CHAPTER II.
We heard sermon in the open air with a poor Highland congregation in Sutherlandshire only a few weeks ago; and the scene was one which we shall not soon forget. The place of meeting was a green hill-side, near the opening of a deep, long withdrawing strath, with a river running through the midst. We stood on the slope where the last of a line of bold eminences, that form the southern side of the valley, sinks towards the sea. A tall precipitous mountain, reverend and hoary, and well fitted to tranquillize the mind, from the sober solemnity that rests on its massy features, rose fronting us on the north; a quiet burial-ground lay at its feet; while, on the opposite side, between us and the sea, there frowned an ancient stronghold of time-eaten stone––an impressive memorial of an age of violence and bloodshed. The last proprietor, says tradition, had to quit this dwelling by night, with all his family, in consequence of some unfortunate broil, and take refuge in a small coasting vessel; a terrible storm arose––the vessel foundered at sea––and the hapless proprietor and his children were nevermore heard of. And hence, it is said, the extinction of the race.
The story speaks of an unsettled time; nor is it difficult to trace, in the long deep valley on the opposite hand, the memorials of a story not less sad, though much more modern. On both sides the river the eye rests on a multitude of scattered patches of green, that seem inlaid in the brown heath. We trace on these islands of sward the marks of furrows, and mark here and there, through the loneliness, the remains of a group of cottages, well-nigh levelled with the soil, and, haply like those ruins which eastern conquerors leave in their track, still scathed with 396 fire. All is solitude within the valley, except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen; but at its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages for miles together lie clustered as in a hamlet. From the north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn, and endless cottages. It would seem as if for twenty miles the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants, and the accumulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland. The interior is a solitude occupied by a few sheep-farmers and their hinds; while a more numerous population than fell to the share of the entire county, ere the inhabitants were expelled from their inland holdings, and left to squat upon the coast, occupy the selvage of discontent and poverty that fringes its shores. The congregation with which we worshipped on this occasion was drawn mainly from these cottages, and the neighbouring village of Helmsdale. It consisted of from six to eight hundred Highlanders, all devoted adherents of the Free Church. We have rarely seen a more deeply serious assemblage; never certainly one that bore an air of such deep dejection. The people were wonderfully clean and decent; for it is ill with Highlanders when they neglect their personal appearance, especially on a Sabbath; but it was all too evident that the heavy hand of poverty rested upon them, and that its evils were now deepened by oppression. It might be a mere trick of association; but when their plaintive Gaelic singing, so melancholy in its tones at all times, arose from the bare hill-side, it sounded in our ears like a deep wail of complaint and sorrow. Poor people! ‘We were ruined and reduced to beggary before,’ they say, ‘and now the gospel is taken from us.’
Nine-tenths of the poor people of Sutherland are adherents 397 of the Free Church––all of them in whose families the worship of God has been set up––all who entertain a serious belief in the reality of religion––all who are not the creatures of the proprietor, and have not stifled their convictions for a piece of bread––are devotedly attached to the disestablished ministers, and will endure none other. The residuary clergy they do not recognise as clergy at all. The Established churches have become as useless in the district, as if, like its Druidical circles, they represented some idolatrous belief, long exploded––the people will not enter them; and they respectfully petition his Grace to be permitted to build other churches for themselves. And fain would his Grace indulge them, he says. In accordance with the suggestions of an innate desire, willingly would he permit them to build their own churches and support their own ministers. But then, has he not loyally engaged to support the Establishment? To permit a religious and inoffensive people to build their own places of worship, and support their own clergy, would be sanctioning a sort of persecution against the Establishment; and as his Grace dislikes religious persecution, and has determined always to oppose whatever tends to it, he has resolved to make use of his influence, as the most extensive of Scottish proprietors, in forcing them back to their parish churches. If they persist in worshipping God agreeably to the dictates of their conscience, it must be on the unsheltered hill-side––in winter, amid the frosts and snows of a severe northern climate––in the milder seasons, exposed to the scorching sun and the drenching shower. They must not be permitted the shelter of a roof, for that would be persecuting the Establishment; and so to the Establishment must the people be forced back, literally by stress of weather. His Grace owes a debt to the national institution, and it seems to irk his conscience until some equivalent be made. He is not himself a member––he exercises the same sort of 398 liberty which his people would so fain exercise; and to make amends for daring to belong to another Church himself (that of England), he has determined, if he can help it, that the people shall belong to no other. He has resolved, it would seem, to compound for his own liberty by depriving them of theirs.
How they are to stand out the winter on this exposed eastern coast, He alone knows who never shuts His ear to the cry of the oppressed. One thing is certain, they will never return to the Establishment. On this Sabbath the congregation in the parish church did not, as we afterwards learned, exceed a score; and the quoad sacra chapel of the district was locked up. Long before the Disruption the people had well-nigh ceased attending the ministrations of the parish incumbent. The Sutherland Highlanders are still a devout people; they like a bald mediocre essay none the better for its being called a sermon, and read on Sabbath. The noble Duke, their landlord, has said not a little in his letters to them about the extreme slightness of the difference which obtains between the Free and the Established Churches: it is a difference so exceedingly slight, that his Grace fails to see it; and he hopes that by and by, when winter shall have thickened the atmosphere with its frost rime and its snows, his poor tenantry may prove as unable to see it as himself. With them, however, the difference is not mainly a doctrinal one. They believe with the old Earls of Sutherland, who did much to foster the belief in this northern county, that there is such a thing as personal piety,––that of two clergymen holding nominally the same doctrines, and bound ostensibly by the same standards, one may be a regenerate man, earnestly bent on the conversion of others, and ready to lay down his worldly possessions, and even life itself, for the cause of the gospel; while the other may be an unregenerate man, so little desirous of the conversion of others, that he would but decry and detest 399 them did he find them converted already, and so careless of the gospel, that did not his living depend on professing to preach it, he would neither be an advocate for it himself, nor yet come within earshot of where it was advocated by others. The Highlanders of Sutherland hold in deep seriousness a belief of this character. They believe, further, that the ministers of their own mountain district belong to these two classes––that the Disruption of the Scottish Church has thrown the classes apart––that the residuaries are not men of personal piety––they have seen no conversions attending their ministry––nor have they lacked reason to deem them unconverted themselves. Unlike his Grace the Duke, the people have been intelligent enough to see two sets of principles ranged in decided antagonism in the Church question; but still more clearly have they seen two sets of men. They have identified the cause of the gospel with that of the-Free Church in their district; and neither the Duke of Sutherland nor the Establishment which he is ‘engaged in endeavouring to maintain,’ will be able to reverse the opinion.
We have said that his Grace’s ancestors, the old earls, did much to foster this spirit. The history of Sutherland, as a county, differs from all our other Highland districts. Its two great families were those of Reay and Sutherland, both of which, from an early period of the Reformation, were not only Protestant, but also thoroughly evangelical. It was the venerable Earl of Sutherland who first subscribed the National Covenant in the Greyfriars. It was a scion of the Reay family––a man of great personal piety––who led the troops of William against Dundee at Killiecrankie. Their influence was all-powerful in Sutherland, and directed to the best ends; and we find it stated by Captain Henderson, in his general view of the agriculture of the country, as a well-established and surely not uninteresting