independent thinking in an 
 imperious style, sword in hand, must content 
 himself with launching harmless fulminations 
 of damnatory phrase from Eome. In the 
 present day this sort of unity can only 
 raise a smile ; and the Bible, the religion 
 of all reasonable Christians, stands written 
 in large letters on the most patent banners 
 of the age. 
 
 On the Bible, therefore, we stand ; and let 
 us now consider seriously what this means, 
 what it means specially in its relation to that 
 unity which Paul was so anxious to preserve 
 amid the divisions that troubled the early 
 Church. What is the Bible 1 this is the 
 critical question. It is commonly called a 
 book, as indeed the Greek word /S//3Aos, of 
 which it is only an Anglification, means a 
 book. But this is a very misleading title. 
 It is a collection of books ; a small literature, 
 in fact, rather than what we popularly under- 
 stand by a book ; and a literature of very 
 various contents ; a collection of memoirs, 
 biographies, moral discourses, and pious hymns 
 of the most miscellaneous description ; the 
 furthest possible removed from a detailed 
 summary of laws and rules that could be 
 lightly referred to by any inquirer as a guide 
 to belief and conduct. Here unquestionably, 
 on the very threshold of Protestantism, lies a 
 great difficulty. If the priest is to be shorn 
 of his right to declare the divine law, who is 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 57 
 
 to be the interpreter? Ay, there's the rub. 
 Every man his own lawyer ; what a muddle 
 would that make ! If this appears ridiculous 
 in regard to the interpretation of human law, 
 how should it be otherwise in the interpreta- 
 tion of law divine ? If there are no authorised 
 interpreters, and if the minds of men are not 
 particularly well fitted for interpreting by 
 unity such a miscellaneous collection of books 
 as the Bible is, the consequence is plain ; not 
 only from the miscellaneous, and sometimes 
 heterogeneous, nature of the contents of the 
 book, but from the habit of human beings in 
 forming judgments, to take a part for the 
 whole, and exalt that part into a position 
 incompatible with a fair recognition of the 
 other parts, it seems certain that in private 
 judgment, the shibboleth of Protestantism, 
 there lies the germ of a new sectarianism, 
 a sectarianism which will cause honest readers 
 of the book to say, I am of Luther, and I 
 of Calvin, repeating the exact form of division 
 which caused the great Apostle to call out 
 with such indignation to the Corinthians — 
 Is Christ divided ? Did Luther die for 
 you 1 Were you baptised in the name of 
 Calvin, or of Zwingle, or Arminius 1 This is 
 a fact which lies now distinctly before us, and 
 which might have been foreseen by any man 
 of common intelligence as the necessary result 
 of the Lutheran protest, and a fact undeni- 
 able, which gives to the sacerdotal council in 
 Rome an occasion for a very self-congratu- 
 latory boast : you see what you Protestants 
 
58 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 have come to ; you have broken the sacred 
 unity of the Church in favour of all sorts of 
 private conceits ; and there you stand before 
 the world like a set of schoolboys who, hav- 
 ing disowned the authority of their master, 
 fall to fighting and closing fists at one an- 
 other, and rejoicing in all sorts of confusion. 
 This looks very well ; but it is a remark as 
 superficial as it is plausible. It makes a boast 
 of maintaining that external unity which, as 
 remarked above, is of no value except as a 
 sort of garden wall to prevent rapacious hands 
 from appropriating the good fruit within ; and 
 there can be no doubt that St. Paul would ten 
 thousand times rather have sacrificed all ex- 
 ternal unity in the Church than see it bound 
 together by chains which implied spiritual 
 slavery, and enforced by the carnal weapons 
 of fire and slaughter. Besides, we must con- 
 sider that while the attitude of sacerdotal 
 Rome to the Christian people was of a kind 
 so gross, and so contrary to the idea of free 
 fellowship in human souls, the doctrinal diff'er- 
 ences that separated Calvinists from Lutherans 
 were comparatively trifling and quite com- 
 patible with a common agreement in Chris- 
 tianity without priestcraft and with a free 
 Bible, which was the watchword of Protest- 
 antism. The sectarianism which sprang from 
 Protestantism arose simply from the weakness 
 of human nature, as Ave have said, and its 
 tendency to sacrifice the well-balanced survey 
 of a whole to the exaggerated importance of 
 a part. But the common ground of the Bible 
 
ON GHRISTIAN UNITY 59 
 
 was always* open with unsectarian catholicity 
 to all ; and the more that wonderful book 
 was studied, as it could not but be by all 
 intelligent Protestants, the more would ad- 
 vances be made towards that spiritual unity 
 in the great essentials of Christian belief 
 which is the soul of the true Church, of which 
 all outward forms of Church organism are 
 only the body. Besides, it must always be 
 borne in mind, what all sorts of sects in the 
 social as in the religious world are so apt to 
 forget, that it is not the variety but the 
 hostility of different types that Catholic Chris- 
 tians condemn. Variety is the wealth of the 
 world, no less in the moral than in the physi- 
 cal sphere. No man would wish all pine trees 
 in the forest, or all granite crags on the braes, 
 to be of exactly the same shape ; and as little 
 would a fond mother wish to exchange the 
 diversity of feature in each member of her 
 family for a uniform repetition of the maternal 
 or paternal type. As in the family so in the 
 Church. Nature abhors monotony ; and the 
 diversity of outward feature that distinguishes 
 the individual members of a family, animated 
 by a common sentiment and kindred tend- 
 encies, is a moral beauty in which she glories, 
 not a deformity which she would efface. 
 
 Let us now round off this large theme with 
 a hasty glance at the existent sects as they 
 stand before us in the motley variety of atti- 
 tude and dress which the principles of British 
 freedom tend to evoke rather than to dis- 
 courage. And first, let us thank Heaven that 
 
60 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 we have got rid of the main evil which brought 
 so much discredit on the Christianity of the 
 first two centuries of the Reformation — viz. 
 the unholy alliance of Church and State to 
 suppress by physical force the spontaneity 
 that belongs to the essential nature of an ethical 
 association. King and priest, though they 
 may differ in not a few points, agree in this, 
 they both love power, and they may conspire 
 together, like the right and the left arm, to carry 
 out the will of a common imperious brain. 
 The priest desires the aid of the king to give 
 practical effect to his dogmatic conceit, while, 
 on the other hand, the monarch finds it useful 
 to stamp his civil laws with an aspect of 
 sacredness from the co-operation of the priest ; 
 and thus Episcopacy, whether or not it might 
 deserve the compliment paid to it by Charles 
 II., that it is the only religion for a gentle- 
 man, certainly in those times proved itself the 
 best religion for a despot. " No bishop, no 
 king," the favourite maxim of his grand- 
 father in regard to political authority, as fol- 
 lowed out bravely by his grandson, produced 
 its legitimate fruit in stout old Scotland by 
 filling the prisons with the bodies and stain- 
 ing the moors with the blood of the 
 most devout people in Christendom. But 
 all this has now passed away. The blood of 
 the martyrs, as in old times, has become the 
 seed of the Church. Toleration, since that 
 placard of the thoughtful Saxon monk in 
 1517, is now the watchword of the time ; so 
 much so that even the infallible priesthood of 
 
ON GHBISTIAN UNITY 61 
 
 Eome, whicli alone is logically entitled to put 
 down dissentient sentiment by force, would 
 not dare to give even the shadow of a prac- 
 tical approval to the principle of rooting out 
 heresy by the sword, to which their faith is 
 both dogmatically and historically committed. 
 So far, therefore, as divisions in the Church 
 have arisen from the forceful interference of 
 the civil power in matters purely spiritual, 
 churches stand on the same basis of freedom 
 that they did in the centuries of their earliest 
 growth. Mahomet, as at once an Arab chief 
 and the founder of a religion, might draw the 
 sword to enforce his monotheistic gospel with 
 perfect consistency. This Christ never did; 
 His kingdom was not of this world ; the cup 
 which He mingled was a cup of peace seasoned 
 with love ; but the Stuarts in Britain, in 
 conjunction with French and Spanish and 
 German potentates, presented to the accept- 
 ance of Christian Europe a draught of hatred 
 seasoned with blood. Toleration triumphed ; 
 and what remained as matter of contention 
 among the British Churches affected external 
 matters of social position only, without trench- 
 ing on the spiritual freedom of the separate 
 Christian associations. One only evil relic of 
 the intolerance of former ages remained to the 
 middle of the present century — viz. in forcing 
 upon the Irish people the recognition of the 
 Episcopal Church of England as the National 
 Church of Ireland. This was a state of things 
 contrary alike to Christian love and wise 
 policy ; the Established Church in every coun- 
 
62 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 try ought to be the Church of the great his- 
 torical native people, not that of a minority 
 of strange conquerors, however superior in 
 military strength and governmental intelli- 
 gence. But this grievance was put an end to 
 by Mr. Gladstone's bill of 1869, and with 
 that the last remains of civil action in the 
 spiritual sphere ceased to blot the fair face of 
 freedom in the British Empire. No doubt 
 the connection between Church and State 
 both in England and Scotland remained ; but 
 this was in the main a friendly bond, and 
 connected with only a few points of civil dis- 
 ability destined soon to disappear. Of this des- 
 tiny the abolition of subscription to tests as a 
 qualification for the exercise of a university 
 function in Scotland may be taken as a sufficient 
 example. But may it not be said, and is it not 
 said by troops of loud speakers, that Establish- 
 ments altogether are contrary to Christianity, 
 and can never act harmoniously with that 
 spirit of voluntary association out of which 
 the Christian Church arose. This sounds 
 fairly enough in the region of theory, but 
 practically what does it mean ? Take the 
 analogy of schools and colleges. So long as 
 the civil government does not interfere in 
 dictating the principle on which sound educa- 
 tion depends, the patronage of the State has 
 always been rather sought than avoided ; and 
 no one can say that any evil has thence fol- 
 lowed to the recipients of State recognition in 
 that sphere. Why should it be different in 
 the Church ? So long as the State does not 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 63 
 
 compose creeds, or impose liturgies, as the 
 Stuarts did in Scotland contrary to the con- 
 scientious convictions of the Church, there can 
 be no harm but rather manifest good in the 
 devotion of a certain portion of State funds to 
 the moral service of the Church. But what 
 if certain persons, or considerable bodies of 
 pious people, choose to dissent from the State 
 Church and set up a Church of their own ? 
 Well, in this case, if there be any real griev- 
 ance connected with the Establishment let it 
 be removed, as in fact the exercise of lay 
 patronage over a spiritual body, justly com- 
 plained of in the Scottish Presbyterian Church, 
 has been removed ; but if there is no substan- 
 tial grievance, and the only thing sought .after 
 is the indulgence of political conceits about 
 liberty, equality, fraternity, and other Frenchi- 
 fied imaginations, let all such dissatisfied 
 parties retire from the National Church 
 and pay for their pet ecclesiastical fancies as 
 dainty people do for their physical luxuries. 
 
 But whether supported by the State or not, 
 it is notable that the most prominent sectional 
 differences in the face of British Christianity 
 refer more to external organisation or what is 
 called church government than to the doctrines 
 or practice of Christian piety, and practically 
 do not present the aspect of a religious sect so 
 much as of a political party. The differences 
 that divide Episcopalians and Presbyterians and 
 Congregationalists are mainly of this descrip- 
 tion : with the single exception that an 
 extreme party in the English Church defend 
 
64 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 their aristocratic form of government by three 
 orders, not only as the most historical form of 
 conducting church superintendence, but as a 
 special divinely appointed channel for the 
 communication of divine grace to sinful mortals. 
 This is a doctrine, not a mere matter of 
 business ; a doctrine which is best character- 
 ised in a single word as the remnant of that 
 taint of sacerdotalism which we have noted as 
 the mother of all those rampant demonstra- 
 tions of priestly insolence against which Martin 
 Luther found it necessary to protest. But 
 letting this extreme faction drop, as a matter 
 belonging more to the conceit of the few than 
 to the creed of the many, we may say broadly 
 that the differential features of the three great 
 divisions of church organisation in Great 
 Britain relate merely to the form of govern- 
 ment, or the method of conducting church 
 business with no recognised difference in point 
 of Christian doctrine, and as such each form 
 may rejoice in its peculiar strong point without 
 going to war with its Christian sisters on 
 subsidiary points in no sense vital, or contrary 
 to a sisterly fellowship in the service of a 
 common master. Let the English Church, with 
 its grand show of rectors and bishops and 
 archbishops, be and be held, as Charles II. 
 wished, the church of gentlemen': gentlemen 
 are entitled to their churches as well as to 
 their clubs. Let Presbyterianism, with its 
 democratic parity, its two orders, and its 
 popular parliament, stand as the inheritance of 
 stout Scottish men who saved our national 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 65 
 
 independence from English aggression at 
 Bannockburn and Drumclog : while the 
 Congregational churches, stamped more dis- 
 tinctly with the same features, fraternise in 
 their administrative form with the political 
 party known as radical or extreme democrats ; 
 one cannot fail to see that the differences 
 which divide them have little or nothing to do 
 with those vital sources of contention which 
 stirred up so strongly the apostolic wrath of 
 St. Paul and the terrible denunciations of 
 St. Jude. The liturgical service which in such 
 a marked manner dift'erentiates the English 
 Episcopal Church is a matter rather of aes- 
 thetical dress than of religious doctrine, and 
 belongs to a sphere in which churches may 
 wisely borrow from one another without in 
 any way affecting their historical character. 
 Nothing in the past history of the Presbyterian 
 Church justifies the notion that the partial 
 introduction of liturgical form is a departure 
 from her distinctive character ; the culture of 
 sacred music, and the extension of her hymnal 
 service, beyond the letter of the Psalms of 
 David, so far from injuring will rather benefit 
 her by adding to her solid worth the attrac- 
 tions of a graceful dress in which she is 
 deficient. In the same way the sister Church 
 besouth the Tweed, will take the best way to 
 strengthen her hold of the great masses of the 
 people, if she can prevail on herself to give 
 more free play to the character of her minis- 
 trant priests, by at once relaxing the bonds 
 of her printed liturgies and encouraging that 
 
66 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 power of personal appeal in her preachers 
 in which the strength of the Scottish pulpit 
 lies. Whatever be the beauties or the defects 
 of the church service, it must never be forgotten 
 that the strength of a church lies in the moral 
 power of its fervid preaching, not in the sweet 
 echo of its printed liturgies. Here, as in all 
 other fields of human action, the steam of the 
 machine lies not in a dead book but in a 
 living man. 
 
 The only other divisive forms in which our 
 British Christianity presents itself, demanding 
 special mention under the general rubric of 
 Christianity, are four — Methodists, Baptists, 
 Quakers, and Unitarians. Of these the last 
 is specifically contrasted with those above 
 enumerated, by its distinctly doctrinal present- 
 ment. It is a protest against a universally 
 received article of the Christian creed with 
 regard to the personality of the Saviour, with 
 which the Church could hold no fellowship, and 
 a rupture was unavoidable ; but it was by no 
 means such a rupture, and did not produce 
 such an impassable bar as the protest of the 
 Saxon monk planted between the Roman 
 Catholic and all the Protestant Churches. The 
 right of private judgment, which was the 
 watchword of Protestantism, by its very nature 
 bound together by a common bond of intel- 
 lectual brotherhood all who, from the conscien- 
 tious study of the original documents, were led 
 to formulate a creed founded on personal 
 conviction rather than on ecclesiastical tradi- 
 tion ; and considering the reverential modesty 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 67 
 
 with which the finite mind ought to approach 
 anything like a metaphysical definition of the 
 Infinite, even the most orthodox adherents to 
 the Trinitarian creed should find it much more 
 easy to shake hands with a Unitarian Protestant 
 than with a dogmatising and anathematising 
 Pope. Christianity certainly does not consist 
 in an intellectual setting forth of the doctrinal 
 points of a speculative theology, but in a moral 
 faith which worketh by love ; and the blessed 
 Saviour who spake the pregnant word, "Not 
 they who call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, but they that do 
 the will of my Father who is in heaven ; " 
 he surely, with his arms of all - embracing 
 sympathy, would not have cast out any 
 disciple who was willing to sign a creed of 
 thiee functions rather than of three persons, in the 
 Divine unity. And most assuredly it is not a 
 curious belief with regard to the person of the 
 messenger, but a free acceptance of the mes- 
 sage, that makes a loyal subject in the State 
 and a devout believer in the Church. Mere 
 intellectual orthodox belief in the sentences of 
 the most loudly launched Athanasian formula is 
 perfectly consistent with a lamentable defici- 
 ency of the Spirit of Christ, and a triumphant 
 demonstration of the spirit of the Devil. 
 
 The Quakers, or, as they prefer to be called, 
 the Friends, are another example of a class of 
 Protestant dissenters whom it would have been 
 practically impossible, even for those who were 
 most delicately sensitive to the evil of schism, 
 to keep from taking up the position of a 
 
68 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 separate specially organised body ; but this 
 not so much from the repugnant attitude of 
 any special doctrine professed by them as 
 from the prominence given by them to certain 
 oddities in sentiment and worship, which 
 rendered common action impossible. Of all 
 Protestant dissenters, the community of Friends 
 is the most amiable and lovable in practice, 
 but at the same time the most absurd in 
 theory. Quakerism may be best understood 
 from a consideration of the tendency of 
 impassioned humanity to rush from one 
 extreme to its contrary, and overleap the 
 mean term which unites in a well-balanced 
 bond the virtue that belongs to both extremes 
 while it discards the vice. The extreme in 
 which the Quakers found the Christian Church 
 in England was the excess of officialism in the 
 management and of ceremonialism in the service 
 of the Church. To avoid these evils they 
 determined to have no office-bearers doing 
 regular service within their body : all was to 
 be left to the spontaneity of the divinely 
 moved individual : and to sit free from the 
 offence of formal liturgies and heartless 
 confessions they determined to sit dumb. 
 Planting itself in this wise before the practical 
 English world Quakerism, to a sober judgment, 
 could only apjDear to be sentiment without 
 sense, soul without body, and body without 
 organs. At the same time, with all their 
 oddity, the Friends are not only a most lov- 
 able, but a most useful, element in British 
 Society. However unwise the extremes may 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 69 
 
 be in which they indulge, they lie in a direction 
 which acts practically as a corrective of the 
 opposite extreme to which modern society is 
 most inclined. If they carry their aversion 
 to outward show and display to such 
 an extreme as to invest their bodies in a 
 plain garb, which might have been reputable 
 two centuries ago, but now can only be an 
 exceptional oddity, which makes people stare, 
 they at least escape from a bondage to the 
 vestiary fashion of the hour, which is often as 
 inconsistent with natural grace and personal 
 comfort as with the wise administration of 
 the pocket. But the most useful phase, of 
 their pious sentimentalism no doubt lies in 
 their protest against war as an attitude in- 
 consistent with the profession of the gospel 
 of peace ; a very useful position to take 
 amongst a population of creatures so prone 
 to hasty strife and hostile collision as human 
 beings are, but nevertheless when laid down 
 absolutely, a principle as dangerous in practice 
 as it is false in theory ; for to renounce armed 
 resistance altogether would be to hand over . 
 society wholesale to the greed of the rapa- 
 cious and the force of the violent. It is with 
 war, in a Christian point of view, as with 
 money ; it is not money, but the love of 
 money, that Christian ethics denounce as the 
 root of all evil ; and it is not noble self- 
 assertive war, the school of true manhood, 
 but the love of war, as the spur of ambition 
 and the sanction of robbery, that a wise canon 
 of Christian ethics should condemn. 
 
70 ON GHSI8TIAN UNITY 
 
 For the sect of Baptists, or Anabaptists, or 
 Anti-Baptists, however they may choose to be 
 called, a very few words may suffice. Whether 
 the Church ejected from its fellowship those 
 Christians who had scruples about the lawful- 
 ness of infant baptism, or the Baptists refused 
 to share in the brotherhood of Christians 
 infected with the taint of infant baptism, there 
 was no ground for disturbing the unity of the 
 Church on such a secondary point. If the 
 Christian clergy had practised infant baptism 
 for fifteen hundred years without challenge, 
 and felt that this practice had acted with great 
 benefit in Christianising the atmosphere of the 
 Christian family, they were at the same time 
 bound to respect the scruples of those who 
 thought that such an act, having no scriptural 
 authority, might lead to the notion of a ritual 
 virtue in the mere external performance of a 
 rite of pure spiritualistic symbolism, and there- 
 fore was sinful. To persons touched with such a 
 nice sensibility the Church should just have said : 
 well there is no harm, we will baptise your 
 • child when it is full grown, and then the 
 responsibility will rest with the child, which 
 in our practice rests with the parents. So 
 long as the Church preserved this kindly 
 attitude, the blame of the schism which actually 
 took place could not rest with them ; whether 
 it did so or not as a matter of fact I am not 
 prepared to say ; but if the blame of a 
 Pharisaic ejection from the Catholic brother- 
 hood on this point did not rest with them, the 
 sin of a contemptuous rejection of offered 
 
ON GHRISTIAN UNITY 71 
 
 brotherhood must rest with the separatists. 
 Anyhow the unity of the Church was disturbed, 
 and Christ appeared divided before the world 
 in a matter altogether secondary where 
 Christian prudence, and a respect for personal 
 convictions, should have smoothed all differ- 
 ences. 
 
 We conclude with the Methodists. From 
 them we learn two very useful lessons, and 
 they are these. It is well known that, though 
 the Methodist body now stands as distinctly 
 and as compactly opposed to the Episcopal 
 Church of England as the Congregationalists 
 or the Unitarians, or any other dissenting 
 bodies, John Wesley, the mainspring and 
 organic head of the movement, never to his 
 dying day wished to be other than a loyal- 
 hearted adherent of the English Episcopal 
 Church. What then was the cause of the 
 separation ? not doctrine certainly or form of 
 government, but simply a noble passion for 
 an aggressive gospel for which he had no field 
 in the regulated routine of local service in the 
 Established Church. The eighteenth century, 
 both in England and Scotland, was a season of 
 quiescent recoil from the civil and secular 
 convulsions of the seventeenth ; and whatever 
 might be its virtues the Church certainly 
 could not boast of any of the impassioned 
 zeal for a high moral ideal by which the 
 Christian Church in past ages had combated 
 and conquered a world that lieth in wicked- 
 ness. There lies also in the very nature of 
 an Established Church, as a formally fixed 
 
72 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 organism of moral service, an aversion to 
 irregular impulses, and a tendency to confine 
 its action within the bounds of a prescribed 
 propriety. This was all very well if the 
 Church could be looked on merely as a sort 
 of school of the higher ethics for adults, in 
 which the evangelical schoolmaster had nothing 
 to do but lead the scholars through an 
 authorised series of sacred lessons, and then 
 dismiss the class ; but what of those who did 
 not, or would not, or could not come to school, 
 a class of which there were great multitudes 
 at that time, as indeed there always will be, 
 not only in the slums and dark dens of large 
 towns, but in the streets and byways, wander- 
 ing loose all over the land 1 For these the 
 Established Church of the time, with its well- 
 marked parishes, rare old chapels, and nicely 
 intoned liturgies had made no provision ; and 
 hundreds and thousands of unclaimed and 
 degraded creatures, with no wisdom but that 
 of the lowest and most material type, were 
 lying at the gate of the vicarage, or the porch 
 of the Episcopal palace, without any evangelist 
 to help or even to dream of helping them. Take 
 the analogy of a well-walled and well-culti- 
 vated garden, richly stocked with odoriferous 
 flowers, succulent herbs, and fruitful trees, with 
 nothing wanting to please the eye or gratify 
 the appetite of the most fastidious beholder, 
 all within the enclosure and under the care of 
 a skilful gardener, without fault or failure, as 
 perfect as any field of mortal culture may be ; 
 but cast your eye outside, and you behold 
 
ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 73 
 
 nothing all round but a vast stretch of service- 
 able soil with a rich crop of briars and brambles 
 and wild flowers, but altogether unconscious 
 from year's end to year's end of the spade of 
 the tiller or the scythe of the mower. Even 
 such a face did the great body of Englishmen 
 in neglected regions present to the apostolic 
 eye of John "Wesley in the year 1740 ; but he 
 was not the man to rest content with feeding 
 on the luxury of what had been achieved in 
 the rich field of spiritual 'gardening by the 
 regular gardeners ; he would travel forth from 
 Oxford, as St. Paul did from Jerusalem, and 
 conquer the moral world for Christ as Julius 
 Caesar did the political world for Rome. Such 
 was the heresy of the Methodists ; and the 
 great lesson which we learn from it is, that 
 the real heretic against whom St. Paul 
 would have lifted up his voice was not the 
 man whose name now stands at the head of a 
 well - compacted spiritual body of Christian 
 soldiers, but the commander of the regular 
 army, whose blindness to the advance of the 
 enemy caused a loyal officer to desert the 
 ranks and draw the sword for king and 
 country on his own score. 
 
 Such is the first lesson that a thoughtful 
 man learns from Methodism, and the second 
 follows close upon it. If, on the one hand, the 
 State Church is justly punished for its laxity 
 by the loss of a large section of natural 
 adherents, on the other hand there is a great 
 gain when the glaring magnitude of her loss 
 leads her to a pious recognition of her offence. 
 
74 ON CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 and spurs her to a noble rivalry with her once 
 noble sister, and now honourable opponent. 
 As when a careless boy at school sees the 
 prize which he had deemed his own carried off' 
 by a less talented but more diligent fellow- 
 student, his pride is roused, and in a fit of 
 noble self-indignation he girds himself manfully 
 to a public regainment of his proper position 
 in the class, so the English Church of the last 
 century, for a season lamed in her noblest 
 function by the exclusive dominance of a 
 formal propriety in her services, has been 
 stirred into a vigorous display of popular 
 sympathy and apostolic aggressiveness by 
 John Wesley and George Whitfield. And 
 exactly in the same fashion and by the same 
 natural agencies we in Scotland in this last 
 generation have seen the somewhat cold 
 propriety and sober intellectuality of the old 
 moderates of the Established Church stimulated 
 into spiritual zeal, and spurred into apostolic 
 action by the noble contagion of the Free 
 Church. And thus, in the many-sided economy 
 of the divine guidance in the world our vices 
 become our schoolmasters, to bring us back to 
 virtue, and a harmony is achieved in the 
 common action of two divided forces that to 
 the undivided unity was denied. 
 
in 
 
 WISDOM 
 
 Wisdom is tlie principal thing : tlierefore get wisdom : 
 and with thy getting get understanding. 
 
 Proverbs iv. 7. 
 
 I speak as unto wise men : judge ye what I say. 
 
 1 Cor. X. 15. 
 
WISDOM 
 
 There are not many bad men in the world, 
 that is men with a distinctly marked and 
 strongly accentuated element of badness in their 
 constitution ; and in this sense the familiar 
 Greek proverb ol ttoXXoI KaKol is certainly 
 not true, though of course it must be borne in 
 mind that KaKoi in Greek usage often means 
 worthless, and specially cowardly, and not 
 irov-qpos or vicious, and in this sense the pro- 
 verb is unquestionably true that the many are 
 worthless, that is, in critical moments and under 
 strong excitement are not much to be relied on. 
 But if, turning our eyes from the ethical to 
 the intellectual world, we should say Host men 
 are fools, we should be, if still somewhat un- 
 charitable, certainly a little nearer the truth ; 
 for that ignorance, an essential ingredient in 
 folly, is more common among men than positive 
 vice, no man can deny. The wise man, though 
 not a less necessary element of the body social 
 than the good man, is doubtless more rare, and 
 on account of this rarity justly held more in 
 esteem ; and not only more rare, as a cairngorm 
 
78 WISDOM 
 
 is more rare than the block of granite out of 
 which it was struck, but in certain circum- 
 stances so important that any exuberance of 
 mere goodness cannot compensate for its abuse 
 by the lack of wisdom. In the guidance of 
 human affairs, whether public or private, wisdom 
 is in fact the one thing needful for a great 
 success. Happiness may be attained without 
 it in various shapes and in various relations, 
 but not permanent well-being. It is like the 
 helm in the vessel, or the compass, a part of 
 the vessel, not indeed so vital to the idea of 
 a ship as the sails or the planks or the steam 
 by which it may be driven, but a part without 
 which at any moment sails and planks and 
 steam can only help the helmless bark to rush 
 like a drunken man on its destruction. What 
 may that most influential potency be without 
 which the richest man may be sunk in poverty, 
 and with which the poorest man may in due 
 season become wealthy, a potency without which 
 a man in the flush of healthy manhood may 
 find himself plunged into a mortal disease, and 
 with which even the most noted constitutional 
 weakness may under suitable appliances be so 
 braced up and supplemented, as to perform 
 creditably most of the social services that 
 belong to a constitutionally strong man ? Let 
 us enquire. 
 
 As in not a few other intellectual operations, 
 the answer to this question will be arrived at 
 most certainly by casting out those cognate 
 forces with which the term in question is apt to 
 be confounded. And first of all Wisdom must 
 
WISDOM 79 
 
 not be confounded with knowledge. It im- 
 plies knowledge certainly, just as the plan 
 of a building by a good architect implies 
 stones ; the stones are the material of which 
 the building is composed, and the architect 
 must know where to find them ; but the 
 higher wisdom to use them he gets not from 
 the stones, but from his own constructive 
 genius. So with the materials of life, a man 
 to live at all must have them and know 
 them ; but a fool may do this ; only the wise 
 man knows how to use them. The differ- 
 ence between knowledge and wisdom may be 
 most clearly observed in the process of educa- 
 tion at our schools and colleges. As these 
 institutions are practically conducted, and pre- 
 sent themselves to the popular eye, they are 
 in the main a training-ground for the acquisi- 
 tion of knowledge ; and we judge of the use 
 the scholar has made of his opportunities by 
 the amount of facts and principles previously 
 unknown with which he now shows himself 
 familiar. This result is obtained by a process 
 of testing — a process which, whether in its 
 healthy form as examination, or in its un- 
 healthy excess known as cram, is altogether a 
 question of intellectual appropriation. But 
 no man who knows the use of language would 
 mistake this intellectual storing up of manifold 
 facts for wisdom, even if the matters stored up 
 were of the most useful nature, and not, as 
 they sometimes are, altogether useless ; for 
 however adapted for wise use they might be, 
 they could no more be mistaken for wisdom 
 
80 WISDOM 
 
 than the plums on a plum-tree could be mis- 
 taken for a plum-pudding. And as with the 
 well-crammed schoolboy, so with the thoroughly 
 equipped and ihinutely accurate scientific man. 
 A botanist may detail through their minutest 
 differences the specific varieties of all the 
 plants in the meadow, a geologist may from 
 recovered bones reconstruct the skeleton of 
 all the monsters that walked the earth, or 
 swam through the flood thousands of thousands 
 of years before Adam showed his face in 
 Paradise, and an astronomer tell you, to the 
 smallest figure, how many days it would take 
 you in an aerial railway at express speed to 
 shoot through our midnight atmosphere, and 
 pay a visit to the man in the moon, or the 
 lady in the sun ; yet none of these miracle 
 workers in the field of science might have the 
 slightest claim to the title of wise. Under 
 the same category falls the sort of knowledge 
 concerned mainly with books, called learning 
 or scholarship, which, as it is by its very 
 nature removed from all direct contact with 
 living reality, may even more readily than 
 pure science leave its possessor to be classified 
 with fools ; for your scientific man, however 
 confined his sphere of research may be, has at 
 all events to do with proved facts which, so 
 far as they go, may serve as material for some 
 constructive wisdom : but your learned man, 
 your mere scholar, deals only in wandering 
 echoes, and photographic scraps, of other 
 people's wisdom, of which no craft of mere 
 bookish lore can teach him to make a wise use. 
 
WISDOM 81 
 
 His brain, in fact, is like a casket of curious 
 relics of some great saint, the possession of 
 which, however valuable, has no virtue to 
 make a man a saint. And, if this is the ac- 
 count of the mere scholar, at most a retailer of 
 other people's wisdom without any wisdom of 
 his own, the position of the mere linguist is 
 even more blank. The saying attributed to 
 the Emperor Charles that the man who knows 
 three languages is three times a man, is only 
 true on the understanding that they are known 
 to be used, and actually are used in the living 
 converse of man with man, in the atmosphere, 
 and under the influences to which the several 
 forms of human speech belong ; otherwise a 
 score of languages, however thoroughly studied 
 merely as languages, are like so many tools in 
 the hands of a bungling workman, who may 
 cut his own finger with the first one that he 
 handles, sooner than he will make any present- 
 able piece of work with the whole array. 
 Nay, so far is mere knowledge from being 
 identical with wisdom that I can easily 
 imagine a strong systematic intellect, quite 
 Aristotelian in its comprehensiveness, putting 
 a whole encylopaedia of omnigenous things 
 knowable into literary shape, without having 
 the slightest tincture in his character of what 
 we understand by wisdom. 
 
 Another cognate term with which, however. 
 Wisdom is more often contrasted than com- 
 pared is Love. No doubt love is an essential 
 ingredient .of wisdom, nay, in a certain sense, 
 may be spoken of as identical with it,; as when 
 G 
 
82 WISDOM 
 
 St. Paul, for instance, says TrXripwjj.a vonov 57 
 dydrq, love is the fulfilling of the law,^ a 
 maxim which is unquestionably true in the 
 connection in which the wise Apostle uses it. 
 He is throughout contrasting it with know- 
 ledge : " knowledge puffeth up, but charity, 
 i.e. love, edifieth " ; but, to put forth this edify- 
 ing power, love is always supposed to act 
 under the conduct and regulation of the specific 
 element which differentiates wisdom from all 
 displays of mere emotional force, however 
 noble. The dyd-mj, or kindly human sympathy, 
 of which the evangelic teacher talks in this 
 passage, must be carefully distinguished from 
 all manifestations of "Epws, or mere amatory 
 passion, such as prevails all over the world, 
 and especially with young people ; an emotion 
 so far from being identical with wisdom that 
 it is one of the most frequent inspirers of 
 those tragic stories which disturb the harmony 
 of domestic life, and furnish an ever-varied 
 theme for the stirring pages of the last new 
 novel. Love in this sense has no more con- 
 nection with wisdom than a dancer has or a 
 racer, when the dancer or the racer is blind ; 
 the blind dancer may trip it over a precipice 
 and be dashed to pieces ; the blind racer may 
 race into a deep pool and be drowned. But 
 even in the spiritual use of the word, the 
 dydirr] of the Apostle is not without danger, if 
 divorced from reason, and acknowledging no 
 control from the regulative power of the vital 
 machinery to which it belongs ; a control 
 ' Rom. xiii. 10. 
 
WISDOM 83 
 
 without which, like a mettlesome steed, it may- 
 rush reinless into ruin, even as the fire which 
 makes a comfortable room, when over-stimu- 
 lated by combustible material, may spread 
 with a devastating despotism, and wrap the 
 whole house in a consuming flame. Worse 
 even than this, a one - sided and imperious 
 love may generate its opposite, a hatred which 
 mows down with aggressive hostility anything 
 that does not acknowledge the supremacy of 
 its force. "What I love with supreme devo- 
 tion is the only good ; this claims all my service 
 and all my worship ; and whatever is contrary 
 to it is of the devil, and I hate it with a per- 
 fect hatred. This is the sort of love, the 
 reverse equally of true apostolic love and 
 of philosophic wisdom, which has turned so 
 often the great family inheritance of our 
 Christian churches into fields of acrimonious con- 
 tention, and planted Christendom with engines 
 of torture instead of trophies of triumph. 
 
 Another moral force with which wisdom 
 requires to be compared and contrasted is 
 that which is the shaping soul of what 
 is generally called religion, viz. reverence. 
 There can be no doubt here also, as in the 
 case of love, that it is a force at once of the 
 most intense potency, and the most far- 
 reaching significance in the constitution of 
 human society. If love is a power without 
 which it is impossible to conceive any large 
 social wisdom, binding any loose collection 
 of moral beings into a compact body, rev- 
 erence, or the loyal acknowledgment of the 
 
84 WISDOM 
 
 less to the greater and the inferior to the 
 superior members of an association of ener- 
 gising creatures, is an emotion without which 
 willing obedience, so necessary for conjoint 
 action, will be looked for in vain. Every man 
 in such case will be thinking only of the 
 imaginary importance of his own petty self, 
 and his habitual temper will be rather to 
 disown than to accept the headship of his 
 natural leader. Beyond the humble range of 
 common social relations, and taking within its 
 loyal acknowledgment the complex economy 
 of the universe, this virtue rises into the 
 sublime under the name of religion, and 
 in such connection may well be designated 
 in all normally constituted communities as 
 the key-stone of the social arch. As the 
 presence on the field of warfare of a great 
 commander — a Wellington or a Napoleon — 
 acts as a constant centre of radiating force 
 to ensure the order, direct the movements, 
 and stimulate the courage of the common 
 soldier, so the faith in the one supreme 
 shaping Reason, the Aoyos of St. John,i which 
 gives order to the movements and a pattern 
 to the tissue of a complex organism, adds 
 a dignity to the character and a firmness to 
 the growth of social ethics in all its varying 
 forms from a world-wide empire to a gemote 
 province or a small domestic circle. In fact, 
 
 ^ In our version (John i. 1) X670S is translated word ; 
 but the Greek word means not only verbum, the spoken 
 word, but reasonable discourse, or reason. To this our 
 English word logic bears striking testimony. 
 
WISDOM 85 
 
 no man can properly estimate his own place 
 in the world without a profound reverence 
 for the soul of the mighty whole of which 
 he is a part ; and in this view it is no exagger- 
 ation to say that, while an irreligious man is 
 either a very deficient creature or a conceited 
 fool, a woman, as constitutionally belonging to 
 the more emotional sex, without piety to the 
 supreme Author of her being, is a monster. 
 Of this dominating influence of reverence in 
 the formation of a truly noble character, 
 all great thinkers, from Plato and Socrates 
 downwards to Shakespeare and Goethe, are 
 living illustrations. Goethe, in particular, in a 
 well-known passage of Wilhelm Meister, in 
 taking the value of different virtues in the 
 formation of character, and as exhibited in the 
 differential features of the different religions 
 of the world, assigns to Achtung, or reverential 
 respect, the supreme position as a measure 
 whereby to test the comparative excellence 
 of a character or a religion. A man, he says, 
 may be a very clever fellow in many depart- 
 ments, without reverence, but he never can 
 attain to real greatness ; and in comparing 
 the dififerent forms of religion that have pre- 
 vailed in various stages of social development, 
 his teaching is that, while the lowest form of 
 religion in the lowest savage tribes is always 
 capable of lifting up reverential hands to the 
 source of all life, and a more advanced form 
 of social piety can teach a man to respect his 
 equal and place him on a platform of social 
 dignity with himself, Christianity alone has 
 
86 WISDOM 
 
 made reverence for our inferiors a distinc- 
 tive mark both of her doctrine and of her 
 practice. 
 
 But, though all this is most certainly true, 
 it is no less certain that, of all forms of human 
 emotional expression, there is none which is so 
 prone as religion to assume bastard forms and 
 strange dresses, the farthest possible removed 
 from anything that deserves thename of wisdom. 
 Of this deviation from a reasonable type, what 
 a German thinker calls caricatures of the 
 Holiest, the causes are obvious. First there 
 comes the immense distance, in the case of 
 religious reverence, between the reverential 
 worshipper and the object of his worship. 
 As in the case of a huge mountain, the greater 
 the height and the greater the distance from the 
 observer's eye the greater the danger of error 
 in the estimate of its height, and the greater 
 the probability that any definite measurement 
 may not be attempted, and the contemplative 
 faculty of the spectator be lost in misty 
 imagination and unlimited admiration. Our 
 limited human reason, quite at home when 
 measuring an enclosed area or a definite distance, 
 wanders with wildered gaze before the panorama 
 of the infinite, and the arm of judgment is 
 paralysed. And this is no doubt quite natural 
 and healthy so far. " Lord, mine eyes are not 
 lofty, nor my heart haughty : nor do I seek to 
 intermeddle with things too high for me : my 
 heart is even as a weaned child," ^ are the 
 wise words of one of the wisest utterances 
 ^ Psalm c.xxxi. 1, 2. 
 
WISDOM 87 
 
 of an old Hebrew psalmist; but though the 
 eye should be modest that scans infinity, there 
 is here also indicated a limit beyond which 
 a sane exercise of a human faculty cannot 
 exist. A wise eye must beware of illusions ; 
 but it must not allow itself to be altogether 
 blinded by the sharp arrows of divine light, 
 or the floating swathes of supersensuous mist. 
 The reverence paid by a reasonable creature 
 to the author of all reason must ever be 
 reasonable; the abnegation of all reason can 
 never be the postulate on which a reasonable 
 theology is founded. And yet this intellectual 
 blindness is so natural to many minds, that 
 even in the most rational creeds articles will 
 stand in a position of doctrinal acceptance 
 which, if brought into the field of common 
 action in common matters, would be laughed 
 at as pure nonsense. Nay even mere phrases 
 wQl sometimes obtain currency in the religious 
 world which, when closely looked into, have 
 no more meaning than a soap-bubble has 
 bones. Closely akin to the abnegation of all 
 reason in theological thinking is the exact 
 contrary of it ; the self-confident intrusion of 
 the limited intellect into the region of the 
 unlimited, of which unlimited nonsense is 
 the natural result. This vice showed itself at 
 an early period in the history of the Christian 
 Church, and gave rise to a lamentable chain 
 of dogmatic distinctions and denunciations 
 which the Founder of our religion would 
 no doubt have condemned as severely as he 
 did the formalism of the Scribes and Pharisees 
 
88 WISDOM 
 
 had these sacerdotal decrees presented their 
 savage faces to his direct regard. To my 
 feeling, the intolerance of this sort of scholastic 
 dogmatism in Christian theology is more repug- 
 nant than many of the most unreasoned forms 
 of vulgar superstition ; for a childish fancy 
 in matters above human measurement is often 
 more natural and less dangerous than a rash 
 intrusion and a peremptory decision. These 
 considerations will be sufficient to show how 
 reverence, which is the root of all the highest 
 wisdom, should in the case of popular religious 
 creeds have become a common house of 
 refuge, so to speak, for all sorts of folly ; 
 insomuch that, as Cicero said in reference to 
 the transcendental metaphysics of some of the 
 Greek philosophers. Nihil est tarn absurdum 
 qwd lion dixerit aliguis phihsophorum, so we 
 may in all sobriety say Nihil est tarn, absurdum 
 quod non crediderit aliquis religiosorum. There 
 is nothing so absurd as not to have found a 
 place in the creed of some sect of religionists. 
 
 There are other two fields of the manifesta- 
 tion of human energies which must be dis- 
 tinctly marked out, in order by way of specific 
 differentiation to mark their relation to wisdom. 
 Action, no doubt, and fruitful energy are in 
 the general case essential to true wisdom ; but 
 mere action and pure energy, independently of 
 the spirit by which it is inspired, can no more 
 be taken as evidence of wisdom than mere 
 blows and bloodshed in a stiff battle can stand 
 as a test of a well-ordered campaign, or a 
 patriotic cause. What is required for notable 
 
WISDOM 89 
 
 results in the field of mere action, is simply an 
 accurate knowledge of materials and circum- 
 stances, a clear vision of how to use them for 
 the attainment of certain ends, and a firm will 
 and a persevering patience to work them up to a 
 definite result. Your clever man of business, 
 of which type Glasgow and Liverpool can pro- 
 duce any amount, your dexterous pleader and 
 well-balanced judge, the boast of Edinburgh, and 
 your political tactician, whose wordy strife stirs 
 the heart of the people and fills the columns 
 of the newspapers ; these are all clever fellows, 
 and do good work in their sphere, but they are 
 not therefore wise men. The work which they 
 do is special, and may serve the purpose of 
 wisdom as servants serve the call of their 
 masters. But the end which each proposes, the 
 TeAos or final result of their action is only a 
 subservient end, which has no value in itself. 
 The TeA.os of the Glasgow or Liverpool merchant 
 is money ; that gained, he has reaped the fruit 
 of his action ; how to use the money when made 
 is an altogether difi'erent afiair, and has no 
 more relation to the use made of it than the 
 crude stones in a quarry have to do with the 
 scheme of the building into which the architect 
 has to fit them. In the same way the eloquence 
 of the lawyer is a mere step in the way of the 
 adjustment of right and wrong between persons 
 with whom the lawyer has specially to do. The 
 cases of the antagonist parties are well stated 
 and the judgment justly given ; the points of 
 the decision on both sides are given like two 
 loaded pistols into the hand of the judge ; but 
 
90 WISDOM 
 
 with the practical merits of the case, whether 
 in the motives from which the quarrel started, 
 or the results in which it may issue, with the 
 wisdom or folly of the whole business, whether 
 right or wrong in the nexus of social things, the 
 lawyer, whether pleader or judge, has nothing 
 to do. The one is functus officio the moment he 
 has stated his case, the other when he has 
 delivered his decision. Similarly the politician : 
 he is a clever fellow when he manages so cun- 
 ningly and so patiently as to get his party in at 
 a general election and put his antagonist out. 
 Of wisdom in this case there can be no question. 
 Not the wisest statesman of the candidates, 
 but the man who knows best how to feel the 
 pulse, to smooth the fret, and to spur the hopes 
 of the moment, will gain the popular vote and 
 be installed in the seat of legislation, as a 
 representative not of the people, it may be, or 
 their best interest, as of a wise Minerva in the 
 upper regions at the right hand of Jove, but of 
 the party and the special favour and prejudice 
 of a particular locality. 
 
 Another category with which wisdom may 
 often have something to do, but under which 
 in the general cause it cannot be subsumed, 
 is Beauty. The great German poet-philosopher 
 among his many wise sentences, has this with 
 regard to government : " The world is governed 
 by wisdom, by authority, and by show." Now 
 by show of course is meant, not an ugly and 
 repulsive but an attractive and engaging show, 
 and this means the beautiful ; and there cannot 
 be the slightest doubt, that though beauty is 
 
WISDOM 91 
 
 only an outside thing, and in no wise implying 
 anything substantial inside, it is a most potent 
 element in influencing the judgments of man- 
 kind. One plain advantage it has : it is seen ; 
 it forces itself on the observation; it cannot 
 be avoided ; it acts on the most shallow as well 
 as on the most profound spectator, and like 
 the sunbeam, wherever it shows itself, is felt. 
 True wisdom, therefore, though it can often 
 manifest its princely power without the aid of 
 Beauty, will never despise' it. If it is only as 
 Aristotle has it, the best introduction, not only 
 a wise man but every man of common sense will 
 desire to have the advantage of it. But what 
 wisdom has specially to look to under this 
 head is that the beauty which is displayed to 
 captivate the eyes of men shall be a true 
 beauty, not a false one ; a beauty not flung 
 forth, like a well-made fly to catch a fish, but 
 like a rich blossom to prophesy a luscious fruit. 
 With lies or false show of any kind wisdom 
 can have no alliance. Poetry itself, the most 
 cunning expression of the most brilliant genius, 
 without a root of sterling truth, is only a soap- 
 bubble, or a glorified mist. We live in a real 
 world where nothing but reality can stand. 
 
 What then is wisdom ? After we have 
 discarded all these false shows or imperfect 
 contributions, what remains 1 Let us try. I 
 formulate it as follows. 
 
 The root of all wisdom is the knowledge in 
 a reasonable being of the capacities that belong 
 to him as a social worker, and of the sphere 
 and circumstances in which these capacities 
 
92 WISDOM 
 
 are to display themselves ; and the fruit from 
 such root is a life in a well-ordered harmony 
 with the system of things to which the being 
 belongs ; or, more shortly, wisdom is the living 
 harmony of truth, love, and graceful display in 
 the conduct of life, as part of a divinely con- 
 stituted order of things in a world essentially 
 harmonious and essentially social. 
 
 If this definition is true, the first thing that 
 a youth ambitions of achieving a wise life has 
 to do is to set himself to act out the old Socratic 
 maxim yvw^t creavrdv, know thyself; and the how 
 to do this to those who are serious in the business 
 is plain enough. Look with one eye into your 
 own souls, and with the other into your nearest 
 environment, and try. If you are worth any- 
 thing as a liver in God's working world, you 
 must put forth your arms and legs, and use 
 them. You will thus find what you can best 
 do, and your faculty of doing will grow strong 
 by the exercise. If there are level fields before 
 you, learn to march and run on them ; if there 
 are high mountains, climb them ; if there are 
 leaping torrents, leap with them ; if there 
 are deep floods, swim through them. And 
 remember that you are a social being, destined 
 to live not with yourself or for yourself but 
 with and for others. Therefore, if there be 
 golfing ground, for instance, in your vicinity, 
 learn to strike a well -calculated ball in honest 
 rivalry or fellowship with your brother players ; 
 so with lawn-tennis, or cricket, or any other 
 sport which makes a young fellow both alert 
 and strong, and besides gives him an abundant 
 
WISDOM 93 
 
 supply of the breath of life, which is fresh air, 
 and sets in motion the fanners of life, which is 
 the free play of lungs, or the breathers, irvev- 
 ftoves as they are significantly called in Greek. 
 Of course I do not mean to say that all young 
 men are equally well constituted for excellence 
 in all athletic sports ; but I do say that some 
 part taken regularly in such sport is consonant 
 with Nature and beneficial for health ; and 
 health of body is the one sure foundation for a 
 well-ordered and comfortable life. The house 
 no doubt is not for the foundation, but the 
 foundation for the house ; nevertheless with- 
 out a sure foundation the best house will fall. 
 For self-knowledge looking inward is of course 
 necessary ; and to looking inward a certain 
 amount of solitary meditation belongs ; but 
 studious young men should beware of con- 
 versing too much with themselves or with mere 
 books ; for not only is the field of active 
 energy curtailed and cramped by this one-sided 
 inwardness, but the balance of our complex 
 frame is disturbed, and the health of the pre- 
 mature student irrecoverably injured. Then 
 for your circumstances. These you cannot 
 make, and only within a very limited range 
 can choose. Learn therefore the grand practical 
 rule not to look abroad always, as if far birds 
 only could have fair feathers ; but before all 
 learn to lay hold with a kindly touch on what 
 is nearest you, and to take things, as Thales 
 said, by the handle, and not by the blade. 
 Every rose has its thorn ; but only the hasty 
 fool, in plucking the rose, lets the thorn dart 
 
94 WISDOM 
 
 into his finger and lie bleeds. A young man 
 choosing his profession has of course to consult 
 his capacity and his inclination ; but let him 
 beware of the double danger, on the one hand 
 of painting his prospective favourite sphere of 
 action in rose colour, and on the other hand of 
 seeing only clouds and darkness in some less 
 attractive region. There are few mountains so 
 pleasant when you stand on them as they are 
 when looked on in the glowing distance; and few 
 habitations as uncomfortable and small as you 
 paint them from some unkindly external 
 aspect. I knew a young man, who would 
 listen to no advice from his parents, but he 
 would be a sailor, and span the seas in a ship 
 to the far east end of the world ; he sailed 
 to China, and in a year he came back, firmly 
 resolved to have nothing more to do with sea 
 or seamanship. His father was an attorney, and 
 he was an expert talker, so he became a 
 barrister ; his father and his dexterous tongue- 
 fence amply supplied him with business ; and 
 in a few years, instead of a roving explorer of 
 distant oceans, he became a sedentary sage, 
 wearing a horse-hair wig, and sitting soberly 
 day after day in the seat of judgment. So it 
 is not seldom in the choice of a profession. 
 The juvenile instinct may point right, but it 
 points only to a part of the business ; it is not 
 a compass to measure all the winds that blow 
 either inside or outside the soul. The great 
 thing needful for the wise use of circumstances, 
 is to practise the art of seeing the best side of 
 all things, and to make the best use of them. 
 
WISDOM 95 
 
 Even within the narrow bars of a cage birds 
 learn to live happily and to sing. 
 
 So then wisdom is merely a sort of healthily 
 and skilfully applied intelligence, intelligence 
 applied to the field of social action. I use the 
 word intelligence here specifically to differentiate 
 wisdom from mere knowledge as stated above : 
 for the intelligence of a reasonable agent in 
 this reasonable world can never be skilfully 
 applied except in that atmosphere of reverence 
 and love that belongs to all common action, 
 under a common head, and with a band of 
 common fellow-workers. In this way wisdom, 
 though, as we have shown above, it is identical 
 neither with knowledge nor with religion nor 
 with love, is the product of the harmonious 
 action of all the three, in a world of which all 
 the parts hang as necessarily together as the 
 notes in a harmony of Beethoven or Mozart ; 
 just as a rose or a lily is neither soil, nor seed, 
 nor sunshine, nor rain, but the combined 
 action of all the four. " Be a whole man to 
 one thing at one time," is an admirable maxim 
 of the wise Chancellor Thurlow as against loose 
 handling and superficial work ; but, while the 
 task is undivided, let it be a whole man that is 
 applied to it ; not merely the discriminating 
 glance and the dexterous touch, but "body, 
 soul, and spirit," as the Scripture has it, a 
 complete and compact humanity, for some 
 human end ultimately, not merely a professional 
 gain. 
 
 Another caution that must not be lost sight 
 of in all fields of concentrated action, is that 
 
96 WISDOM 
 
 which lies in the familiar law of all practical 
 matters so fully illustrated by Aristotle, that 
 all virtue and all excellence of every kind 
 is the middle term between two extremes. 
 Thus courage is the mean between the defi- 
 ciency of cowardice on the one hand, and the 
 excess of rash daring on the other. It is with 
 a wise life as with good horsemanship ; the 
 steed at one moment may require the lash, at 
 another the rein ; but as, on the one hand, a 
 persistent and intemperate lash may spur the 
 beast into a fury which may both exhaust its 
 strength and endanger your life, so on the 
 other a constant withholding of the lash will 
 foster a lazy dulness which may turn a useful 
 servant into a useless incumbrance. "Whatever 
 you do, therefore, do it by all means fervidly 
 and forcibly ; but do it also, as St. Paul says, 
 decently and in order, which means with 
 measure and moderation. Only with this 
 measured calmness of healthy force can a man 
 of creative energy in any sphere of action 
 assert himself, not as the slave, but as the lord 
 of his inspiration. The force that cannot 
 restrain itself is only a spasmodic explosion, 
 eager to conceal a fundamental weakness under 
 the mask of a momentary strength. This is 
 not the fashion in which strong keels plough 
 the billow or strong ploughs part the glebe. 
 
IV 
 WOMEN 
 
 THEIE PLACE AND FUNCTION IN THE 
 SOCIAL ECONOMY 
 
 Deborali, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she 
 judged Israel at that time. 
 
 Judges, iv. 4. 
 
 Let your women keep silence in the churches. 
 
 1 Cos. xiv. 34. 
 
WOMEN 
 
 We live in times, since the French Eevolution 
 of 1789, of large discussion and general 
 inquiry, when nothing is accepted on the 
 mere guarantee of past tradition, and even 
 the deeply-rooted foundations of social exist- 
 ence are rudely shaken, and we are called upon 
 to defend their existence, not only on the his- 
 torical ground that they always have been, 
 but in the forum of logical argument and in 
 the region of reasonable possibilities. Of these 
 questions, not the least important certainly is 
 that of the place and function of women in 
 the social economy, one party content to 
 think, with an ancient Greek of high authority, 
 that women are then best when they are least 
 known and least talked about in public life,-^ 
 another with revolutionary fervour contending 
 that to restrict a woman to the narrow sphere 
 of domestic duty is to lower her from her 
 
 ' Thucydidea in Plutarch, De virtutibus mulierum, 
 preface. 
 
100 WOMEN 
 
 proper place as the companion into the 
 position of a fair attendant on the majesty of 
 the man. In this discourse we shall endeavour 
 to sift the claims of these contending parties, 
 and show how an adjustment of these claims 
 may be made in a fashion that should satisfy 
 the reasonable advocates of both parties, and 
 give offence only to the unreasonables, in 
 whose minds the violence of party warfare 
 has succeeded in giving the death-blow to 
 sober judgment. 
 
 One thing to start with is plain, that a 
 woman to look upon is as different from a 
 man as a birch tree from an oak, or a soft 
 green bank from a stout stony brae. This 
 observation of course belongs only to the 
 outside ; but it stands not with reason, as 
 displayed in the artistic array of significant 
 things in the universe, that two creatures of 
 such diverse presentment should internally be 
 identical in constitution, and fitted exactly 
 for the same sphere. They are like no doubt 
 in general aspect, and fall under one generic 
 designation, but they are also very unlike ; as 
 unlike as a bare Scotch house of Aberdeen 
 granite is to a trim Surrey cottage of brick 
 and wood and richly decorated with ivy and 
 jessamine and all sorts of dainty evergreens : 
 very unlike certainly, but they are both 
 houses, and both afford excellent shelter to 
 food-eating mortals. Or, to take the simile of 
 the birch tree and the oak : here the parallel 
 and the contrast betwixt the physical and the 
 moral world stands complete. In the birch 
 
WOMEN 101 
 
 tree we have all the beauty and the grace that 
 belong to the woman, in the oak all the strength 
 and roughness that characterise the man. We 
 start, therefore, from this fact, as from a 
 firm postulate : variety and contrast in like 
 things is part of the essential constitution of 
 the universe ; and to act in any way against 
 this is to make vain war against Nature, and 
 to set your narrow private conceit against the 
 catholic wisdom of the great primal Reason 
 that makes the world a world. 
 
 Let us now distinguish carefully ; for, as the 
 proverb has it, Omne simile davdicat, all similes 
 limp. And though the birch may stand for a 
 lady and the oak for a man, in virtue of the 
 unity of conception, which belongs to the 
 creative Xoyos, yet this Divine Eeason presents 
 itself on four stages or platforms occupied by 
 types of creation, of which the lower is 
 inseparably sundered from that which stands 
 immediately above. The four types are 
 
 KOCK, PLANT, ANIMAL, MAN. Of the rOck or 
 
 underlying groundwork, the most perfect form 
 is the crystal, a most beautiful and bright 
 consummation of rocky existence, as one may 
 see in the golden light of the cairngorm and 
 other precious stones. But beyond this the 
 rock type of existence cannot go ; it may 
 indeed crumble into pieces, and create a soil 
 out of which some plant of the vegetable 
 order may grow ; but it cannot become a tree. 
 Then again, the birch or any other luxuriant 
 leafy grace of the glens is separated from 
 the animal creation by a condition equally 
 
102 WOMEN 
 
 restrictive ; with all its grace, and with 
 all its luxuriance, and with all its playful 
 flirtations with the passing breeze, it stands 
 immovably rooted in the rock ; it may 
 wave its arms, or rather its arms may be 
 waved, but its root cannot be stirred without 
 destruction. Locomotion is denied to the 
 tree as much as to the mountain crystal. 
 Take now the dog, a familiar presentation of 
 the third platform. He starts into life as 
 swift as the wind and as light as a feather ; 
 he too can be trained from the wild hunter of 
 the woods into the obedient servant and 
 reverential worshipper of the unfeathered 
 biped called man : but beyond this he cannot 
 go ; he can understand a wink and obey a 
 nod ; he can bark and he can bite j he can 
 value a caress and fear a rod ; but he can 
 claim no sympathy with a single reasonable 
 sentence expressive of a sequence of reason- 
 able ideas in the creature who stands supreme 
 on the superior platform. He has no lan- 
 guage ; why 1 Simply because, not possessing 
 the inward reason — what the Greeks called the 
 Aoyos evSidderos, he cannot possess the outward 
 expression of it, the \6yo<s Trpo^optKos of the 
 same subtle people. Then what does this 
 reason, this God-given godlike Aoyos on the 
 stage of highest earthly vitality mean 1 No 
 doubt a man must stand on his own legs, and 
 hold by terra firma as much as the meanest 
 worm or the most huge hippopotamus ; he 
 cannot jump out of his skin ; nay, in the 
 earliest form in which he greets the day, he is 
 
WOMEN 103 
 
 more weak and more helpless than any animal, 
 winged or wingless, in air or land or sea. But 
 mark how he advances ; not as the tree grows, 
 only taller and more branchy, but into an 
 entirely different creature ; from the most 
 weakly dependent of all creatures, step by 
 step, and stage by stage, he develops into the 
 most self-dependent, self-assertive, and self- 
 formative of all living things. Training 
 unquestionably he requires, as much as a 
 vine-tree or a dog ; but his training is merely 
 a preparatory drill for enabling him to train 
 himself, for teaching him that his true exist- 
 ence as a man has only then commenced, 
 when he has seriously set himself to the 
 formation of his own character, mapping out 
 his own sphere. In this self -formative energy 
 the differential quality of a human being 
 consists. The lower animals, like the rocks 
 and the trees, are left with their unerring 
 instincts and their innate tendencies in the 
 hands of Nature and of God ; man alone has 
 the wonderful privilege of being planted here 
 to work out his own destiny, by a process of 
 self-education which only begins where instinct 
 and innate tendencies end. He enters life as 
 his own master, with the privilege of rising to 
 the level of the gods if he acts wisely, and of 
 sinking lower than the brutes if he plays the 
 fool. This distinctive basis of all human as 
 compared with vegetable and animal life on 
 the earth being fixed, our next question is 
 how far the same principle of an impassable 
 barrier between platform and platform may 
 
104 WOMEN 
 
 affect the relation of masculine and feminine 
 on the same platform. On the inferior plat- 
 form we recognise a cow and a bull, a pea-hen 
 and a peacock, as possessing certain incom- 
 municable attributes which separate the two 
 sexes as distinctively as a tree is different 
 from a rock, or a dog from a tree. But the 
 gap in this case of two human beings, a 
 man and a woman, though no less distinctly 
 revealed to the external eye, is rendered 
 internally less and less appreciable by the 
 action of the self -formative faculty charac- 
 teristic of the human being. Different as 
 the more delicate sex is from the stronger in 
 tissue and texture, she has that within her 
 which, by training and culture, may bring her 
 more and more into a community of feeling 
 and action with her sturdy counterpart. 
 She may borrow from him, in the course of 
 rounding off her character, some share of the 
 strength and decision which is his peculiar 
 boast, as on the other hand he may soften 
 down the rough edges of his male nature by 
 the contagion of the female grace and sweet- 
 ness. And this is in fact what we see every 
 day in the contrast between a rude ill- 
 mannered man and the perfect gentleman. 
 What is a gentleman ? As a well-mannered 
 man he is simply a well-rounded man, a man 
 who has smoothed down the roughness of the 
 rude unfeathered male biped by the amenity 
 and the grace that belongs to the other sex. 
 He has achieved in his social presentment 
 that balance of contraries, in which all the 
 
WOMEN 105 
 
 cunning of the most perfect forms of existence 
 resides. A stick that unites all the strength 
 of a cudgel with the lightness of a cane will 
 be a perfect stick, equally adapted for a smart 
 blow or a gentle rap. So Apollo among the 
 gods is at once the most pleasing and the 
 most potent figure that the Greek mythological 
 gallery contains, a god equally remote from 
 the yielding sweetness of Aphrodite and the 
 rude strength of Hercules. He is a perfect 
 god-man, and can make his arrows as effectu- 
 ally felt on his foes as Jove's thunderbolt, 
 without being shrouded in those rolls of 
 darkness with which the Thunderer loves to 
 invest his vengeful discharge. In the same 
 way a woman may indeed be content with 
 posing only as a Venus, in which guise she is 
 altogether and purely female ; but, if she does 
 justice to the self -formative instinct that 
 belongs to her as a human being, she may 
 raise herself into the fellowship of the Muses, 
 the ministers of the Sun-god, or mount even 
 higher, as a Minerva, the faithful agent and 
 the wise vicegerent of the supreme Jove. Let 
 us say therefore, following out these analogies, 
 that the perfect woman is she who, while 
 presenting in full blossom to the general eye 
 all the charms and graces which are the 
 special glory of her sex, has known to com- 
 bine with them the large intelligence, impartial 
 survey, firm grasp, and imperative will which 
 are the typical virtues of the other sex. In 
 other words, as in a fortress, she must build 
 up the weak sides of her citadel without in 
 
106 WOMEN 
 
 any way neglecting her natural vantage points 
 of attack and defence. Let us inquire, there- 
 fore, what the strong points of a woman's 
 character are, which it must be her prime 
 care to secure, and what the weaker are 
 which a wise self-culture may strengthen and 
 bring into a well-balanced harmony with the 
 whole. 
 
 In the first place we take the physical struc- 
 ture as the foundation of the dominant vital 
 force which we call the soul. Here the wisdom 
 of training lies in giving full and free play to 
 all the bodily organs, so far as is consistent 
 with the grace, beauty, and delicacy so essen- 
 tially characteristic of the female type. In 
 this view, though strength is undoubtedly to 
 be sought for, and will be obtained by a wise 
 exercise of the organs, yet we must say that 
 in the main agility and dexterity are to be 
 cultivated in the gymnastics of the young 
 woman, rather than feats of potent muscu- 
 larity. There is no exercise more fitted to 
 make a strong and well-balanced bodily ma- 
 chine than pedestrianism ; therefore, while 
 the young of both sexes should be trained 
 to use their legs largely, five or ten miles 
 a day will be a just allowance to the more 
 delicate sex for ten or twenty that may 
 be requisite to bring out the motive capacity 
 of the young man. In games also, and out- 
 of-door recreations, care should be taken that, 
 while all games, such as football, cricket, boat- 
 racing, and high-leaping, which are apt to be 
 associated with violent exertion, should be 
 
WOMEN 107 
 
 excluded from the female field, dancing and 
 skipping, lawn -tennis, croquet, and bowling 
 should be looked upon as the natural arena 
 for the display of their physical powers. 
 Between these two classes of healthy recrea- 
 tion the game of golf, so wisely borrowed from 
 stout Scotland by majestic England, holds a 
 middle place ; and while it is quite certain that, 
 as at present played on the broad links, of St. 
 Andrews, Aberdeen, and Montrose, its efficient 
 performance demands a degree of strength 
 both of leg and arm not to be expected in 
 the normal samples of the other sex, there 
 is no reason why this most healthy, vigorous, 
 and graceful recreation should not be practised 
 by ladies on a smaller scale ; exactly as in 
 climbing, where Bencleuch and Dunmyat in the 
 Ochil range may satisfy the ambition of the 
 gentler sex ; but Ben Ledi and Ben Lomond 
 in the Grampian outworks will be required 
 to evoke the more ambitious muscularity of the 
 man. 
 
 So much for the body ; in the spiritual 
 sphere of our marvellous structure, we discover 
 a cognate and no less distinctive differen- 
 tiation. In the woman we find a domin- 
 ance of the emotional element in such a fashion 
 as to correspond exactly with the delicacy and 
 the beauty of her corporeal frame. Of course 
 the male animal also has passions : passion is 
 the steam of the moral world, and without 
 steam the machine would not go ; but with 
 woman the impassioned element is not only 
 more prominent, but it is softened and tem- 
 
108 WOMEN 
 
 pered by the love, which St. Paul calls the ful- 
 filling of the law, and which transferred from the 
 Greek appears as the English word sympathy. 
 Sympathy (crvixTrdOeia) means a fellow-feeling 
 with others, an instinctive readiness to act 
 on the other text of the wise Apostle, " Weep 
 with those who weep, and rejoice with those 
 who rejoice." Woman is a more sympathetic 
 creature than a man ; if less strongly self- 
 assertive than the other sex, she is character- 
 istically less selfish ; and herein lies her special 
 glory and her mighty power in the social 
 world. For what does that sentence of the 
 Apostle practically mean 1 what has love to 
 do with law 1 everything. Law is only a part 
 and a very small part of love ; it is love in a 
 narrow sphere of measurable prescription, and 
 generally expressed in a negative form : " Thou 
 shalt not steal ; thou shalt not bear false 
 witness," and so forth. No man with love in his 
 soul will dream of doing any such thing ; and 
 so without any promise of reward or fear of 
 penalty, the man with love in his soul fulfils 
 these laws, and for him courts of justice are 
 altogether useless tribunals. The power which 
 sits on the throne of his soul fulfils an infinitely 
 higher law than what any human court of 
 justice, with its narrow range of measurable 
 prohibition and compulsory duties, can take 
 account of. If law be in the main prohibitive 
 and retributive, love is in its essence attrac- 
 tive, conciliatory, and cohesive ; and in its 
 social action can be compared to nothing more 
 fitly than to a musical note under the hand 
 
WOMEN 109 
 
 of a great composer, which refuses to assert 
 itself in any place or in any degree which may 
 disturb the harmonious expression of the piece. 
 In this way love is not only, in the vulgar 
 sense, the fulfilling of the law, but the attractive 
 force which makes law possible ; a force with- 
 out which all common action among diversely 
 constituted beings would be impossible, and 
 apart from which that pleasant interplay of 
 kindred creatures which we call society would 
 resolve into a arena of bears and wolves and 
 tigers, where only a greater or less amount of 
 murder could give rise to any social distinc- 
 tion. 
 
 There is one special utterance of the emo- 
 tional element in the human being which 
 demands special mention — this is reverence. 
 How is this connected with love 1 Naturally 
 enough. The sympathetic feeling which binds 
 being to being in this vast and various world 
 will be called for the most frequently between 
 equals, or persons acting on the same plat- 
 form of social intercommunion. But with 
 this familiar range the reaching grasp of this 
 godlike passion may not be contented ; it 
 descends eagerly to the lower and lowest 
 regions of social interdependence ; and in this 
 not unfrequent field of its exercise, it is called 
 pity and compassion. On the other hand, 
 when it mounts to a higher platform of kindly 
 recognition, it stands before the general eye as 
 respect and reverence ; and when striving 
 upwards to the highest, it takes the attitude 
 of worship and adoration, and finds its social 
 
no WOMEN 
 
 expression in the practice of piety and the ser- 
 vices of religion. In this region its nature at 
 least to the outward eye is so changed, that 
 instead of the love of God it is in Scripture 
 frequently called the fear of God. This, how- 
 ever, is only one aspect of the upward emotion. 
 In religion as in all other fields of ethical life, 
 " perfect love casteth out fear ; " and just as 
 in the family relation of common life, a 
 certain reverential fear must always be mixed 
 up with the love which a good child cherishes 
 to a kind father, so in the kindred relation of 
 the whole human family to the All-Father of 
 the Universe, the same kindly tempering of 
 grateful familiarity with loyal fear will prevail. 
 So explained, woman, just because she is 
 the more loving creature, is at the same time 
 the more reverential, and the more religious 
 presentment of the human type. To the 
 honour of the sex be it stated, that a well- 
 conditioned woman is as distinctly a religious 
 creature as a bird is a winged creature and a 
 dog a racing creature. So much so indeed, 
 that while a professed atheist among bearded 
 men is only a fool, a female atheist, like 
 Harriet Martineau, is a monster, as much as a 
 bird without wings or a fish without fins. 
 
 Such being the moral constitution of the 
 more loving and lovable half of the human 
 type, her sphere of action in the interplay of 
 human forces, called society, can be given 
 without the slightest difficulty in a very few 
 words. In all those spheres of benevolent 
 activity which spring so naturally from the 
 
WOMEN HI 
 
 inspiration of Christian love, women will be 
 prime movers, whether it be feeding the 
 hungry, clothing the naked, or instructing the 
 ignorant. Their kindly hand will never be 
 wanting ; and if they do not always appear 
 publicly as leaders and directors of charitable 
 institutions, they will often be found to have 
 been the original instigators of plans of social 
 amendment, of which their male partners 
 assumed the advocacy and usurped the praise. 
 Specially in this connection it will be found 
 that, while his pulpit ministrations and 
 church business of various kinds keep the 
 evangelical action of the minister of a parish 
 more in the public eye, a great deal of the 
 most valuable parochial work, such as the 
 kindly visitation of the sick, the motherly 
 superintendence of the young, and the many 
 small acts of attention that bind the lower 
 classes to the upper, are performed more 
 efficiently by the minister's wife than by the 
 minister. This fact alone, growing as it does 
 out of the inmost nature of womanhood, 
 places in the strongest light the absurdity 
 of the Popish doctrine of the celibacy of the 
 clergy. An unmarried priest will be like any 
 other unmarried person of the bearded sex, 
 only half a man, and be more apt to pamper a 
 lofty sacerdotal conceit, than to rouse a kindly 
 human affection. In all the devout exercises 
 and deeds of pious sisterhood that belong 
 to the essence of an efficient Christian Church, 
 women must ever be the most efficient in- 
 struments of clerical government; and it is 
 
1 ] 2 WOMEN 
 
 better to have known their value from the 
 experience of domestic life, than to demand 
 their help from the lofty platform of clerical 
 dignity. Not every leader of a spiritual army, 
 such as Moses, may know to lead the people in 
 a song of victory for the horse and the rider 
 whom his powers may have thrown into the 
 sea; but if he is a wise man as well as a 
 strong general he will know where to find a 
 Miriam, a prophetess who will sing the paean 
 to his progress, and march forth with timbrel 
 and harp, and an array of patriotic maidens 
 to dance a sacred dance of triumph before the 
 Lord. 
 
 So much for the emotional sweetness of the 
 fair sex, which in the sphere of religion gives 
 the seasoning to the spiritual food of the soul 
 that would loose the best part of its relish 
 without it. But this is not all. Though it is 
 not in woman's normal sphere to go forth like 
 David, and encounter a giant Philistine in 
 open field of battle, yet she has the divine 
 force in her which will on occasion make her 
 burst forth into floods of sentiment, and dash 
 into deeds of noble venture that may rank 
 proudly with the most highly vaunted achieve- 
 ments of soldiership in the stronger sex. 
 History is full of such acts of female heroism ; 
 and Joan of Arc in our French wars is in no 
 wise a solitary instance of a peasant girl not out 
 of her teens, under the influence of a purely 
 female inspiration, performing deeds of valour 
 which put the whole military strength of 
 court and country to shame. These noble 
 
irOMEX 113 
 
 eruptions of more than masculine manliood 
 in the feebler sex could not fail to excite the 
 admiration of the ancient classical writers, both 
 Greek and Eoman. Tacitus (Hist. ii. 18) in 
 his account of a victory gained by Civilis the 
 leader of the Batavians in a rebellion which 
 they raised against the Romans in the reign 
 of Vespasian, has a remarkable passage — 
 
 " Civilis," he says, " surrounded by the standards 
 of the captive cohorts, with, the design on the one 
 hand of planting the recent glory of his arms before 
 the eyes of his soldiers, and on the other hand that 
 his Eoman adversaries might be terrified by the 
 fresh memory of their defeat, ordered his mother 
 and sister, with the wives and little children of his 
 men, to take their station in the rear of his army, 
 serving at once as a stimulus to further success anil 
 a reproacli if they should be beaten ; and the whole 
 field resounded with the war-song of the women." 
 
 Specially Plutarch, in his interesting essay on 
 the virtues of women, has a long array of 
 authenticated stories, in which the women not 
 ■only by their presence on the field of battle 
 fill the brave with courage and the cowards 
 with shame, but actually march into the front 
 and decide the fate of the day. Of the Gauls, 
 he tells us that before their descent into Italy 
 they had been weakening their strength by 
 internal dissensions, clan against clan, as the 
 Irish were when conquered by our second 
 Henry. Perceiving the evil to which these 
 domestic quarrels had led, the Gallic women, 
 throwing themselves between the armed com- 
 I 
 
114 WOMEN 
 
 batants, produced such a reconciliation and 
 unity of counsel that for ever afterwards the 
 custom remained of never declaring war 
 without holding a council of which the women 
 should be members. Of the Persian women, 
 to a like effect, he tells us that when, in his war 
 against the Medes in the time of Astyages, 
 the army of Cyrus had been repulsed and were 
 fleeing in haste to the city, they were met by 
 the women with the cry : Out on yoii poltroons ! 
 if you flee, you shall iwt enter whence ye went out ; 
 and with this noble burst of indignation they 
 turned the men back into their ranks and 
 gained the day. Yet again, the same great 
 biographer narrates of an Argive woman, 
 Telesilla, a poetess, that when Cleomenes, 
 King of Sparta, at the head of a stout army 
 of that nation of soldiers, was approaching 
 near to the city, she in a moment of divine 
 (Sat/ioytos) boldness, putting herself at the 
 head of the women of the city, marched to the 
 ramparts, occupied the walls, and drove the 
 invaders back into their tents. In memory of 
 this noble exploit the Argives celebrated a 
 feast in the fourth month of every year on the 
 day of the battle, in which the women 
 appeared clad in male attire, tunic and plaid, 
 while the men disported themselves in the 
 stole and the veil that belonged to the gentler 
 sex. Would it were ever so ! that the dress 
 might always proclaim the character, and no 
 lion's skin give even a momentary look of 
 boldness to an ass. 
 
 But woman is not merely an emotional 
 
WOMEN 115 
 
 creature ; as a human being she is also reason- 
 able and intellectual ; and without reason her 
 noblest emotions would evaporate into smoke. 
 She must always know where she is ; and how 
 she is to use her circumstances, shape her 
 course, and control her impulses. We have 
 therefore to inquire in what fashion this 
 directing and regulating force, necessary to all 
 sane human action, exhibits itself in the fair 
 sex. Nor will the answer be difl&cult. Follow- 
 ing out the principle of balance, above accentu- 
 ated, the woman must seek to develop her 
 intelligence primarily in those fields where 
 her emotional nature finds its most ample 
 gratification, while at the same time she 
 trains herself to adopt as much of the in- 
 tellectual strength of the less emotional sex 
 . as may be consistent with the dominance of 
 her more engaging type. In preserving this 
 balance and achieving this complement, it is 
 evident that the natural instruments of female 
 culture are poetry and music and the fine arts 
 generally, for to them the emotional capacity 
 belongs as naturally as the blossom to the lily 
 and the flower to the rose. No doubt there 
 is a sort of poetry that has no root in reality, 
 being in fact mere coloured mists of fancy 
 which amuse the eye for a moment, and then 
 vanish into vacuity ; and with this women of 
 an inferior type may be content, but the 
 poetry which we speak of here as the 
 appropriate form of a well-rounded intel- 
 lectual culture in the fair sex has its firm root 
 in reality and its ripe fruit in wisdom ; a 
 
116 WOMEN 
 
 poetry adding wings to the soul, like a bird 
 for the nonce, but not depriving it of its firm 
 terrestrial footing. The creeping thought of 
 the soul in prose, becomes a bird the moment 
 it begins to sing ; and all poetry, as we see in 
 Homer, is naturally voiced with song, just as 
 the music of the birds in spring comes 
 forth with the green buds of May. Taken in 
 this wider sense poetry means a great deal 
 more than the mere stringing together of 
 dainty fancies and sonorous rhymes. The 
 materials of a poetry of culture must be 
 gathered from large fields of nature and life ; 
 and for this purpose the observant faculties, 
 the memory and the imagination, must be 
 brought largely into play. The sympathy 
 which we noted above as so strong in the 
 female character, is not only a power which • 
 draws soul to soul in the human circle, but in 
 the sphere of poetry it sends friendly hands 
 forth to know and to embrace all that is 
 beautiful and striking in the living picture 
 gallery of God, which we call Nature. In 
 harmony with this we find that the observant 
 faculty in the fair sex is differentially strong. 
 The eye of a woman has a nice range and a 
 curious subtlety which fastens eagerly on 
 beauties and blots that escape the ruder and 
 the less discriminating glance of the male. 
 Natural history therefore in all its branches, 
 and drawing as the special training instrument 
 for observation, will form a prominent subject 
 in the programme of education for young 
 women; and with these will naturally be 
 
WOMEN 1 1 7 
 
 associated a living memory and a living imagina- 
 tion, faculties of primary importance to the 
 healthy action of a cultured mind, but alas ! 
 ho"w often neglected or cheated of their proper 
 place in the educational tactics of our age, 
 in which the living glory of the faculties is 
 habitually sacrificed to the vexing of the eyes 
 with the record of dead books, and cramming 
 the brain with strange detail of useless know- 
 ledge. But for the culture of the complete 
 woman, human history, or history commonly 
 so-called, is even of more importance than the 
 furnishing the picture gallery of the imagina- 
 tion with rich memories of living types of 
 natural beauty ; but to have this educational 
 virtue it must be taught in a moral and 
 spiritual way, not as a mere array of sequent 
 facts and calculated dates, but in portraits of 
 truly great men, such as David, King of Israel, 
 St. Paul, Akbar the Mogul Emperor, Martin 
 Luther, and John Knox, as they lived and 
 moved in the foreground of the societies which 
 their formative genius stamped with the type 
 of a noble nationality. 
 
 "With pure science, and spheres of intel- 
 lectual action and curious remark, which have 
 nothing or little of the emotional element in 
 their constitution, the sympathetic sex, in the 
 general case, can have little to do, except of 
 course in special cases when a beardless woman 
 may be more purely intellectual than a bearded 
 man. Up to a certain point also, and in a 
 certain degree as a corrective to the one- 
 sidedness of a purely emotional culture, an 
 
118 WOMEN 
 
 initiation into these severe sciences belongs to 
 the young of both sexes. Mathematics, for 
 instance, though I have been wont to define it 
 as the measure of all things and the substance 
 of nothing, is nevertheless highly useful, and 
 that in two respects, first because when its 
 unsubstantial conclusions are applied to the 
 measure of existing forms and forces of which 
 the beautiful order of the world is made up, 
 they become practically of the utmost value 
 in all exact knowledge of natural phenomena ; 
 and again, because even when unapplied in the 
 pure formal array of their propositions, they 
 give to the disciplined mind a living feeling of 
 that law of necessary sequence so constantly 
 sinned against in the loose and illogical 
 conclusions of social intercourse. For the same 
 reason pure logic and metaphysics, if not, as is 
 too often the case in Scotland, practised by 
 crude and unripe minds, may have their place 
 in a well-ordered scheme of female education ; 
 though, of course, any prominence of mere 
 logical argumentativeness, if it mars even the 
 march of a gentleman's talk, is absolutely 
 destructive of the fragrant grace that ought to 
 flow from the lips of a fair lady. 
 
 There is one field of literary action peculiarly 
 fitted for the development of the female faculty, 
 which deserves special mention. It is the field 
 of fictitious narrative commonly called novels, 
 a field in which it is needless to say that not 
 a few of the noblest women of the present day 
 have reaped well-earned laurels. What is a 
 novel? It is a fiction of human life and character, 
 
WOMEN 119 
 
 the very sphere in which a sympathetic crea- 
 ture will naturally disport, with pleasure to 
 herself and benefit to mankind ; and though, 
 of course, this field is equally open to the man, 
 the woman, with her special magic of love, will 
 be able to touch many senses more nicely, and 
 to unmask not a few dangerous deceits more 
 tenderly than a man. In this view a good 
 novel — for I speak not of stories worked out 
 in strong colours for the sensational delight of 
 the hour — a good healthy-minded novel will be 
 the best sermon ; for it will tell of many 
 serious things, and slippery chances, of which 
 the pulpit, from various causes, is habitually 
 shy. And not only a sermon, but a drama 
 also, as any one may see in the stage adapta- . 
 tions from Scott's novels ; a good novel, in fact, 
 always containing the essential materials that 
 make a good drama ; and the dramatic form of 
 the story, in the hands of a skilful disposer, 
 will be more effective than the prose narrative ; 
 obviously because the stage at once strips the 
 story of long pendicles of talk with which it 
 ■ may be encumbered, and presents its more 
 striking features, in a sequence of speaking 
 realities, with which no bookish narrator can 
 compete. The stage will thus become the 
 right hand of the pulpit ; and if it has not 
 been so always, and specially in Scotland 
 never has been so, it was not the fault of 
 the instrument but of the handler who refused 
 to use it. 
 
 So much for the arena of literary activity in 
 the present age so widely occupied by the fair 
 
120 WOMEN 
 
 sex. But all women are not literary, however 
 well fitted for life ; and here comes the ques- 
 tion : for domestic life only and the quiet but 
 all- important sphere of motherhood, or for 
 public life also in all or any of its depart- 
 ments ? Can a woman be a preacher ? Might 
 a lady be a bishop ? Could a lady be a lawyer, 
 a doctor, a prescriber of drugs, or a surgeon ? 
 ^lay she be a professor in a university, a head- 
 master in a school 1 And above all may she 
 be a politician, and an M.P. ? These are serious 
 questions ; and as they are seriously asked at 
 the present hour, deserve to be seriously 
 answered. 
 
 In answering this question we are met on 
 the threshold with a deeply-rooted social in- 
 stinct, and a very high apostolic authority. 
 The instinct declares that the sphere of 
 woman is more domestic than public, more 
 within the house than without, and St. Paul, 
 not less strongly, that women should not 
 take any prominent part in the prophesying, 
 or, as we would say, preaching that belongs to 
 the public assemblies of the Christian Church. 
 His words are particularly strong, " The head 
 of the woman is the man," says he ; " the man 
 is the image and glory of God, but the woman 
 is the glory of the man" (1 Cor. xi.) In this 
 doctrine the student of the Greek drama will 
 find himself forcibly reminded of the train of 
 argument by which the combined wisdom of 
 Apollo and Pallas, in the Aeschylean play, 
 gives a verdict in favour of the son who had 
 executed vengeance on the wife who had 
 
JVOMEN 121 
 
 murdered her husband, rather than in favour 
 of the wife who had been murdered by her 
 son. The real head of family life is the father, 
 not the mother, and in a contention betwixt 
 the two the cry for the avenging justice of 
 Jove, according to Greek ideas, will rise up 
 louder in behalf of the injured male. But the 
 Apostle is not content with this assertion of 
 the general relation of inferiority in which 
 nature, or to use his more pious phrase, God 
 has placed the woman. In a subsequent 
 chapter he descends to particulars : " Let your 
 women keep silence in the churches : let them 
 be under obedience : and if they wish to learn 
 anything, let them ask their husbands at 
 home : for it is a shame for a woman to speak 
 in the church." These are strong words ; and 
 it cannot be denied that a very general senti- 
 ment, founded on a healthy human instinct, 
 responds in our day, in the most unqualified 
 fashion, .to this teaching of the greatest of the 
 Apostles. There is a native modesty in the 
 weaker sex, it is felt, that should keep them 
 aloof from any appearance on the noisy and 
 contentious and often rude platform of public 
 life. In this sentiment there is doubtless a 
 great amount of truth ; but all general maxims 
 are liable to exceptions, and are true only when 
 they keep within their proper sphere, and do 
 not attempt to shake themselves loose from 
 the conditions of time, place, and circumstances 
 out of which they arose. In this view it is of 
 importance to remark that the Bible is not a 
 book in the same sense that Aristotle's Ethics 
 
122 WOMEN 
 
 is a book, or a treatise on the law of marriage 
 is a book ; it is a collection of books extending 
 over a jjeriod of more than two thousand years, 
 growing out of local roots, and coloured by the 
 peculiarities of time and place under which they 
 arose. In this respect the difference, or rather 
 antagonism, between the books of the Mosaic 
 law and the records of gospel teaching, are felt 
 by every student of the sacred volume ; no one 
 is surprised to find certain rites and ordinances 
 made of primary importance in the book of 
 Leviticus, which the gospel of Jesus has swept 
 away as so many weeds encumbering the 
 growth of the mature plant of Christian 
 ethics ; but not every reader of the New 
 Testament is careful to consider that the 
 direct words of Christ, in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, and other places of the Gospels, pro- 
 nounced as applicable to all times and places, 
 as essential chapters of the evangelic law, are 
 one thing, and the special rules of the Apostles, 
 in regulating the conduct of the early churches, 
 another and a very different thing. Let us 
 consider how this applies to the Apostolic 
 Epistles generally, and specially to the first 
 Epistle to the Corinthians with which we are 
 here concerned. Any one may see that the 
 prominence given to faith in the Epistle to the 
 Eomans, as to works in the Epistle of James, 
 was caused by the dominance of certain one- 
 sided and narrow conceptions of Christian 
 truth, in the churches to which these letters 
 were addressed ; and no person who does not 
 take this difference into consideration can 
 
WOMEN 123 
 
 succeed, either in understanding the argument 
 as originally put, or knowing how to apply it 
 to cognate conceptions entertained by shallow 
 readers of the sacred volume at the present 
 day. Now the Corinthians, the inhabitants of 
 a very wealthy, luxurious, and dissolute city, 
 were, as is evident from the whole train of this 
 Epistle, a very disorderly and ill-conditioned 
 Church, and disgraced by some of the most 
 glaring offences against our vulgar morality, 
 crying loudly for apostolic reprehension. Nor 
 was Paul the man to spare the use of the 
 strongest terms, and no doubt with the most 
 perfect wisdom, in reprehension of the then 
 condition of the early congregations of be- 
 lievers. In an infant church, on which the 
 uncharitable eye of the whole Heathen and 
 Jewish world rested, nothing could be more 
 dangerous than the existence of a disorderly 
 congregation of both sexes, in which any man 
 or woman could rise in the fervour of a hasty 
 inspiration, with a song or a sermon, in all 
 sorts of understood and not understood 
 tongues, and excite a whirl and a hubbub of 
 confused prophesying. Women especially, 
 from the dominance of the emotional element 
 in their constitution, would be liable to put 
 themselves forward in the van of such pro- 
 phetic excess ; and the prominence of the more 
 reticent sex in such interspersed explosions 
 could not fail to create a scandal extremely 
 injurious to the character of the Church. The 
 Apostle Paul, therefore, was fully justified in 
 stating the doctrine of the natural position of 
 
124 iruMEN 
 
 woman in the strong terms quoted above. In 
 the main it always was, and always must be 
 true, that even in the administration of family 
 affairs, the man is the head of the woman ; let 
 her be content to have the heart, which is the 
 soul, and the hands which work the grace of 
 the domestic economy ; but outside this sphere, 
 in the clamorous atmosphere of public life, or 
 the platform of political wrangling or ecclesi- 
 astical thunder, the seldomer she shows her 
 face the better. 
 
 This in a general sense is plainly what the 
 A-postle means ; but when his sentence, " it is 
 a shame for a woman to speak in the church," 
 as specially applied to the circumstances, condi- 
 tion, and style of women in the early Corin- 
 thian Church, is attempted to be raised into 
 an absolute rule for all times and places, a 
 reasonable man will see good reason to dissent. 
 Should a woman be a preacher ? Can a woman 
 be a preacher ? That she can I know well ; 
 for one of the best sermons I ever heard was 
 from a lady, a member of the Society of 
 Friends, in the good town of Newcastle. Of 
 course a woman will not preach with all the 
 force and stern urgency of a bearded male ; 
 but she will have a style of her own, which 
 will have its place in the movement of the 
 moral world, as appropriately as the clear 
 wimpling brook of the valley has its charm 
 alongside of the foaming rush of the mountain 
 torrent. In the early times of the Judges, not 
 only men but women, as Deborah, the sister of 
 Barak, were prophetesses and judges of the 
 
WOMEN 125 
 
 people, and after splendid victories over the 
 surrounding heathens, came forward publicly, 
 like Telesilla, and other musical women 
 amongst the Greeks, to sing their anthem of 
 praise before the whole congregation, in a 
 fashion which St. Paul, with his inherent good 
 sense, would certainly not have disapproved. 
 
 Women therefore may certainly, under wise 
 regulations, preach in public when they have 
 the gift, and the occasion has a natural demand 
 on their eloquence ; just as we saw in the case 
 of the Gauls, that they might even draw 
 the sword and regain a lost battle to the 
 shame of the dastard males. Yes, preach, 
 certainly preach and prophesy ; on certain 
 subjects their special experience and their 
 special sympathy will make them much better 
 preachers than men. But should women be 
 official guides and rulers of the church, as 
 vicars and bishops in the Episcopalian Church, 
 and parochial ministers in the Presbyterian t 
 That is another question ; and brings in the 
 element of the capacity of women not only 
 for preaching and prophesying but for guid- 
 ance and government in the conduct of public 
 business. Deborah no doubt was a judge of 
 Israel as well as Samuel ; but she was an 
 exceptional character in exceptional times ; and 
 we shall think twice before we give her, as a 
 rule, either the priest's surplice or the lawyer's 
 wig. On the whole, I am inclined to think 
 that from the predominance of the emotional 
 element in their character, gifted women 
 are more fitted to stimulate and to elevate the 
 
126 WOMEN 
 
 society of which they are a part by the 
 contagion of their noble nature, than to take 
 an active part in the regulation and conduct 
 of public affairs — affairs in which great cool- 
 ness and stern severity are not seldom as 
 necessary as tender sympathy and gentle piety. 
 I would not, therefore, even in the less 
 worldly sphere of religion, desire to see the 
 fair sex habitually performing the public 
 duties of a vicar or a bishop. An eloquent 
 woman may often make a more effective 
 appeal to an assembly of sympathetic Christians 
 than the most powerful orator of the stronger 
 sex, and yet be utterly unable to deal with 
 discretion and discrimination in much of the 
 secular business which is apt to attach itself to 
 the official administration of spiritual matters 
 in the complex organism of modern society. 
 Generally speaking, I feel convinced that a 
 pious-minded lady will do much more effective 
 service in a Christian parish by the incidental 
 side work which she can suggest and conceive, 
 than by planting herself at the head of the 
 spiritual army and in the van of the battle. 
 And if the conduct of church business is thus 
 wisely remitted to the man in a sphere so 
 peculiarly feminine, there can be no mistake 
 in excluding her from the peculiarly masculine 
 profession of the law. No doubt a woman 
 has a tongue ; and in a jury case, where a 
 passionate appeal has to be made to an 
 impressionable audience, I could imagine no 
 more effective pleader than a woman ; but 
 jury cases connected with the strong expres- 
 
WOMEN 127 
 
 sion of ardent human feeling are rare ; and 
 for the general business of a barrister any 
 display of delicate feeling would be quite out 
 of place. Justice is cool ; and the daily 
 exercise of pleading in the law court is more 
 correctly described as a deft exercise of 
 intellectual fence than as a large display 
 of human affection. The professional habits 
 of a lawyer indeed tend rather to freeze than 
 to foster the growth of sentiment in the soul. 
 He has to do with stern enactments and 
 formal prescriptions, which are no doubt 
 necessary for the public good, but with which 
 anything like personal feeling or individual 
 sentiment has no concern. To the horse-hair 
 wig, therefore, and the stern brow of the 
 robed judge, no daughter of Eve will wisely 
 aspire. With medicine it is otherwise. From 
 the days of Agamede downwards, as in Homer's 
 song — 
 
 ' ' A skOful leech, and well she knew all herbs on ground 
 that grow," 
 
 women have been celebrated for their kindly 
 skill in soothing the smarts of the wounded, 
 and sweetening the sorrows of the sick. Their 
 especial training from the nursery upwards 
 points plainly to the medical profession as 
 peculiarly their own ; and, though some of 
 the preparatory studies for this benevolent 
 sphere of human activity are rather repulsive 
 to the delicate sensibility of the female sex, 
 and some operations of the surgical branch of 
 the profession may demand a force of arm and 
 
128 WOMEN 
 
 a firm grasp not normally belonging to gentle 
 maidens, the noble self-devotion, moral 
 courage, and practised self-denial of the sex 
 will lead them bravely through these diffi- 
 culties and arm them stoutly, if not for all 
 branches of the healing art, at least secure 
 them a large field of eifective action. The 
 success which they have achieved in this line 
 of benevolent action, known to the jDublic 
 by a few honoured names, must be regarded 
 as one of the greatest triumphs of our most 
 recent civilisation. 
 
 So much for the three learned professions, 
 so called, naturally because to their exercise 
 belongs a special intellectual capacity acting 
 in concert with large stores of historical record 
 or results of scientific research. But what of 
 politics 1 Is the conduct of public business not 
 a profession ; and if the practice of law justly 
 places a man in the foremost rank of the social 
 army, does not the Member of Parliament 
 who makes the law, which it is the duty of 
 the judge to interpret and to apply, exercise 
 a profession of a kindred character and of a 
 superior rank 1 Unquestionably ; and, if we 
 felt ourselves obliged to confess that the 
 guidance and control of public life in the more 
 feminine sphere of religion did not lightly 
 consort with the gentler nature of the woman, 
 much more must we say that the difficult and 
 slippery ground of governing a nation, and 
 the steering of the State vessel through the 
 boisterous contention of political parties, is 
 alien to the finest elements of the female mind. 
 
WOMEN 129 
 
 We shall say therefore absolutely that a 
 woman in a free state should not be a Member 
 of Parliament. But this is only one aspect 
 of the business. Though not a supreme 
 regulator, a woman is always a citizen of the 
 state to which she belongs ; and, if a citizen 
 in a free state, she is entitled to use the 
 influence which belongs to her station and 
 position in the social economy. If she asserts 
 her right to political influence in this secondary 
 form, it is difficult to see in the field of argu- 
 ment what objections can be made to her 
 claim. But in practice a consideration may 
 occur which, with not a few of the noblest 
 specimens of the sex, may have great weight. 
 Political life even in its secondary stages is 
 a troubled element, and the atmosphere which 
 it breathes is always more or less impure from 
 the hot steam and poison of selfish regards 
 which it creates. In .fact, from the greatness 
 of the stakes, and the dependence on an 
 unreasonable multitude on the one hand, and 
 a handful of lofty bribes on the other, there is 
 no sphere of public life, as a distinguished 
 statesman once said in my hearing, which 
 presents so many temptations to deflection 
 from the straight line of honesty as politics. 
 If so, it is a sphere from which the purer 
 nature of the more moral sex may justly 
 shrink. If her recognition by the State as a 
 unit in the final appeal of a contested election 
 could do no harm to the State, might not the 
 taking an active part in a struggle where 
 feverish passions poison the blood do great 
 K 
 
130 WOMEN 
 
 harm to her ? A danger certainly lies here. 
 Such is the rancour apt to be begotten in the 
 struggle for power and place which a con- 
 tested election practically means, that even 
 individuals of the stronger sex have been 
 known to abstain from taking part in the 
 fray. On the whole, therefore, I should 
 incline to leave it in the election of the fair 
 sex themselves whether they would wish to 
 take an active part in the choice of our legis- 
 lators. If a majority of them come forward 
 and make such demand, I for one should not 
 oppose it. It is their business, not mine. If 
 they will walk with silken shoes in dirty 
 puddles, let them walk. Only one thing I 
 would add ; that the feeling of the more noble 
 element in society should be distinctly known 
 and uttered, and when uttered might have an 
 appreciable weight in turning the scale of 
 public opinion, I hold to be quite certain ; 
 but this weight of the female sentiment 
 might make itself felt in many ways without 
 dragging the fair creature into the foul air 
 of party fever. Not to mention the influence 
 behind the domestic throne, which a sensible 
 woman may often exercise on a husband of 
 dubious politics, there are in the State as in the 
 Church not a few stages where a woman may 
 profitably appear without taking part directly 
 in a public struggle either as a counsellor or a 
 warrior. There are leagues, and clubs, and 
 associations of all kinds as free to the women 
 of all parties as to the admirers of D'Israeli. 
 One remark only remains. It has from a 
 
WOMEN 131 
 
 long series of precedents been a principle in 
 the practice of modern education to exclude 
 the fair sex from the advantages of the highest 
 academical culture, and to bar the door of the 
 universities against them as if their mere 
 presence there were a disturbance and a plague. 
 This notion probably proceeded more from the 
 fear of the bad manners of young men than 
 from jealousy of the talents of the rival fair 
 ones. But now that the march into the field 
 of medical practice has been formally allowed 
 to the more dainty sex, there can be no excuse 
 for acting on the monkish principle of forbidding 
 the association of intelligent young women 
 with young men in the intellectual gymnastics 
 of the university. If any danger might be 
 apprehended from the familiar intercourse of 
 the sexes, it is a danger that belongs in no wise 
 eminently to meetings for intellectual instruc- 
 tion, but as much, I fancy, or rather more, to 
 balls, or dress -boxes in theatres, in concerts, in 
 prayer-meetings, and mixed assemblies of all 
 kinds. Even in church a man may fall in 
 love with a fair damsel sitting" in the opposite 
 pew as readily as in an academical lecture- 
 room. For myself, I feel that this most 
 recent triumph of a large intellectual sympathy 
 over the narrow views of a secluded domesticity 
 will do as much to improve the manners 
 of young men, as to enlarge the intelligence 
 of young women. It is not the light and 
 flippant flourishes of ball-room fans that will 
 be given to court the atmosphere of grave 
 prelections and severe examinations on serious 
 
132 WOMEN 
 
 subjects. Young ladies of an intellectual 
 tendency and a Christian morality will knowhow 
 to maintain their own dignity in a class-room 
 as well as in a ball-room ; and their presence 
 in any respectable assembly will do more to 
 elevate the rude by their example than to 
 disturb the foolish by their presence. Wher- 
 ever women appear, except, of course, in times 
 of general corruption, they are the salt of 
 society. In the Gospels they stand prominently 
 as the most loyal followers of Him whose sad 
 honour it was to have been slandered by the 
 Scribes and crucified by the priests of the age. 
 And in the range of apostolic preaching that 
 followed after the resurrection, in learned 
 Athens, we find that, while stern Stoics and 
 light Epicureans combined to meet the great 
 Apostle with a rude " What will this babbler say?" 
 a woman named Damaris, following in the 
 track of a judge in the court of the Areopagus, 
 gave her name as a member of the infant 
 Christian Church in Athens ; and from this 
 small seed, under divine providence, there 
 grew up a mighty tree, to which, after the 
 lapse of nearly two thousand years, was 
 reserved the honour of freeing the most in- 
 tellectual centre of South -Eastern Europe 
 from the desolating tyranny of the Turks. 
 
V 
 
 ST. PAUL AND THE EPISTLE 
 TO THE EOMANS 
 
 Our beloved brother Paul in all his epistles, in which 
 there are some things hard to be understood, which 
 they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do 
 also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 
 
 2 Peter iii. 16. 
 
ST. PAUL AND THE EPISTLE 
 TO THE ROMANS 
 
 No thoughtful reader of the New Testament 
 can fail to have been struck with the specific 
 character of the Epistle to the Romans, as 
 compared with the other apostolic missives of 
 the same great man. His other letters may 
 be characterised generally as letters of kindly 
 sympathy, friendly advice, or, as in the Epistles 
 to Timothy and Titus, of church arrangement 
 and ecclesiastical business ; but this com- 
 munication to the Romans, though not without 
 an appendix so to speak of that sound practical 
 appeal for which the great Apostle was so 
 distinguished, is in the main doctrinal ; an 
 argumentative handling of the great matters 
 in dispute among the first Christians and 
 specially the Jewish converts, and a handling 
 also that does not shrink from contact with 
 some of the most subtle questions that belong 
 to the most abstract metaphysics. The only 
 other Epistle that can claim any affinity with 
 the Romans in this aspect is that to the 
 
136 ST PAUL AND THE 
 
 Hebrews commonly attributed to St. Paul, but 
 not without a felt weight of contradiction 
 from theologians of authority ; an epistle 
 however which bears a distinct kinship with 
 the Romans in respect of detailed argumenta- 
 tive form, though without the metaphysical 
 background. The special prominence given 
 to doctrine accounts for the great use made of 
 the Epistle to the Romans in the compilation 
 of all our creeds and confessions, especially the 
 Protestant, which in their very nature could 
 not but assume a systematic form, altogether 
 different from the purely epistolary style of 
 the Apostle John, or of our Saviour's teaching 
 in the Gospels. I shall endeavour therefore 
 to summarise this theological discourse shortly ; 
 an attempt which may be the more useful, 
 because Christians of the present day, like 
 myself, are much more concerned to measure 
 their daily conduct of life by the wise maxims 
 of the twelfth chapter than to trace the exact 
 sequence of the arguments in the main body of 
 the Epistle. 
 
 In the first chapter two propositions are set 
 forth formally as the basis of all "religious 
 teaching, both universally human and specifi- 
 cally Christian — first, that to any reasoning 
 mind the order and beauty of the structure 
 of the physical world necessarily leads to the 
 belief in a great ordering and unifying cause 
 which we call God. As soon might an army 
 march through the various steps of a plan of 
 campaign, leading to a glorious victory, without 
 a commander-in-chief : or the notes in a 
 
EPISTLE TO THE RO:\IANS 137 
 
 musical instrument leap into the nice sequence 
 of a symphony, without a Mozart or a Beet- 
 hoven to fix their places ; or a machine put 
 its wheels, boilers, and funnels into working 
 order without a James Watt or a Henry Bell ; 
 or again, the stones in a quarry shape them- 
 selves into the scheme and jointure of a 
 habited house without a master-builder, as this 
 goodly world of curious structure and com- 
 plex action be conceived as the result of an 
 infinitude of forceful atoms playing at blind 
 man's buflf with one another. This is the great 
 fundamental truth of all religion, acknowledged 
 alike by popular instinct, common sense, Greek 
 wisdom, and Hebrew inspiration. There is one 
 God, and Aoyos, or self-consistent, self-shaping 
 Eeason is his name. The detailed exposition 
 of this conclusion of all intellectual sanity, in 
 professional books, is what goes under the name 
 of Natural Theology, so honourably connected 
 in our literature with the name of Dr. Paley : 
 but, in fact, it requires no exposition ; to 
 doubt it is as if a man should desire to 
 formulate his belief in the stability of the 
 ground on which he stands. St. Paul, there- 
 fore, merely glances at this as a fact which 
 proved itself to every man with seeing eyes ; 
 but the moral sphere, in which the self-existent 
 spirit of order displays itself, may not be 
 equally manifest to all. Nevertheless to all 
 healthy minds it is manifest, and St. Paul does 
 not take the trouble separately to state its 
 application to the moral world of which he 
 was the apostle. Immoral men there no doubt 
 
138 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 might be in the moral world, men whose 
 passion blinded them to the moral order of the 
 universe depending on a reasonable unifying 
 cause, as much as the march of the stars, or 
 the growth of the green mantle of beauty on 
 the earth. Immorality in the social world, 
 like earthquakes, and thunderstorms, and 
 tempests of all kinds, is occasional and passing, 
 and does not in anywise trench on the funda- 
 mental truth that in both worlds order is the 
 law, and a law which commands reverence from 
 all who live under the controlling sphere of its 
 action. Therefore the Apostle is quite entitled 
 to say that as the invisible things of God from 
 the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
 being understood by the things which are 
 made, so the wrath of God is revealed from 
 Heaven against all ungodliness and unright- 
 eousness of men who hold the truth in un- 
 righteousness. Man is a social being j sociality 
 implies order : and order amongst social beings 
 can arise only from the action of that reason- 
 able love which binds all the members of a 
 social body together, and rejoices in the 
 reverential regard of that primal reasonable 
 love which made the existence of social beings 
 possible. To this reverential recognition of 
 the common source of all social order, selfish- 
 ness in all its forms, and specially that species 
 of selfishness which implies the usurpation of 
 the throne of reason in reasonable beings by 
 carnal appetites and fleshly lusts, is diametri- 
 cally opposed. It is at once a disintegrating 
 and a degrading force, and virtually manifests 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 139 
 
 itself in acts of open rebellion against the 
 supreme Adyos or reasonable authority in the 
 universe. So much for his second proposition, 
 which means in modern phrase that^religion is 
 the key-stone of the social arch, a proposition 
 which no thoughtful student of human nature 
 or human history can deny. Only one im- 
 portant remark on this head remains. It is 
 plain not only from this passage of St. Paul, 
 but from the general style and substance of 
 the denunciations of the other apostles against 
 the heathenism of their times, that it was not 
 so much doctrinal heresy in the modern sense 
 against which they launched their bolts, as 
 against the gross sensualism both among Greeks 
 and Romans, which found a justification only too 
 readily in the dissipation of the mundane forces 
 which so naturally spring from a Polytheistic 
 theology. No doubt with Homer or with 
 Socrates the supreme regulative power of the 
 moral as of the physical world lay with Zeus. 
 But if a man, fond of a glass of wine, got 
 drunk on festal occasions, or an erotic youth 
 indulged in sensual pleasures equally degrading 
 to himself as to the victim of his passion, it 
 was obvious to gloss over the offence by a pious 
 appeal to a Dionysus or an Aphrodite, a sort 
 of white-washing which under a strictly moral 
 monotheism would have been impossible. An 
 orthodox Jew might be a formalist, but he could 
 not stamp the name of God on pure sensualism. 
 So far well. The creed of the monotheist 
 gave not the slightest suggestion of a con- 
 secrated sensualism : but was he therefore 
 
140 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 practically free from those sensual vices the 
 familiar indulgence in which sinks a man lower 
 than the brute, and which in unguarded 
 moments with subtle insinuation have even 
 made a prey of the most saintly souls ? In 
 no wise. It is one thing to profess a perfect 
 creed and another thing to lead a perfect life. 
 St. Paul was a Jew himself, and knew only 
 too well of what stuff priests and doctors of 
 the law were made. Therefore he concludes 
 all under sin. As in the intellectual sphere 
 all men, even the wisest, are ignorant on many 
 points, or one-sided — which is a sort of half- 
 ignorance — in all, so in the sphere of self- 
 government and social action no man is 
 without blot and all men are sinners. This 
 is the Apostle's distinct contention. Next to 
 gross sensualism, self-righteousness is the most 
 common, and in some views the more dangerous 
 form of human sinfulness ; for it sets up a 
 routine of observances and the practice of 
 certain prescribed duties on the throne of an 
 arbitrary ideal before which no vulgar virtue 
 may stand any more than pencillings of a 
 schoolboy in the presence of a masterpiece 
 of artistic work. It therefore blinds vision 
 and stops progress ; and not only so, but 
 renders it more difficult sometimes to convert 
 a moderately good man than a glaring sinner 
 from the error of his ways. Such a shallow 
 self-estimation and blindness to the moral ideal 
 which Christ preached, and which Christ was, 
 St. Paul notes severely in the Jews, and 
 especially in the complacent conceit in which. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 141 
 
 cradling themselves, they habitually indulged 
 in the common sin of judging others severely, 
 and themselves either lightly or not at all. 
 But who are you, breaks out the Apostle, who 
 judgest another who may more properly judge 
 you ? Of these two, he who has the written 
 law and breaks it, and he who has no written 
 law, but finds it in his inward conscience and 
 keeps it, which is the more virtuous ? More 
 virtuous this latter, even if the other both had 
 the written and unwritten law and kept it, 
 inasmuch as this man had not the public sign- 
 post to point his way, and yet did. not wander. 
 What Christianity demands is a spiritual seed 
 that blossoms into the beauty of a holy life, 
 by divine power from within, not a forced 
 conformity with outward regulation in external 
 matters that can be legally defined. Judged 
 by such a low standard a Jewish formalist may 
 be a perfect man, hut not before God, who 
 alone judgeth all men by the perfect standard 
 of divine right, — subtle Greek, strong Eoman, 
 and legal Jew alike ; for there is no respect of 
 persons with God. 
 
 Hath then the Jew no advantage at all ? 
 "WTiy were they called the chosen people if the 
 choice was neither frora the possession of any 
 peculiar virtue nor leading to any special 
 privilege ? Unquestionably it was a great 
 advantage and a most peculiar privilege to be 
 entrusted with the oracles of God, oracles 
 destined in due course of the ages, under the 
 conduct of the chosen people, to spread their 
 vivifying virtue over the earth from east to 
 
142 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 west, and bring all nations under spiritual 
 subjection to a spiritual law as high above all 
 mere civil or sacerdotal laws as heaven is high 
 above the earth. My brethren, according to 
 the flesh, the Jews, says the wise Apostle, have 
 all reason to be thankful for this advantage, 
 and for this privilege; but an advantage is 
 possessed for the sake of being used, and a 
 privilege to be put into active . exercise, not to 
 be made occasion for a vain boast. And so in 
 the third chapter he repeats with stronger 
 emphasis the doctrine of the second that no 
 man is justified or accounted righteous before 
 God by works of formal law, but by faith in 
 the preacher of a spiritual ideal, the Lord Jesus 
 Christ ; and it is true not only now, but 
 always has been true in the very nature of 
 the moral world, that man is saved by faith 
 in a Divine Ideal, not by observance of a 
 human real. 
 
 So much for the doctrine of salvation by faith, 
 a doctrine which was prominently put forward by 
 Luther, Calvin, and other chief captains of the 
 religious Christian war in the sixteenth century, 
 as a contradictor to the Eomanist doctrine 
 of salvation by sacerdotally prescribed works, 
 prayer, penance, and such like ; and no doubt 
 rightly for the polemical need of the hour, and 
 quite in harmony with the same antagonism of 
 faith and works as here set forth by the great 
 Apostle of the Gentiles. In the court of 
 reason St. Paul and the Protestant theologians 
 are both right, of course when rightly under- ' 
 stood. Faith is opposed not to works from 
 
EPISTLE TO TEE ROMANS 143 
 
 faith in a moral ideal, but to works from 
 outward conformity to a legal ordinance. But 
 St. Paul was too sensible a man to be content 
 in arguing with prejudiced human beings with 
 mere logical accuracy. He knew that in the 
 gross men are governed in social matters more 
 by authority than by reason, more by persons 
 than by principles. He accordingly ' in the 
 next head of his discourse goes back to the 
 primal fount of their boasting, to Abraham. 
 Was Abraham, whom all Jews, and in fact the 
 whole east, look to with reverence, saved by 
 works or by faith t By faith unquestionably ; 
 for he served God faithfully as the father of 
 the faithful long before Moses was heard of ; 
 and besides, it stands expressly written in the 
 Jewish scriptures that Abraham believed God, 
 and it was counted to him for righteousness. 
 This instance shuts all mouths. Christian 
 faith is not a mere matter of intellectual 
 orthodoxy, but it is perfect trust and reliance 
 on one entitled to command ; and just as he is 
 a good soldier who believes in his commander- 
 in-chief, and follows him obediently in all 
 things, so he is a good Christian who believes 
 in God as the supreme director of human affairs, 
 and in Christ as the declarer of His will. 
 And so it is in all other matters. Politi- 
 cians prevail by faith in the leader of their 
 party ; adventurers by faith in the man who 
 started the adventure ; explorers by faith in the 
 captain of the exploring expedition ; all mechan- 
 ical workers, by faith in the Arkwright, or the 
 Watt who opened the field for their operations. 
 
144 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 So far we have had j)lain sailing ; whatever 
 the sects and the churches may babble and battle 
 about orthodoxies and heterodoxies in matters 
 intellectual or governmental, it is plain that 
 the faith by which Christians are saved 
 according to St. Paul is an essentially ethical 
 faith, an implicit trust in the captain of that 
 salvation which worketh by love, and approves 
 itself by deeds. But now we come to more 
 doubtful matters. In the middle part of his 
 Epistle the great Apostle becomes metaphysical ; 
 and in dealing with sin finds himself drawn 
 into the difficult question of the origin of evil, 
 and the more difficult one of liberty and 
 necessity in the formation of human purposes ' 
 and the issue of human fates. In the fifth 
 chapter, immediately after his triumphant 
 proof that Abraham, the father of the Jews, 
 was in spirit and power essentially a Christian 
 believer, he reverts to his main proposition 
 that all men are sinners, and can have no hope 
 of salvation, if works are to found a claim ; but 
 in repeating it he lays down a doctrine with 
 regard to the origin and issue of this moral 
 deficiency, which at once brings into the fore- 
 ground of the discussion some matters, as St. 
 Peter has it, hard to be understood, and which 
 certainly belong moretothe region of speculative 
 metaphysics than of practical piety. He traces 
 the general sinfulness of human beings to the sin 
 of the first father of the race, and death as the 
 special penalty of sin, paid by the whole race, as 
 the necessary sequence of the sinful taint which 
 they inherit from their primal sire. Now, a 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 145 
 
 very slight reflection will serve to convince the 
 pious reader that jn every view this doctrine 
 with regard to the origin and consequences of 
 moral evil is contrary alike to historical fact 
 and to our most sacred moral instincts. First, 
 with regard to death, nothing can be more 
 illogical than to seek for a special cause in the 
 case of man, for a fact that is bound up with 
 the universal face of life in its thousandfold 
 exhibition on the stage of animated existence. 
 "\Mierever there is life, there is death ; the 
 grass dies, the flower dies, the tree dies ; the 
 worm that creeps, and the bird that flies ; 
 every form and fashion of breathing creature, 
 from the mite and the moth to the mammoth 
 and the mastodon, as certainly as they come on 
 the stage by the bright mystery of life, so cer- 
 tainly do they disappear into the darkness 
 of death. Why not man 1 Does he not stand 
 on the same vital basis as all other terrestrial 
 life, by the vital conditions of air and food, and 
 growth and decay ; and why should he not 
 die 1 It is illogical, therefore, to conclude 
 that death came into the world by sin ; it came 
 into the world from a cause not far to seek ; 
 this, namely, that by disappearing from the 
 stage existing creatures might make room for 
 generation after generation to enjoy the 
 blessing of life which otherwise had been 
 confined to a few. Then as to sin ; what is 
 the cause of sin ? how did this vile imperfection 
 come into the world, the creation of a perfect 
 God ? Plainly because the finite creature is by 
 its nature limited in capacity, fallible in pur- 
 h 
 
146 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 pose, and feeble in self-control ; so that sin 
 belongs to his moral nature, as naturally and as 
 unavoidably as error and delusion to the sphere 
 of his intellectual action. There is another 
 doctrine that seems to flow from St. Paul's 
 metaphysics in this place, viz. that guilt can 
 be inherited. This is a monstrous doctrine; 
 no doubt the consequences of guilt may pass 
 from father to son, and from son to grandson ; 
 a man may so weaken his nervous system' by 
 the excessive use of wine or other stimulant, 
 that generation after generation shall suffer 
 from the effects of their ancestor's offence ; but 
 this is a misfortune for which the sufferer 
 receives the pity of the sympathetic beholder, 
 not the blame. All guilt is personal ; and as 
 in the case of a rebellion — say the Highland 
 rising of 1745 — any government would be 
 accounted savage and barbarous which should 
 not only extirpate the real rebels, but prosecute 
 with forfeiture and death the whole progeny of 
 the original traitors through endless genera- 
 tions, so certainly the idea of making millions 
 and billions and quadrillions of human beings 
 pay the penalty of death for the sin of Adam is a 
 conception fitted to extinguish all the risings of 
 filial love in his human children to the great 
 Father of the human family. Let any man of 
 common moral instinct set such a God before 
 him as an article of filial faith, and he will find 
 it impossible to repeat " Our Father which art 
 in Heaven" with any honest significance, "^^laat 
 shall we say then? Did the Apostle of the 
 gospel of divine love really present such a 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 147 
 
 hateful and abhorrent object of worship 
 before the people whom it was his mission to 
 convert by the transforming power of the 
 gospel of love, or have we misinterpreted his 
 text ? Most sincerely do I wish that we could 
 accept this latter alternative. Most assuredly 
 he did mean what he says ; but he was evi- 
 dently led to this metaphysical paradox, partly 
 from his acceptance of the first chapter of 
 Genesis as the first link in a great chain of 
 literally • historical facts, whereas it is only a 
 philosophico-theological scheme of the con- 
 stitution of moral things in a historical form ; 
 and again, from a desire to contrast the shame 
 of the world and the human family from 
 Adam downwards with its glory under Christ, 
 who in this view is looked upon as the father 
 of a regenerate and restored world. This 
 contrast has also been carried into our modern 
 theological creeds, with which the imputed 
 righteousness of Christ is as familiar a pulpit 
 phrase as the guilt of Adam's first sin, and the 
 inherited curse upon the whole human race. 
 But righteousness, strictly speaking, can no 
 more be imputed than guilt can be in- 
 herited. It is not by acts of formal imputation 
 of the righteousness of the Saviour that Chris- 
 tians are rendered worthy of eternal life ; it 
 is by a living faith . in a divinely commis- 
 sioned teacher, manifested in the career of a 
 Christ^like life of devotion to the cause of 
 humanity and the ofi'spring of a Divine Father. 
 True it is as the most glorious fact in the whole 
 history of man that the son of Mary gave His 
 
148 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 life a ransom for many, and died both by 
 and for their sins ; but the language of Scrip- 
 ture, when using, these phrases, and specially 
 when, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, it talks 
 of Christ as a high priest, and His death as a 
 sacrifice and an atonement, is. to be taken not 
 literally, but merely as a convenient adapta- 
 tion to Jewish conceptions. To take such 
 language literally is simply to ignore the 
 whole style of religious teaching, which not 
 only in the Gospel of John, but everywhere deals 
 in allegory, similitude, and parable, not in meta- 
 physical, argumentative, and scholastic dogma. 
 And with regard to the main point of St. 
 Paul's doctrine in this metaphysical side issue 
 to his ethical evangel, it is some consolation 
 to know that it belongs only in a secondary 
 way to St. Paul, and that no trace of such a 
 purely dogmatic treatment of the origin of 
 evil from the father of the race, and the in- 
 herited curse from his primal sin, can be 
 found in the whole body of devout belief, 
 whether under the law or in the gospel texts. 
 Nor is there any reason why this view of so 
 abstract a point should be allowed to trench 
 upon the respect due to the utterances of such 
 an accomplished preacher of the gospel of 
 grace as St. Paul. Whatever his accomplish- 
 ments were, there is no reason to suppose that 
 he could keep his mind altogether free from 
 certain biases which belonged to him as a 
 man who had breathed the breath of Talmudic 
 tradition and Greek speculation in a fashion 
 of which none" of his fellow-apostles could 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 149 
 
 boast ; and the very breadth of this intellect- 
 ual equipment might lead him into a scholastic 
 play of argument peculiar to himself, and alto- 
 gether outside of his apostolic commission. 
 In common life it is easy to distinguish be- 
 tween the direct purport say of a royal 
 message, and the style in which it may have 
 been presented by an enthusiastic and elo- 
 quent messenger ; and so any theoretical mis- 
 conceptions about the nature of the plan of 
 salvation arising from the peculiar idiosyn- 
 crasy of St. Paul drop into the domain of 
 superfluous side-play, when one sits reverently 
 at the feet of Jesus, and feeds upon the divine 
 simplicity of His words. In His preaching 
 there is neither metaphysical subtlety, nor 
 sacerdotal ceremony, nor legal formalism, but 
 love rooted in reverential faith blossoming 
 into active benevolence, and growing up into 
 everlasting life. 
 
 We now come to the last point handled in the 
 theologico-metaphysical section of this powerful 
 Epistle ; a point which, notwithstanding its 
 specially abstract nature, has known to find for 
 itself a conspicuous place not only in the pol- 
 emics of Protestant Doctors, but in the personal 
 experience of private Christians. The point is 
 Predestination, a two-handed word, necessity 
 on the one side and liberty on the other. The 
 idea of the close connection of all things 
 and their mutual interdependence flows neces- 
 sarily from the conception of a first disposing 
 cause from which all sequence must proceed, 
 as necessarily as an arrow from the bow. It 
 
150 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 is a conception, therefore, specially accentuated 
 in all forms of monotheism, but it is not con- 
 fined to them ; as the use of the words Aura, 
 and MoTpa, and Motpat, Fate and the Fates, in 
 the Greek writers sufficiently proves. The fact 
 is that, to a thoughtful mind under any system 
 of religion, the feeling of human subordination 
 in all matters, and divine superintendence, is so 
 strong, as to the polytheistic Greek to have sug- 
 gested the simile of a woven tissue, of which each 
 thread is indissolubly intertwined with others in 
 the composition of a whole, the character of 
 which depends in no wise on the strain or 
 tendency of the individual threads, but on the 
 prescribing and directing power of the weaver. 
 Hence the Fates, three in number, denominated 
 KXwdw, Adx^o-is, and "At/dottos — the Spinster, 
 the Portioner, and the Inflexible ; and that 
 this applies with minute accuracy to the life 
 of man on earth as a whole, no man can doubt. 
 For, in the first place, though we call ourselves 
 persons, when compared one with another, in 
 respect of our existence we are pure pro- 
 ducts, and the fashion of our existence with 
 bone and flesh and nerve in a special bodily 
 presentation is as absolutely dependent on a 
 supreme creative power as the steam car that 
 thunders along the rail is the creation of 
 James Watt and the artificers that carry out 
 his idea. Nor is it only in respect of our 
 bodily machine, to adopt the simile, that we are 
 what we are, the creatures of a divine fore- 
 ordaining power. Our minds are predestined 
 as well as our fleshly framework ; our genius, 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 151 
 
 our tendencies, our capacities are given us, in a 
 style and in a measure which we may not refuse, 
 and wMcli may in fact, as every day's experi- 
 ence amply proves, be traced back, through 
 father and grandfather, mother and grand- 
 mother, and a long succession of generations, 
 forming what we call types of family and 
 national idiosyncrasy not to be ignored. And 
 not only so in the direct line of descent from a 
 typical ancestor ; but we are what we are by 
 an environment of circumstances, working daily 
 and hourly upon us, from which we cannot 
 escape. A Scot is a Scot, strong, stout, hardy, 
 and steady, by virtue of a certain inherited 
 temperament no doubt, but not less by the 
 hardness, and the unkindliness, and the sourness 
 of the sky under which he lives. Of course 
 here, as in other influential forces, evil creates 
 a good; the Scot becomes as hardy as his 
 climate, and makes himself felt as a member of 
 a working world, in not a few cases, where a 
 sunny Neapolitan or merry Greek might fail ; 
 still in respect of his environment he had no 
 choice. In his circumstances as in his blood 
 he is the slave, not the master of his fate. 
 What shall we say then 1 Is there no such 
 thing as liberty in the human world ? is man 
 a mere machine, a piece of cunning engineering, 
 with no more power over his motions than a 
 puppet has Over the wires by which his nimble 
 tricks and antic motions are controlled ? Not 
 so ; certainly not. Liberty in the case of 
 human beings is a word as true as Necessity ; 
 it is only different in its range ; just as we 
 
152 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 may picture a great circle with a number of 
 lesser circles within its circumference, each 
 with a central action of its own, but all under 
 the controlling influence of a resistless power 
 in the periphery, just like a fish in a pool 
 which may float about largely within the 
 bounds of the pool, but from the structure of 
 the confining embankment has no power to 
 leap out of its liquid encasement, much 
 less to change its scaly nature as a tenant 
 of the watery element, and become a sea- 
 gull to steer itself through the air, or a 
 hen. to pick its way through a farni-yard. 
 There is no contradiction here. Every day's 
 experience proves that a man may be perfectly 
 free within a certain prescribed sphere, while 
 beyond it he is and remains a perfect slave. 
 But what does St. Paul say to the matter, and 
 why does he enlarge so copiously on this 
 curious point of theological metaphysics? Is 
 it from a mere speculative curiousness to round 
 off his argument against the self-righteous 
 formalists with whom he had to do in the 
 previous part of the discourse 1 Not at all. 
 If he were to rise from the grave to-morrow, 
 he would leave it to German professors to 
 discuss such matters in their relation to theo- 
 retical man. He is a practical man to the 
 backbone, a soldier who does battle for the 
 cross, not a speculator who comes to discuss it. 
 His concern with this great question is simply 
 from its practical side ; from the side of 
 sentiment also, let us add, and noble emotion. 
 It is his heart's desire to Israel, the yearning 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 153 
 
 of his soul for the salvation of his brethren 
 according to the flesh that makes him feel 
 their exclusion from the salvation of the 
 gospel, and the non-election of the chosen 
 people so strongly. That they were a chosen 
 people, and had been elected to very peculiar 
 graces, could not be denied ; to them belonged 
 the adoption and the glory and the covenants, 
 and the giving of the law, and from them, as 
 concerning the flesh, Christ came ; and yet, in 
 spite of all they had been, and all they had 
 done, they were to be finally cast away, ex- 
 cluded from all fellowship with those Greeks 
 and Eomans who, in becoming Christians and 
 inheritors of eternal life, only reaped the fruit 
 of the seed that had been sown by the patri- 
 archs and the lawgivers of the Jews. What 
 could he say to this 1 The mere thought of 
 it stabbed him to the heart ; he could not 
 reverse the fact, and as a pious man and 
 a practical man he could only say that all 
 are not Israel who were of Israel ; that God 
 the great giver has a perfect right to dispense 
 His gifts when and where and to whom He 
 pleases ; and that His election could not be 
 made void from any change in His eternal pur- 
 pose, but simply from the rejection or the 
 abuse of His gifts by those for whom they 
 were intended. On this ground the Apostle, 
 casting his eye on the blessed retrospect of 
 Hebrew history, could only weep for them and 
 pray for them ; the penalty for despising the 
 Almighty's abounding grace can no more be 
 avoided than a right to share in it can be 
 
154 ST. PAUL AND THE 
 
 claimed ; let them repent, and the door of 
 grace may even yet be opened to all those who 
 are Jews, not outwardly in the flesh, but 
 inwardly in the spirit ; and as for you of the 
 Gentiles, he adds, who have profited so much 
 by that grace which its original donees refused, 
 know to profit by their example and fear to 
 abuse those privileges, which now come in such 
 unexpected overflow to you. Be not high- 
 minded, but fear. Where grace reigns, boast- 
 ing is excluded. 
 
 Only one point remains, on which a single 
 sentence will suffice. St. Peter, in the passage 
 from which our motto is chosen, speaks of 
 certain persons, unlearned and unstable, who 
 have perverted, to their own destruction, the 
 teaching of his beloved brother Paul in this 
 Epistle. What sort of persons were these, 
 and what was the particular form of their 
 perverseness ? They belonged to three classes. 
 First, those just mentioned as pre-eminently the 
 high-minded men who indulged in the luxury 
 of boasting of their privileges, instead of 
 nursing a sacred fear lest they might be 
 tempted to abuse them; second, those who 
 despaired of grace, and from hopelessness of 
 obtaining the favour of God, threw themselves 
 in self-abandonment into the arms of the Evil 
 One; and lastly, a class of persons eager to 
 interpret the freedom from the penalty of sin 
 preached by St. Paul as a freedom from the 
 practice of virtue, and who thought that the 
 indulgence of a few favourite sins could not 
 prejudice the election of grace to which they 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS 155 
 
 had been appointed by the foreknowledge and 
 the predestination of the Great Disposer. 
 Like a fond mother, they thought He would 
 not be severe on His pets. These three 
 sophistical abusers of his grand argument, only 
 too obvious considering what stuff human 
 sinners are made of, could not escape the 
 vision of St. Paul, and so he disposes of them 
 one by one in the way of formal argument 
 with all seriousness ; but perhaps at this time 
 of day, when no person could dare to show 
 his face as member of a Christian church who 
 was openly guilty of such degrading vices as 
 those persons whom we see denounced in such 
 ample terms by St. Peter and by St. Jude, 
 the best way to meet such practical abuses of 
 speculative doctrines is that blunt fashion in 
 which Zeno, the head of the Stoics, responded to 
 one of his servants who had been guilty of an 
 act of theft. The servant, as his biographer 
 informs us, though no philosopher, knew 
 enough of his master's teaching to have heard 
 the word diiapfi,iv7f, or Destiny, occupying a 
 favoured place in the scheme of the philo- 
 sopher's ethical terminology ; so when his 
 master lifted the scourge to serve his back 
 with the penalty which his hand had earned, 
 the offender forthwith cried out, "Why flog 
 me 1 in the words of your own teaching I . 
 was predestined to steal." "Yes," said Zeno, 
 " no doubt, but you were also predestinated 
 to be flogged." ^ No breach of the moral law 
 can be excused by a reference to the Supreme 
 
 ^ Diogenes Laertius, Zeno, vii. s. 23. 
 
156. ST. PAUL AND TEE ROMANS 
 
 Lawgiver; for those very decrees which the 
 offender pleads are framed on the principle 
 that life is the school in which a moral being 
 learns virtue, by the reward which accom- 
 panies the performance and the penalty which 
 follows the transgression of the law. 
 
VI 
 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 Of whom.the world was not worthy. 
 
 Hebrews xi. 38. 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 The greatest misfo"rtune that can happen to 
 any people is to have no noble deeds and no 
 heroic personalities to look back to ; for as a 
 wise present is the seed of a fruitful future, so 
 a great past is the seed of a hopeful present. 
 It is in this respect with peoples as with 
 families. Nothing stands in the world uncon- 
 nected with the past or unproductive of the 
 future ; and as certainly as it requires a 
 peculiar virtue in the child to resist the evil 
 influence of a worthless parentage, so certainly 
 will that people require a double grace from 
 Heaven in respect of future achievement 
 which starts with no elevating memories from 
 the past. But there is a greater misfortune 
 than this, and not merely a misfortune but a 
 crime — viz. to have had noble ancestors and 
 to forget them ; and this is a misfortune and 
 a crime which, I am sorry to think, has 
 happened and is happening in no small degree 
 to stout old Scotland. I meet every day, for 
 instance, with people, sensible, well-educated, 
 and well-meaning people, in Scotland bred 
 
160 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 and with Scottigli blood in their veins, who 
 know no more of the noble fathers of our 
 spiritual liberty, the Covenanters, than they 
 know of the social history of any outlying 
 regions of medieval or modern Europe ; nay, 
 they know even less sometimes ; for while a. 
 Polish Kosciusko or a Greek Miaulis may 
 stand in the picture-gallery of their brain with 
 a certain reputable regard, a Cameron and a 
 Cargill, if they are names whose echo has 
 asserted a place in their memorial records of 
 the past, are names not of cherished heroism, 
 but associated only with the type of an un- 
 tutored obstinacy and a sour religiosity of 
 which every healthy-minded man must be 
 ashamed. How is this 1 The Scotch have 
 not forgot Bannockburn, but not a few of 
 them are willing to forget Drumclog. Why 
 is this ? Was our spiritual independence, 
 asserted at Drumclog, a less important factor 
 in our national character as a distinct people 
 than our political independence achieved at 
 Bannockburn and Stirling Bridge ? Certainly 
 not ; as certainly as that a man's pocket and 
 his. property are not of more weight towards 
 the formation of a manly character than his 
 conscience. Then we repeat the question, 
 how was this ? Mainly because at Bannock- 
 burn the Scotch as a united people stood up 
 as one man against a foreign invader, whereas 
 at Drumclog Scotland was a divided people, 
 one half, the nobler and the more Scottish 
 half, fighting the baser and the Anglified half 
 in the form of a stern civil war. The opening 
 
THE SCOTTISH GOVENANTEnS 161 
 
 up of the succession to the English throne, by 
 the death of Elizabeth in 1603, though it had 
 the outward show of a great glory to the 
 northern kingdom, was in fact the first of a 
 succession of severe blows which the faithless 
 Stuarts aimed at our nationality. The Stuarts, 
 whatever they were originally in their native 
 seat, when transplanted to England were 
 essentially a base race. No sooner had James 
 I. got seated on his throne at Westminster 
 than he thanked Heaven that he was no 
 longer a Scot, and owed no duty to his native 
 country except to remodel its rudeness as 
 much as possible, after the type of the civilised 
 metropolis on the banks of the Thames ; and 
 his idea of civilisation was like that of Edward 
 Longshanks and his son, even that of conquest 
 and subjugation. He was now free from the 
 stout old barons and the stiff churchmen that 
 checked his grasp of power in the north ; he 
 was now lord of a people of a more docile and 
 facile respectability, and being so he deter- 
 mined to king it grandly. Accordingly he 
 set himself with the Anglified Episcopising 
 section of his courtiers who lived at his beck 
 in London to govern Scotland on English 
 principles, and gradually wean them from that 
 sturdy independence both in civil and religious 
 matters which made it so difficult for a 
 despotic monarch to deal with them. Where 
 there is a Court, a retinue of Court danglers 
 will always be found ready to sell the honour 
 of the realm to which they belong for the 
 smiles of Court favour, and the places and 
 M 
 
162 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 pensions that naturally follow it. So this 
 crowned pedant, being naturally a coward and 
 not willing to raise a positive civil war, con- 
 trived to bring together a picked lot of servile 
 lords, who in the year 1606 smuggled into an 
 essentially Presbyterian country a mongrel 
 form of Church government, half Episcopalian 
 and half Presbyterian, which in the eyes of the 
 despotising monarch, showed fairly as the 
 thin end of the wedge for introducing his 
 courtly form of Church government into his 
 native country, but which in fact only sowed 
 the seed of those ecclesiastical dissensions 
 which, commencing with the sacerdotal parade 
 of his unfortunate son, ended in the bloody 
 policy of his unprincipled grandson. A nation 
 divided against itself cannot stand ; and such 
 was the unfortunate divorce of court policy 
 from national feeling, in 1660, when Charles 11. 
 succeeded to the throne and the principles of 
 his infatuated father, that a war could not 
 but ensue between the Crown and the people, 
 in which either, as in Austria the Pope that 
 ruled in Vienna prevailed to crush the Protest- 
 antism that was budding in Bohemia, so the 
 sacerdotal Church in England would succeed in 
 trampling out the popular parity of the Pres- 
 byterian Church in the north ; or the people, 
 rising up in the full strength of devout man- 
 hood, would drive both crowned monarch and 
 mitred priest back into the soft regions from 
 which they came, and assert triumphantly their 
 native right of marching Godward without 
 orders from an earthly monarch, and reading 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 163 
 
 their own Bibles with their own eyes without 
 any enforced spectacles from an English 
 priest. And this most noble and most 
 glorious victory of spiritual independent 
 popular conscience over sacerdotal dictation 
 was gained by the fifty years' struggle of the 
 Scottish Covenanters. 
 
 Why then, to recur to the question with 
 which we started, why then are they for- 
 gotten, if not, indeed, thank Heaven, by 
 the mass of the people, yet significantly 
 enough by not a few ? Principally, I think, 
 from these causes : First, the Episcopal section 
 of the people, though, after the revolution 
 settlement in 1688, indisputably a small body 
 of dissenters in a distinctively Presbyterian 
 country, could not but look on the Covenanters 
 as godless deniers of a divinely sanctioned 
 sacerdotalism ; and as not a few of them 
 belonged to the upper and upper middle class 
 of society, their view of the great historical 
 struggles in which Scotland had been engaged 
 from the Reformation onwards, could not but 
 exercise a certain contagious influence on that 
 class of persons who are accustomed to look 
 to social position rather than to reason and 
 right in their estimate of public questions. 
 Some of them also, though the day was past for 
 prevailing with the sword, could wield the 
 pen, and paint the historical page in such 
 fashion as to hold up our noble army of 
 covenanted martyrs as a rude rabble of sour 
 religionists, equally remote from the dignity 
 of a clerical aristocracy and the graces of a 
 
164 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES 
 
 gentlemanly worship. This sort of talk, of 
 course, could have no slight effect with those 
 persons found here and there in all associations 
 of human beings with whom dress and a 
 certain play of polished phrase are of more 
 weight in the formation of a gentleman than 
 nobility of character or manliness of conduct. 
 But this style of elegantly traducing the 
 assertors of our Scottish spiritual independence 
 was a mere loose drift in comparison of the 
 fatal blow which our nationality received by 
 the union, not simply of the crowns as in 
 1603, but of the kingdoms under Queen Anne 
 in 1707. Not that such union in itself was 
 undesirable ; far from it. It was only right 
 that two peoples using the same language, 
 bounded by the same seas, and shaking hands 
 in familiar intercourse across the same river, 
 should take their stand before the world as 
 an undivided empire ; two separate kingdoms 
 united like two brothei's under a common 
 family name, or, to borrow a parallel from 
 commercial life, two partners in a common 
 business acting together with distinct and 
 well-defined personal rights. And in so far 
 this ideal of a fair and equitable union was 
 realised in the Scottish Act of 1707. By that 
 Act Scotland retained its separate Church, 
 its separate law courts, and its characteristic 
 system of school training ; but one important 
 element was left out in the account ; our laws 
 we might retain : but our legislation went to 
 London. The great metropolis on the banks 
 of the Thames was henceforth to be the centre 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 165 
 
 of governmental power and legislative control 
 not only for England and English purposes, 
 and for British and Imperial purposes, but 
 for the Scottish kingdom and for Scottish 
 purposes. This was manifestly a most unfair 
 and most unequal bargain, and tending directly 
 gradually to weaken and finally to annihilate 
 all independent Scottish life like a body with 
 the head cut off, though the heart might 
 still beat with Scottish pulses. How was this 
 most unfair conclusion come to 1 Simply 
 from the power that has often worked so 
 potently in political matters-^simply because 
 traitors were many and honest men were few. 
 In spite of the protest of Fletcher of Salton 
 and other noble fellow - protesters, Scotland 
 was sold in that Parliament by a company of 
 English Court-danglers, men trained in the 
 school of those whom a great historian char- 
 acterises as of an unblushing shamelessness, 
 and a venal servility unsurpassed in the history 
 of legislation ; ^ and by such base instrument- 
 ality the ancient kingdom of Scotland, with 
 its noble army of patriots that had made 
 it famous in the annals of European manhood, 
 was put before the historic Muse in the attitude 
 of deliberately cutting off its own head to such 
 effect that the ancient city in which the Alex- 
 anders and the Jameses of the noblest epochs 
 of our history held their seat, was thence- 
 forward no more the capital of Scotland than 
 Birmingham or York is of England. How 
 such a system must work in undermining the 
 ^ Macaulay, c. xiii. 
 
166 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 foundations of national feeling in Scotland 
 need not be stated in detail. Though the 
 mass of the people remained faithful to old 
 Edinburgh and John Knox, all who took a 
 prominent part in public business, as politi- 
 cians or statesmen, all who either were 
 somebody, or wished to seem somebody, with 
 wigs or without them, looked up to London 
 and Canterbury, not to Edinburgh and Drum- 
 clog. 
 
 So much for the lamentable change in the 
 political position of our beloved native country, 
 brought about by the ignoble nobility who 
 cunningly concocted the union so called, but 
 which practically has gradually been working 
 now for nearly two centuries as an absorption 
 of Scotland into England. But there were 
 also forces of native growth at work tending 
 to make Scotland with every generation less 
 Scotch, and specially to dethrone her noblest 
 heroes from their due seat in the popular 
 memory. Much has been said, and said 
 deservedly, in praise of the traditional Scottish 
 as contrasted with the traditional English edu- 
 cation from the Reformation downwards. To 
 the intimate union of Presbyterian pulpits 
 with Presbyterian schools we owe, no doubt, 
 that intellectual superiority of the ordinary 
 Scot over the ordinary Englishman, which all 
 who know the peasantry of both countries 
 willingly allow. But this superiority concerns 
 only the mass of the lower and middle classes 
 of society. On the platform of the highest 
 education, Scotland is as far below England 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 16Y 
 
 in some important branches of learning as 
 it is below Germany in the rich variety, 
 large catholicity, and profound research of its 
 intellectual range. Our Universities are not 
 only narrow in their range, but they stand 
 altogether without either foundation or super- 
 structure ; for the foundation of a University 
 education is a middle school, and its super- 
 structure a well-endowed system of scholarships 
 and fellowships which may afford to the young 
 academician the biennial and triennial period 
 of intellectual repose which is absolutely 
 necessary for the successful prosecution of 
 the higher branches of learning. What are 
 we to think of the Universities of a country, in 
 which after two or three years of beating through 
 Greek and Latin books, the platform of a bad 
 middle school was made compulsory on all 
 as a step to academical honours, while not a 
 single professor opened the view of the young 
 Scot to the inspiring scenes of military 
 daring and heroic martyrdom with which our 
 national story abounds ? The consequence of 
 this low standard and meagre furnishing of 
 our highest seats of learning has been, first, 
 that a young man may take the degree of 
 M.A. who may not know the difference 
 between St. Columba, the founder of our 
 Scottish churches, and Columbus, the dis- 
 coverer of America ; and again, that when a 
 young Scottish Hellenist begins to show such 
 an appetite for Greek, as to give hope that 
 the elementary brambles in that field may one 
 day produce berries, he is straightway sent 
 
168 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES 
 
 to Oxford, where he will learn many good 
 things no doubt, but certainly return, if "he 
 ever do return to Scotland, more inclined to 
 spin sentimental threnodies in praise of Claver- 
 house who died fighting for Popish James at 
 Killiecrankie, than to sing the Seventy-sixth 
 Psalm with young Hamilton and his noble 
 army of Covenanters who beat the same 
 Claverhouse at Drumclog. 
 
 After this cursory glance at the causes which 
 have contributed to throw a shade over the 
 brilliant exploits of those devoted men- to 
 whom Scotland owes as much in the field 
 of religion as to Bruce and Wallace in 
 matters secular, the way is now clear for a 
 rapid sketch and a fair estimate of their 
 achievements in that fifty years' struggle which 
 taught the three Stuarts in such significant 
 style that the title of king, whatever it might 
 mean in Turkey, in Britain certainly did not 
 mean a master, and that in Scotland not less 
 certainly a subject did not mean a slave. 
 
 The fifty years' struggle for freedom of 
 conscience, which has laid Scotland under 
 such a deep debt of gratitude to our heroic 
 ancestors, dates properly from 1638, when 
 the Solemn League and Covenant in defence 
 of the Presbyterian Church, already sanc- 
 tioned by King James I. in the Act of the 
 Scottish Parliament, 1593, was signed by the 
 most influential public men of the time, in the 
 Greyfriars' Churchyard, and extends to the 
 familiar date of the glorious Eevolution of 
 1688, under the guaranteed supremacy of 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVEXANTEHS 169 
 
 William and Mary. But there was a little 
 incident in the start of this noble struggle 
 a year before the formal swearing to the 
 Magna Charta of our national Church, which, 
 though it can readily be made to assume a 
 humorous turn in song, was in fact a very 
 significant and emphatic prelude to the great 
 drama which followed. This was the well- 
 known outburst of national indignation, in 
 the person of a woman called Janet Geddes, 
 and in the shape of a stool, which she flung at 
 the head of the reverend gentleman who was 
 officiating as the reader of an English liturgy 
 in the principal church of Presbyterian Scot- 
 land. To a mere liturgy as a printed form of 
 public prayer neither Mrs. Janet Geddes, or 
 whatever her name was, nor any other sensible 
 Scottish person of the more emotional sex, 
 would have made any such rude protest ; but 
 it was not so much the service-book, as its 
 manufacture in England under Episcopal 
 action, and its imposition on Scotland by the 
 dictatorial despotism of the head of the State 
 intruding into matters with which the State 
 has nothing to do, that roused the mettle of 
 the indignant dame. Her instinct in this 
 matter was in fact the first note of the great 
 civil war, which two years later broke out in 
 England, and ended, after a bloody contest of 
 ten years, in forcing the infatuated Stuart to 
 pay the penalty with his own head for his 
 high-handed intrusion into the sacred heart of 
 his people. If in England his offence was 
 more against the political than the eoclesi- 
 
170 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 astical liberty of the people, this only made 
 his offence on the Scotch side of the question 
 the more serious ; and the revolt of the stool 
 might have taught him, if anything could 
 have taught the son of a foolish father, to ac- 
 knowledge practically in the performance of his 
 secular function what that text means, where it 
 is written, "Eender unto Caesar the things that 
 are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are 
 God's." But this text from the mouth of the 
 Son of God, like not a few others, was too high 
 above the level of mortals wearing crowns to 
 be understood by the European kings of the 
 seventeenth century. The instinct of a poor 
 woman, sitting at a stall in the High Street 
 and selling apples to schoolboys, knew better ; 
 and so, while Charles was rewarded for his 
 temerity in meddling with spiritual matters 
 by the title of "martyr," conferred on him by 
 the adulators of his princely conceit. Dame 
 Geddes, on the spot where she flung the 
 prophetic stool, speaks to the ear of patriotic 
 record in these true words : — 
 
 AT OR NEAR THIS SPOT 
 A BRAVE SCOTTISH WOMAN, 
 
 BY PROTESTING AGAINST 
 
 THE FORCIBLE INTRODUCTION 
 
 OF THE ENGLISH LITURGY 
 
 INTO THIS CHURCH, 
 
 LAID THE FOUNDATION 
 
 OF CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 
 
 FOR THESE ISLANDS. 
 
 Into the details of the great English civil 
 
THE SCOTTISH GOVEXANTERS 171 
 
 war which broke out in 1639, and ended with 
 the decapitation of the crowned offender in 
 1649, and the period of the Commonwealth 
 and Protectorate immediately following, which 
 ended in 1660 by the restoration of Charles II. 
 to his father's throne, our present subject 
 does not require us to enter. It is with the 
 results of that struggle that the tragic story of 
 our heroic Covenanters more properly com- 
 menced. That the Scottish people should 
 enter into alliance with their English neigh- 
 bours in a common struggle against the union 
 of sacerdotal and secular despotism in the 
 person of Charles I. was only natural ; equally 
 natural that when, after the battle of Naseby, 
 he fled to the Scottish camp for protection 
 against his English antagonists, they should 
 hand him over to the party with whom he 
 had more directly to do. When, however, it 
 came to extremes, and the English, under the 
 stern captainship of Cromwell, proceeded with 
 a grand sweep of coercive power to put an 
 end at one stroke at once to the old English 
 hereditary kingship and the life of the king, 
 the native loyalty of the Scottish people, 
 combined with the Presbyterian aversion to 
 the extreme individualism of the English 
 Independents under the leadership of Crom- 
 well, caused Scotland to disclaim the policy 
 of the English Eepublicans, and put the 
 reins of State into the hands of the son of 
 the great offender. Charles II. was accord- 
 ingly recalled from Holland, whither he had 
 retired after the execution of his father, and 
 
172 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 under the presidency of the Marquis of Argyll 
 in the year 1651 crowned king of Scotland at 
 Scone. The Marquis, however, and the Scot- 
 tish people, knowing with whom they had to 
 do, did not put themselves under the headship 
 of the son of Episcopal Charles and the grand- 
 son of Episcopising James without a guarantee. 
 In public assembly at Scone, and under solemn 
 appeal to Almighty God, Charles swore to be 
 truly the native father, not the foreign master, 
 of his people, and to respect the right of per- 
 sonal conscience in his subjects as loyally as 
 they had acknowledged his right of succession 
 to the throne. How these vows were kept 
 we shall see anon. Charles was an altogether 
 worthless character. He did not know what 
 truth meant, and was as ready to play with false 
 oaths when they served his need as gamblers to 
 play with loaded dice. He did not know that 
 though a man may tell a lie in an extreme 
 case to save an innocent brother's life, no man 
 worthy of a brotherly greeting would tell a lie 
 to win a crown for himself. The world stands 
 upon Truth, as a tree grows from its root. 
 
 But if Charles excelled in baseness and in 
 lies, the Scottish people, when he was pro- 
 claimed in Edinburgh, welcomed him with a 
 display of vociferous and rampant loyalty 
 which might help to deceive the soul of such 
 a shallow Sardanapalus into the belief that 
 after all the body of the people had no stern 
 faith in their Presbyterian order, and would 
 gladly receive an Episcopal priesthood and an 
 English liturgy at his desire. Of course he 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 173 
 
 would readily find not a few of the ignoble 
 nobility of the age willing, for the love of 
 power, and also possibly with a side-glance at 
 their pockets, to desert a cause which they had 
 espoused for a season, more from political and 
 personal considerations than from a deep-seated 
 religious conviction. Accordingly Charles 
 found little difficulty in commencing his reign, 
 which can only be termed a continuous war 
 against the conscience and honour of Scotland, 
 by one of the basest acts of ingratitude that ever 
 marked the blood-stained records of political 
 contention. He trumped up a charge of high 
 treason against the Marquis of Argyll, the 
 very man who, as we have seen, received him 
 when he was a homeless outlaw from his 
 native England, and put the crown of a Pres- 
 byterian people upon his head. After this it 
 was easy to pick up an untitled clergyman 
 and scholar, and execute him as a criminal, 
 and hang up his head on the Nether Bow 
 port, Edinburgh, for the sole crime of having 
 preached against the despotism of the hier- 
 archy, and maintained publicly that with the 
 great majority of the unbribed Scottish people 
 he could find no bishop, but only Presbyters, 
 in the apostolic practice of the first Christian 
 Church. But the dignity of the Crown and a 
 decent regard for public feeling required that, 
 to this sacrifice of individual victims, a public 
 sanction should be given, by an Act of the 
 Scottish Parliament, declaring open war against 
 the religious liberty of the Scottish people, 
 and arming the monarch with the sword of 
 
174 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 merciless pei'secution against whosoever should 
 dare to think otherwise on sacred subjects 
 than his Majesty pleased. Subservient crea- 
 tures of Sharp's type were easily found ; and 
 accordingly an Act of a Parliament holden at 
 Edinburgh in January 1661, and another in 
 the second session of the same first Parliament 
 of Charles II., declared in no doubtful terms 
 his. Majesty's intention to stamp out by brute 
 force under polite hands the historical religion of 
 the country to which he had pledged his honour. 
 The wording of both these Acts was suffi- 
 ciently significant and prophetic of the bloody 
 scenes that followed through the whole reign 
 of this lawless self-pleaser, to the expulsion of 
 the treacherous and tyrannical line of the 
 Stuarts in the person of James II. In the 
 first of these Acts, an Act concerning Eeligion 
 and Church Government, as we read, his Majesty . 
 declares, in direct opposition to his oath at 
 Scone, that it is his full and firm resolution to 
 maintain the true Protestant religion in its 
 purity of doctrine and worship as it was estab- 
 lished within this kingdom during the reign 
 of his royal grandfather of blessed memory ; 
 and as to the government of the Church, his 
 Majesty will make it his care to settle and 
 secure the same in such a frame as shall be 
 most agreeable to the Word of God, and most 
 suitable to monarchical government, and most 
 complying with the- public peace and quiet of 
 the kingdom. Of course by this he means 
 Episcopacy, quite in the spirit of his foolish 
 grandfather of despotic memory, who, how- 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 175 
 
 ever he might have disported himself in the 
 year 1593 with his Danish bride beside him 
 in a fit of honeymoon humour, always acted 
 on the principle of " no bishop no king " — the 
 bishop being at his right hand to stamp with 
 the sacred name of God whatever tyrannous 
 decree might come forth from the profane 
 will of the monarch. In the other Act, 
 8th May 1662, entitled "An Act for the 
 restitution and establishment of the ancient 
 government of the Church by archbishops 
 and bishops," the preamble distinctly approves 
 the usurpation of right in spiritual matters by 
 the State, against which it was the great 
 glory of our Covenanting forefathers manfully 
 to protest, and in the long run triumphantly 
 to prevail. The words are : " Forasmuch as the 
 ordering and disposition of the external govern- 
 ment of the Church doth properly belong unto 
 his Majesty as an inherent right of the Crown 
 by virtue of his royal prerogative and suprem- 
 acy in all causes ecclesiastical." This doctrine 
 of the supremacy of the State in the matter 
 of Church government might be maintained 
 speciously enough by men who had been born 
 and bred under the traditions of the pre- 
 Reformation age, but in a man who owed his 
 crown and his life, when wandering as a home- 
 less refugee, to the loyalty of his Presbyterian 
 subjects, was beyond all precedent base. 
 
 This enactment of high-handed State-des- 
 potism would have been ridiculous had it not 
 been followed by deeds as decided as the 
 words of the enactment were unqualified 
 
176 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 When proclaimed at Glasgow, three hundred 
 and fifty ministers, with their congregations, 
 left their pulpits, choosing rather to deliver 
 the Gospel message on the free slopes of their 
 natives braes, without shelter and without 
 display, than in gilded halls with a commis- 
 sion from men whom they could not but look 
 on as the mitred slaves of an unholy usurpa- 
 tion. They shook the dust from their feet as 
 they left the floor of their dear loved House 
 of God to the tread of the intrusive Episco- 
 palian, and the heart of Scotland went with 
 them. Long years must pass, and streams of 
 blood would flow, before the native right of a 
 betrayed people should be able to assert itself 
 against the strong arm of treacherous king- 
 craft ; but the seed of unrighteousness when 
 sown will bear a fruit in judgment ; God is 
 not mocked ; and the sighs and groans of an 
 oppressed people not rising in vain will, in 
 the ripeness of the years, rouse the heart and 
 nerve the arm of the Avenger. 
 
 The first notable outbreak of the slumber- 
 ing wrath of the nation had its origin in the 
 west, the sacred territory of Scottish Church 
 liberties, and ended amid blood and tears 
 most lamentably in the green hollows of the 
 Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, trending from 
 the Lothians towards Peeblesshire and Lanark- 
 shire on the south. In the west and south- 
 west of Scotland, where the true pulse of ■ the 
 Scottish heart beat most strongly, bands of 
 soldiers had been sent by the Government to 
 keep watch over the discontented peasantry. 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 177 
 
 and specially to see to it that all the fines and 
 penalties that followed the non-acceptance of 
 compulsory Episcopacy should be duly col- 
 lected. In performing this function they of 
 course, as the servile instruments of a hated 
 despotism, comported themselves in no very 
 kindly fashion, and on one occasion they 
 behaved with such heartless violence to a poor 
 old man of the covenanting party as to rouse 
 the vituperative wrath of his neighbours, and 
 strike out a spark of resistance to the reigning 
 despotism which speedily burst into a flame. 
 In the mountainous neighbourhood of Kirk- 
 cudbright and Dumfries a regular insurrection 
 was organised, followed by a march through 
 Lanark and Bathgate to RuUion Green in the 
 Pentland Hills, about eight miles south of 
 Edinburgh. In making this march eastward, 
 with minds well furnished with the sacred 
 memory of John Knox and the Greyfriars 
 Churchyard, they no doubt expected that the 
 people of the country would rise up at their 
 appearance and shake the tyrant from his blood- 
 cemented throne ; but they were mistaken. 
 A sudden popular uprising, however strong in 
 patriotic emotion, is always weak in the face 
 of a regularly organised government. Edin- 
 burgh besides, in the year 1666, when this 
 movement took' place, was more in the power 
 of servile courtiers and merciless lawyers than 
 in any sense a representative of Scottish 
 rights and Scottish sentiment. Accordingly 
 we find that this premature attempt to shake 
 off the bloody yoke of intrusive Episcopacy, 
 
178 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES 
 
 instead of a brilliant start for the coming 
 wave of popular indignation against lawless 
 authority, ended in a fearful overthrow. 
 Though generaled by a gentleman of a good 
 Ayrshire family, the stout band of the patri- 
 otic insurrectionists could not prevail against 
 the superior numbers of the Government 
 army, headed as it was by a man, Dalzell of 
 Binns, in "West Lothian, the natural violence 
 of whose character had been trained to a 
 tiger-like ferocity in foreign warfare between 
 Muscovites and Turks in the East. The brave 
 soldiers of the Cross were beaten at Eullion 
 Green, and their defeat was forthwith followed 
 by one of those barbarous executions in which 
 the heartless loyalty of that servile Parliament 
 delighted. Eleven of the prisoners taken at 
 the battle were tried for high treason, found 
 guilty, and ordered to be hanged at the Cross, 
 and their heads and right arms to be cut off. 
 But this was not enough. The victors must 
 needs wreak their vengeance on one of the 
 least guilty of what they deemed a guilty 
 act, one who had no doubt travelled with the 
 insurgents from the west country, but who 
 was in such weak health that he took no share 
 in the battle, and left the army at Colinton 
 to seek repose in his father's house at Liber- 
 ton. The name of this victim was Hugh 
 M'Kail, a young man under thirty years of 
 age, handsome in person, accomplished in 
 learning, and powerful in speech. But these 
 qualifications were just such as made him much 
 beloved by the people and most obnoxious to 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 179 
 
 the ignoble nobles of King Charles's court. 
 Young men of ability are always most potently 
 stirred by the passions which belong to noble 
 manhood, and are most fearless in flinging 
 the bolts of a noble indignation against the 
 titled mercenaries of an enslaving dynasty ; 
 and if to these graces of soul a bodily pre- 
 sentment is added, in which the dignity of 
 the lion is united with the sweetness of the 
 dove and the grace of the antelope, the eye of 
 the sympathetic spectator will not be slow to 
 recognise behind the human mask of the ad- 
 verse party the diabolical compound of vul- 
 pine cunning and tigrine ferocity. The grand 
 offence of young M'Kail, who was a clergy- 
 man and a preacher, seems to have been that, 
 like the prophets of the Hebrew times, he was 
 not afraid to speak God's truth in the face of 
 man's lies ; and so in one of his sermons in 
 Edinburgh, following out the train of thought 
 in St. Paul's famous chapter xi. to the 
 Hebrews, he said the pious people had no 
 reason to be surprised at their suffering per- 
 secution ; for in all ages this was a trial the 
 faithful servants of G-od had to endure, 
 whether from a Pharaoh on the throne, a 
 Haman in the Council, or a Judas in the 
 Church. The meaning of this in those times 
 was too obvious to be mistaken. The young 
 preacher with the fearless heart and the tell-- 
 ing tongue was seized and brought before the 
 Privy Council, and exposed to the excrucia1> 
 ing torture of the boot. His legs were broken, 
 but his spirit stood ; he had nothing to con- 
 
180 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 fess except that lie believed in the Bible and 
 not in the bishops. And so he was tried and 
 condemned to death for high treason, and exe- 
 cuted in due form on the 22 nd December of 
 that misfortuned year. His last words on 
 the scaffold were "Farewell father, farewell 
 mother, farewell friends — welcome Heaven, wel- 
 come glory, welcome death ! " He spoke, and 
 tears of bitter sorrow dropt copiously from 
 the eyes of the beholders ; tears which, falling 
 into the soil of leal Scottish hearts, were the 
 dew from which at no distant date a rich crop 
 of patriotic manhood and divine retribution ^ 
 was to grow. 
 
 The public sympathy with the sufferers in 
 these scenes of State butchery, coupled no doubt 
 with the popular contempt for the actors in 
 such tragedies, led shortly afterwards to a 
 change of policy in the persecuting Govern- 
 ment ; but as they still stuck to the priestly 
 postulate that the head of the State is by 
 divine right the head of the Church, the change 
 to a more mild policy on the part of an 
 essentially unauthorised dictatorship could not 
 reconcile the parties. The so-called Indulgence 
 Act, passed in the year 1669, in its very name 
 implies a reserved absolute right which for the 
 nonce the party in power were willing for the 
 sake of peace to renounce ; it was in the form 
 of a permission to the ousted ministers to act 
 as ministers in the places from which they had 
 gone forth, under certain limitations and 
 marked social disadvantages, which allowed 
 the legal status and the secular privileges to 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 181 
 
 remain with the Episcopalians. By conditions 
 of this kind of course only the baser and the 
 looser style of Presbyterians could be moved. 
 They consented to serve under the existing 
 law, as barely tolerated, with the stamp of 
 servility on their forehead. But the mass of 
 Presbyterian dissent was made of nobler stuif. 
 They could accept of no terms from a treacher- 
 ous kingcraft any more than the Apostle Paul 
 could have accepted a firman to preach from 
 the Scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites of Jer- 
 usalem. They would preach in the free fields, 
 and breathe free air uncontaminated by the 
 breath of courtly gervility and monarchical as- 
 sumption that possessed the churches ; and they 
 would pour out freely their prayers from a full 
 breast, as' the time and the circumstances might 
 demand, not acting as mere recitative puppets 
 to the wires of a sacerdotal scribe in London. 
 
 This of course could not be understood by 
 the hireling courtiers and high-handed rulers 
 of the day. Matters went on from bad to 
 worse for ten years more ; pious people would 
 persist in having a free gospel preached on 
 their native heath ; and though no overt act of 
 rebellion was committed, the hatred of sacerdotal 
 tyranny grew every year more fretful and feverish 
 in their breasts, and they were forced in self- 
 defence to arm themselves with daggers as well 
 as with psalm-books when they held their Sun- 
 day services on the hills. This of course was 
 treason ; and, though it would not do to hang 
 up at every road-crossing the head of a godly 
 young man who had dared to follow the example 
 
182 THE SCOTTISH COVEXANTEES 
 
 of M'Kail in preferring a sentence from St. Paul 
 to a statute of Lauderdale, yet no opportunity 
 was lost of making the life of every Scotsman 
 unendurable who dared to have a conscience 
 for himself in the face of an unprincipled and 
 unscrupulous government. Thus in lack of other 
 servants to carry out his tyrannical will, Lauder- 
 dale, who in the year 1671 swayed the counsels 
 of the Episcopising Parliament, hired an army 
 of rude Highland caterans to come down and 
 ])illage and plunder the pious peasantry of 
 Ayrshire without mercy and without appeal, as 
 the wolves come down upon the sheep. Such 
 monstrous inversion of his sworn duty by the 
 State-shepherd could not but render a loyal 
 people like the Scotch more impatient and 
 more ready to re-enact at all risks- the em- 
 battled array at Eullion Green than live to have 
 their most holy convictions scorned, and their 
 most sacred rights trampled on by a band of 
 titled traitors and legalised murderers. Accord- 
 ingly the seed was sown by the invasion of 
 this Highland host, which ripened in two years 
 afterwards into the glorious victory of Drum- 
 clog. But before the trumpet was formally 
 sounded for this proud conflict, an incident took 
 place which warned the murderous Government 
 with a bloody significance what treatment they 
 might expect from an exasperated people when 
 the hour of retribution should arrive. This 
 incident was the assassination of Archbishop 
 Sharp on the well-known site of Magus Muir 
 on the common in the north-west corner of 
 the parish of St. Andrews, as he was drivins 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 183 
 
 with his daughter in his carriage to the seat 
 of his savage supremacy by the sea. The 
 details of this incident, one of the most striking 
 scenes in the sad tragedy of Covenanting self- 
 defence, are so well known that they need not 
 be repeated here. Sufficient to say that the 
 afifair was accidental, no part of the plan of the 
 party in whose name it took place, but not the 
 less significant, and not the less instructive in^the 
 lesson which it taught to all wielders of supreme 
 power, who substitute violence for law, and 
 lies for truth, in the programme of their public 
 life. Had Sharp been a man of honour, and a 
 Christian gentleman, however honestly we may 
 charitably suppose him to have joined himself 
 to the English Episcopalians, he would have 
 said : " My countrymen north of the Tweed 
 have as much right to read Presbytery out of the 
 Bible as I have Episcopacy ; they do not inter- 
 fere with my rendering of the sacred text ; and 
 I have no right to interfere with theirs. Let 
 Charles, a trifler and a pleasure hunter, perform 
 what pranks may suit his lawless humour, at 
 full swing ; but I am a Christian priest and 
 a minister of God's gospel of peace, and can 
 have nothing to do with a policy, which in 
 kinship not with Christ, but with the Neros and 
 Diocletians of Pagan times, commences with the 
 assumption of a spiritual power in matters 
 which can belong to no secular authority, and 
 ends in the persecution and death of the most 
 faithful servants of God, and the most loyal 
 subjects of the king, that the country can 
 boast." But Sharp did not say this ; he was 
 
184 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 more, perhaps, an ambitious prelate than an 
 honest Episcopalian ; and the prominent part 
 which he played in the venal legislation which 
 led to the murder of so many of the best and 
 most noble-minded Scotsmen of his age, might 
 have taught him not to be surprised if one day 
 a sword drawn in the cause of popular freedom 
 might strike him with the same mortal force as 
 that which he had helped to wield so mercilessly 
 in the service of courtly preferment. Assassina- 
 tion, no doubt, is the term by which the manner 
 of his bloody exit from this earthly stage must 
 be designated ; but there are two kinds of 
 assassination, that from personal spite and 
 jealousy, as in the case of Joab's stabbing of 
 Abner (2 Sam. iii. 27); and that from the 
 outburst of a noble indignation of loyal subjects 
 against a ruler who has abused his kingship, 
 or his priesthood, by deeds which, when 
 stamped with their right name, could have 
 been done, not by the grace of God, but 
 of the devil and his angels. For myself, as 
 a man, and with the full conviction that the 
 murder of the prelate, though perhaps unwise 
 in policy, and wisely not acknowledged by the 
 leaders of the Covenanting parties, was both 
 noble in purpose and justified in the circum- 
 stances ; and I adhere literally to the words 
 which I wrote when footing it over the bloody 
 ground some forty years or more, 
 
 Lament who will the surplice rent 
 And mitre trampled low, 
 Not all are murderers who kill, 
 The cause commends the blow. 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 185 
 
 Sharp kissed the sod in the month of May 
 1679 ; and his death seemed to have acted like 
 a spur to raise the devout patriots of the west 
 to make a display of their unsubdued determina- 
 tion to read the Bible with their own eyes 
 in a more soldierly and less objectionable 
 fashion. On the 1st of June they massed 
 themselves on the right bank of a rivulet in 
 Avondale that flows through marshy ground 
 into the Clyde, some thirty miles south-east of 
 Glasgow ; and, though under the command of 
 a man inexperienced in the art of war, young 
 Hamilton of Preston, they crossed the burn 
 under such an overpowering moral inspiration, 
 singing the Seventy-sixth Psalm, 
 
 In Judali God is known : his name 
 Is great in Israel, 
 
 that the greatest soldier of the time, Graham of 
 Claverhouse, who advanced with his dragoons 
 from the east, saw them break their ranks and 
 fly in confusion with their back to the foe ; and 
 Claverhouse himself was forced to follow with 
 the rest, his horse disembowelled with a pitch- 
 fork. This was a great success ; a success which 
 deservedly entitles Drumclog to tank with 
 Bannockburn, as winning for our spiritual 
 life that independence which the sword of 
 Bruce gained for our political estate on the 
 banks of the Bannock. The 1st of June 1679 
 and the 24th of June 1314 are two dates 
 without which, in the dearest shrine of his 
 historical memory, no devoutly stamped man 
 has a right to call himself a Scotsman any 
 
186 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 more than a house without a fireside, or a 
 firmament without the sunshine. The only 
 diiference between the two is, that while the 
 struggle for political liberty was finished for 
 ever by that one decisive stroke beneath the 
 shadow of Stirling Castle, the victory over our 
 ecclesiastical invaders, at Drumclog, was only 
 one of a series of stern blows that after a pro- 
 tracted strain of fifty years at length prevailed 
 to drive the crowned traitors from the throne. 
 Had Scotland at the glorious date of Drumclog 
 possessed a Cromwell, — one man of strong will, 
 decided purpose, and instinct of military com- 
 mand, — in that case the defeat of Claverhouse 
 on the banks of the Avon would have settled 
 the national account with Charles II. as 
 decidedly as the sword of Bruce and Randolph 
 at Bannookburn sent Edward II. back to his 
 English home on the south side of the Tweed. 
 But alas ! it could not be so ; at Bothwell 
 Brig, which followed in the train of Drumclog, 
 divided counsels, as in war they inevitably 
 must do, caused defeat. On the 22nd day of 
 the same month that witnessed Claverhouse 
 retracing his steps in hasty flight from Avon- 
 dale, Monmouth ploughed a bloody path for 
 hundreds of captured Covenanters to pine for 
 months in the cold churchyard of the Grey- 
 friars in Edinburgh, where forty years before 
 the sacred bond of the Covenant had been 
 sworn, thence to be kennelled in convict ships, 
 and sold into slavery beyond the seas ! Thus 
 ended the third act of this woeful tragedy ; but 
 the final victory of faith over fraud, and right 
 
THE SGOTTISH COVENANTERS 187 
 
 over might was only delayed, not doubtful. 
 There were men, in Scotland not a few, who, 
 in the spirit of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, 
 knew to hope against hope, and who would 
 rather die confronting the blood-thirsty tyrant 
 than live as the slave ; and the greatest of 
 these was Eichard Cameron. 
 
 This self-devoted martyr of Scottish Presby- 
 tery, whose chivalrous achievements on behalf 
 of the Covenanters hold the same place in the 
 record of those times that the dashing exploits 
 of the Marquis of Montrose do in the annals 
 of the Episcopising party^ — this noble Cameron 
 was born at Falkland, in Fife, the son of a 
 respectable merchant there. In his youth he 
 belonged to the Episcopal Church ; but very 
 soon after his entering on manhood, being of 
 a thoughtful nature, he began to look curiously 
 into the history of the Church under the brutal 
 government of Middleton and Lauderdale, and 
 after serious study became convinced that those 
 who accepted the bribe of the indulgence were 
 traitors to the Scottish Church ; and he accord- 
 ingly left the communion of the curates, and 
 found the spiritual nutriment for which his 
 soul hungered in the ministrations of the field 
 preachers. This manly independence of soul in 
 the matter of religion naturally gave great 
 offence to those who took their side in ecclesi- 
 astical matters from a Eoyal ordinance, rather 
 than from a Scripture text ; and they proceeded 
 forthwith to do everything in the way of 
 sacerdotal dictation to make his life in his 
 native district vexatious and intolerable. He 
 
188 THS SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 therefore wisely determined to leave a district 
 where a man was not allowed to live in peace 
 with a manly conscience, and seek the possi- 
 bility of an independent life in the free atmo- 
 sphere of the borders. He travelled south, and 
 took service with Scott of Harden in the 
 north-west corner of Eoxburghshire. But here 
 also the worldly element of the Indulgence 
 followed him as a fret in the smooth flow of 
 his spiritual life. His master, Sir William, 
 and his lady had both accepted the more 
 lenient terms to Presbyterian dissent offered 
 by the Indulgence ; and it seemed to them 
 quite natural that the person who performed 
 secular duty for them on the week days should 
 be part of their family following in the spirit- 
 ual service of the Sabbath. But Cameron 
 had a conscience that could not allow him to 
 trifle with his serious convictions in this 
 matter ; so instead of the indulged church, 
 he stayed at home on Sunday, and, reading the 
 Bible prayerfully in his own chamber, became 
 more and more convinced of the sinfulness of 
 State intrusion into the affairs of the Church. 
 He accordingly set forth the matter fully to 
 his employer, and was rewarded for his honesty 
 by dismissal from his service. He then 
 travelled farther south, and meeting with the 
 Eeverend John Welch, a distinguished minister 
 of the Covenanters, in Kirkcudbright, by 
 him was persuaded to enter the Church as a 
 preacher of the true gospel, unhampered by 
 State restriction, and took his licence from a 
 Presbytery of the ousted ministers. Thus 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 189 
 
 equipped, lie preached the gospel of a Church 
 owing n-o headship but that of its divine 
 Master in various districts of Annandale, 
 G-alloway, and Ayr ; but the plain and un- 
 qualified terms in which he denounced from 
 the pulpit the sinfulness of complying with 
 State enactments in religious matters, gave 
 offence to some of the indulged clergy in 
 Nithsdale to such a degree that he found it 
 advisable, about the end of the year 1679, to 
 retire to Holland, where he could open his 
 mouth freely in the company of the banished 
 worthies of the Covenant, who had found a 
 refuge from persecution in the Free States of 
 the Low Countries. Here he received a 
 regular ordination, and when their hands were 
 lifted up over his head, in the beginmngr,of 
 the year 1680, he returned to his native 
 shores, with the pious purpose to do as the 
 Lord might give him opportunity, in the great 
 work of lifting up the National Standard which 
 had been trampled on so tragically at Bothwell 
 Brig. Nor had he long to wait. On the 22 nd 
 June of the same year, the day of the anni- 
 versary of that ill-starred encounter at Both- 
 well Bridge, the people of Sanquhar, amid the 
 quiet surroundings of their brown hills, were 
 startled by a tramp of horses galloping at full 
 speed right up to the Market Cross in the 
 middle of the Square. They opened their eyes 
 with eager quest and strange alarm, direct to 
 the troop of armed horsemen, in whom in their 
 times they might readily expect to see the 
 royal dragoons, -vvhose function it was to scour 
 
190 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 the country and disperse the conventicles of a 
 free people, who would persist in reading their 
 Protestant Bibles without any government 
 stamp upon the page. But it was not so. It 
 was not Claverhouse come to blot out, on the 
 banks of the Nith, with a bloody surprise, the 
 shame that had covered his retreat from 
 Drumclog. It was Eichard Cameron who, 
 with his brother Michael at his side, after 
 singing a psalm and offering up a prayer, 
 planted himself before the Cross, in the face 
 of a multitude of sympathetic hearers, and 
 read the following declaration : " We for our- 
 selves, and all that will adhere to us as the 
 representatives of the true Presbyterian Kirk, 
 and covenanted nation of Scotland, considering 
 the great hazard of lying under such a sin any 
 longer, do by these presents disown Charles 
 Stuart that has been reigning or rather tyran- 
 nizing on the throne of Britain these years 
 bygone, as having any right to or interest in 
 the crown of Scotland, for government, as 
 forfeited several years since by his perjury, 
 and breach of covenant both to God and his 
 Kirk, and usurpation of his crown and royal 
 prerogatives therein, and many other breaches 
 in matters ecclesiastical, and by his tyranny and 
 breach of the very leges regnandi in matters 
 civil. For which reason we declare a war with 
 such a tyrant and usurper, and all the men of 
 his practices, as enemies to our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and his cause and covenant." And 
 after affixing in printed form the words of this 
 brave protest to the Cross, he offered up a short 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES 191 
 
 prayer, and forthwith rode away, himself and 
 his brother and twenty armed horsemen that 
 were iu his train, into the wild mountain retreats 
 of freedom from which he came. 
 
 Such was the famous Sanquhar declaration, 
 an event which stands as prominently before 
 the patriotic Scottish eye as the battle of 
 Prestonpans, some sixty years afterwards, did 
 in the eyes of the Jacobite party ; significant 
 both of them of what a glowing enthusiasm, 
 and a chivalrous devotion can do to lift up a 
 falling cause, but altogether diverse in the 
 result. The splendid dash of sentimental 
 loyalty to a worthless race that began so 
 brilliantly in the summer of 1745, ended at 
 the beginning of the next year in the defeat 
 of the ill-advised princeling and the ruin of the 
 Gaelic chiefs who had been foolish enough to 
 draw the sword in favour of a forfeited right 
 and a shallow sentimentality ; while the 
 Sanquhar declaration was and remained the 
 prelusive note to the victory of truth over 
 lies, and right over wrong, on which all Britain 
 looks back with gratitude in the glorious 
 Revolution of 1688. No doubt this daring 
 deed of the son of a Falkland merchant, with 
 twenty men at his back, has the air of what 
 may be called romance about it, which the 
 wise men of the time might interpret as rash- 
 ness, and the worldly-minded might stigmatise 
 as pure madness ; but the event plainly showed 
 that neither the motive of the act was a mere 
 dreamy conceit nor the result a fruitless fancy. 
 On the contrary, as certainly as the stool of 
 
192 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 Dame Geddes, in 1637, was, as we have seen, 
 the sure presage of the great civil war which 
 led to the decapitation of the ill-starred Charles 
 in 1649, so certainly did the bold and manly 
 declaration of the rights of the people, pub- 
 lished by this brave soldier preacher, give an 
 unmistakable hint to the English nation of the 
 principle on which the Popish James was to 
 forfeit his throne, as the priest-ridden Charles 
 had forfeited his life. Unquestionably no man 
 of common prudence in the common course of 
 aifairs would have ventured to pluck the beard 
 of a reigning sovereign in the fashion that 
 Cameron did at Sanquhar ; but the times in 
 which this bold man of Fife lived were no 
 common times, and the king who wore the 
 crown was no common offender ; nor was 
 Cameron a man who would shrink from strik- 
 ing a patriotic stroke at crowned treachery 
 because it was morally certain that with his 
 life he must pay the. penalty of his boldness. 
 In fact, it could not be otherwise. After the 
 terrible prostration of the patriotic party of 
 the nation at Bothwell Bridge, there was 
 neither bone nor brain in the party to make 
 a successful stand against the stout array of 
 the regular army ; and accordingly, only a 
 month afterwards, when the great soldier 
 preacher had paid his last adieu to the per- 
 secuted peoples in one or two parishes in the 
 neighbourhood, he fell at Aird's Moss, on the 
 muir a few miles east of Cumnock, a willing 
 victim to the superior force of the royal army 
 under Bruce of Earlshall. After this battle 
 
TRE SGOTTISH COVENANTERS 193 
 
 Edinburgh, as usual, from its position as the 
 seat of government, performed the unenviable 
 duty of treating with every possible indignity 
 the bodies, living or dead, of Scotland's most 
 noble sons. Cameron's head and hands were 
 cut off and taken to Edinburgh, and " there," 
 cried the bearer of this shameful prize of war, 
 as he delivered them up to the officials of the 
 Council, "there is the head of a man who 
 lived praying and preaching, and died praying 
 and fighting." Thus he died ; and ill will it fare 
 with Scotland when she forgets to couple the 
 name of Eichard Cameron with that of Eobert 
 Bruce and John Knox as the noblest assertors 
 of her national independence. 
 
 It was not to be expected that the bold 
 declaration at Sanquhar, followed as it was 
 by the trial of swords at Aird's Moss, would 
 lead immediately to any relaxation in the 
 severity of the then Government. On the 
 contrary : it acted as a challenge to the 
 party in power to stand or fall by their usurped 
 authority ; and though reasons of policy, and 
 some lingering feelings of humanity might 
 have led to some relaxation of the severe 
 laws against the field preachers, it would have 
 sounded as a complete surrender if they had 
 received coolly the public denunciation of the 
 head of the party as a traitor and an usurper. 
 High treason was written so plainly in the 
 face , of the Sanquhar declaration, that no 
 subtlety of legal logic was necessary to sub- 
 stantiate the charge. Accordingly the per- 
 secution against which Cameron's voice had 
 
 
194 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 so stoutly protested raged only the more 
 fiercely during the five years that intervened 
 between the date of the declaration and the 
 succession of James II. The bloody work 
 now went on in a grander and more epic 
 style, so much so, indeed, that the years that 
 took their start from Sanquhar on to the 
 Eevolution, in the annals of the pious sufferers, 
 appear as " the killing times." Two innocent 
 women were seized and tied to a stake, on 
 the GaUoway shore, till they were smothered 
 in the advancing tide ; and among the wild 
 hills of Muirkirk, which separate Ayrshire 
 from Lanarkshire^ at a place called Priesthill, 
 a poor carrier was dragged forth and shot 
 down by Claverhouse (a service utterly un- 
 worthy of a gallant soldier). This was in 
 May 16,85; and Charles had died in January 
 of the same year with the blessing of a 
 gracious Popish confessor at his bedside. His 
 successor, James II., was an open and avowed 
 servant of the Roman Pope from the beginning 
 to the end of his brief career ; and as such, 
 though he could not be expected to be less 
 murderous than his predecessor, he was cer- 
 tainly more honest. As a Papist, believing in 
 a God-stamped infallibility in the head of his 
 Church, he was as much bound to bring down 
 the curse of God upon the head of a heretic 
 as the Board of Public Health would be bound 
 to visit with the heaviest penalty of the law 
 a cheniist who should sell a compound of 
 arsenic or any other poison for a medicinal 
 drug. But this openness and consistency of 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 195 
 
 his Popish profession, while it cleared his own 
 conscience, in prosecuting the work of State 
 murder initiated by his sacerdotal predecessors, 
 did not render him less severe in the adminis- 
 tration of their legacy ; and if he did assume 
 a certain air of toleration in some details of 
 the intolerant programme, there can be no 
 doubt it was only as a matter of policy to 
 lull suspicion till the hour should come for 
 doing what he considered his duty to the 
 Mother Church. But with all wise precautions, 
 and with the loyal acceptance which his reign 
 found fr6m a kindly people at his first start, 
 he was too honest a man to play with the 
 English Church such a game of lies as his 
 worthless brother had played with Scotland 
 at Scone. For three years after his accession, 
 he stood unveiled before the people as a 
 plotter against the Protestant Church of 
 the country ; and accordingly he received in 
 no doubtful terms an intimation from the 
 highest authorities that his services were no 
 longer required on a Protestant throne ; there- 
 upon he wisely took ship for France, whence 
 he never returned, except to show fight for 
 a single unlucky hour at Boyne in the north 
 of Ireland; thence to leave a Protestant 
 throne for ever to a Protestant people, and 
 die peaceably a few years afterwards at Paris 
 amid the prayers and penances of his beloved 
 Popery. But, though English Protestantism 
 thus happily got rid of its tormentor, Scottish 
 piety, for three long yeats after the accession 
 of the Popish king, had to endure all the 
 
196- THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 sorrows which rent her heart under the Epis- 
 copal tyranny to which he had succeeded. 
 
 For the Cameronians and those who, under 
 the name of associated societies, had sworn to 
 his principles, there could be no quarter ; and 
 with two of the most noted names of the last 
 ten years of the fifty years' struggle, we 
 must conclude our roll of covenanted martyrs. 
 These were Alexander Peden, commonly known 
 as Peden the Prophet, and James Renwick. 
 The former of these, the son of a small pro- 
 prietor in the north of Ayrshire, born in 1626, 
 had been appointed, shortly after the restora- 
 tion of Charles II., to the parish of G-lenluce, 
 Galloway ; but being a stout Presbyterian, 
 and accustomed to use that freedom of speech 
 which Martin Luther used to the German 
 Emperor at Augsburg, and our brave Knox 
 to Queen Mary at Holyrood, he retired 
 thence immediately on the proclamation of 
 the Drunken Parliament in Glasgow, 1661, 
 and left his curse behind. After that he 
 became an outlaw and a fugitive, and wandered 
 from one homeless haunt to another, now in 
 Scotland and now in Ireland, till in the year 
 1673, when residing with a friend in Lanark, 
 he was apprehended and sentenced to im- 
 prisonment in the Bass Eook. There he 
 remained for five years ; and then, along with 
 sixty other pious prisoners, he was sent off 
 in a ship from Leith to London, thence to 
 proceed to America in a state of perpetual 
 banishment from his native country. By 
 good fortune, however, the men in power at 
 
TEE SCOTTISH COVENANTEES 'l9V 
 
 that time in London were seized with a fit 
 of human kindness, and liberated Peden with 
 all his fifty fugitives wholesale. Peden then 
 returned to his native country and followed 
 his calling there, in England and in Ireland, 
 like the Apostle Paul, as an itinerant preacher 
 and prophet till he died, worn out with years 
 and trials, on his own bed in his own parish of 
 Sorn. How then was he a martyr ? Men may 
 sufifer martyrdom in the trials of a persecuted 
 life as well as on the scafibld ; but the singular 
 thing in the case of Peden was that, though he 
 died peacefully in his bed, the brutal soldiery, 
 whose office it was to perform the legalised 
 butcheries of those tyrannical times, actually 
 came to the ground where he was buried, forty 
 days after his death, and digging up the body 
 from the grave, marched off with it to the 
 Gallows Hill at Cumnock, and gibbeted him 
 there as they would have done a living male- 
 factor. This act alone, had there been none 
 other, would have sufficed to stamp with eternal 
 infamy the men who, for a period of fifty 
 years, in the name of Christ's gospel of love 
 and peace, trampled in hatred and in blood on 
 the heads of the noblest assertors of our 
 Christian nationality. 
 
 The next name that crowns the procession 
 of our Presbyterian martyrs is James Eenwick. 
 Eenwick was the son of an excellent man, a 
 weaver in 'the pleasant village of Minniehive, 
 in Mthsdale, and being an only son was 
 brought up with all the pious care and in- 
 telligent training that was to be expected from 
 
198 THE SCOTTISH GOVENANTEBS 
 
 a godly and intelligent mother. As a boy lie 
 was remarkably precocious ; a great reader on 
 all subjects, and a serious thinker on the most 
 important of all subjects, his relation to his 
 Maker. His talents being taken note of by 
 some persons of means, he was sent to the 
 university, where he was prevented from taking 
 his degree by the oaths which, under the 
 Stuart despotism, all graduands were called 
 upon to swear. Eenwick had been a witness 
 to the execution of the famous covenanting 
 preacher, Donald Cargill, in Edinburgh, which 
 followed shortly after that of Cameron; and 
 having, though a young man of less than 
 twenty years, joined himself from deep con- 
 viction and decided resolve to the associated 
 societies which, after the death of Cameron, 
 formed themselves into a sacred union in 
 defence of free Bible-reading and free preach- 
 ing in Scotland, he could not conscientiously 
 take the oath of supremacy with which the 
 young academicians of the time were juggled 
 into the gilded servitude of an unprincipled 
 Government. He had also been present at the 
 deathbed of Peden in 1685; and so stood 
 forward as an evangelist of a pure Bible gospel, 
 completely equipped, no less by his external 
 surroundings, than by the conscientious serious- 
 ness of his own character, and the charm of 
 his engaging and attractive presence. Like 
 Cameron, and other preachers in those un- 
 kindly times, he had been obliged to seek in 
 Holland for the higher education which no 
 independent Presbyterian thinker could receive 
 
THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 199 
 
 at home. After returning to Scotland he spent 
 his tiiae in wandering from place to place, 
 preaching a free gospel in wild unhaunted 
 glens, to escape from the murderous watch of 
 the minions of Popish James. I remember 
 some three or four years ago, when my summer 
 quarters were in the vicinity of St. Mary's 
 Loch, starting from the classical harbourage of 
 Tibbie Shiels, and after a tramp of a few miles 
 southward on the road to Hawick, planting my 
 foot on the ground of the lonely dell where 
 this noble young evangelist preached his last 
 sermon on his way northward, towards the 
 close of the year 1687. Thence he proceeded 
 through Peebles and Edinburgh to Fife, and 
 thence back to Edinburgh, where he was 
 snapped up by the spies of the Government, 
 and handed over, as all the flower of the 
 country were in those 'days, without shame or 
 remorse, to the public hangman. On the 17th 
 February 1688, he stood on the scaffold in the 
 Grassmarket, the last of the sacred procession 
 of martyrs for liberty" of conscience, of whom 
 Scotland has even more just cause to be proud 
 than of those brave men who fought with 
 Eobert Bruce at Bannockburn and with Wallace 
 at Stirling Bridge; and I shall readily be 
 pardoned, as a leal Scot, if I here drop my prose 
 and conclude with some lines which flowed 
 from my pen, when treading the ground made 
 sacred by our covenanting forefathers, some 
 thirty years ago, more naturally and more 
 justly than the glories of any Roman Zama 
 or Greek Marathon could inspire. 
 
200 THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS 
 
 The faithful people loved him. From green Ayr, 
 Nithsdale, Glencairn, Sanquhar, and founts of Ken, 
 
 Free pUgrim feet o'er perilous pathways fare. 
 To hear young Renwiok preach in treeless glen ; 
 
 And mothers bring their new-bom babes, to bear 
 Baptismal blessings from his touch ; and when 
 
 Fearless he flings the glowing word abroad, 
 Full many a noble soul is winged with fire from God. 
 
 Yet must he die ! The fangs of Law are keen ; 
 
 False Law, the smooth pretender of the Right, 
 That stm to knaves a sharp-edged tool hath been. 
 
 To give a fair name to usurping Might ! 
 By Law round noble Hamilton, I ween. 
 
 The faggot blazed to feed proud Beaton's spite ; 
 And now when Scotland's best, to please the Pope 
 And Romish James, must die — 'tis Law that knots the 
 rope ! 
 
 Let loose your hounds, cold-blooded lawyers ! pay 
 
 The knave to trap the saint ! Your work is done. 
 Young Eenwick falls, to venal spies a prey, 
 
 And lawless Law kills Scotland's purest son. 
 The grey. Grassmarket heard him preach to-day, 
 On the red scaffold's floor. His race is run. . 
 Now kings and priests, with brave light-hearted joy. 
 May drain their cups, nor fear that bold truth-speaking 
 boy! 
 
 "Weep, Scotland, weep ! but only for a day ; 
 FraU stands the throne, whose props are glued with 
 gore ; 
 
THE SGOTTISR COVENANTERS 201 
 
 For a short hour the godless man holds sway, 
 
 And Justice whets her knife at Murder's door. 
 Weep, Scotland ! but let noble Pride this day- 
 Beam through thine eye with sorrow streaming 
 o'er ; 
 For why ? — Thy Renwick's dead, whose noble crime 
 Gave Freedom's trumpet breath, an hour before the 
 time ! 
 
 THE END 
 
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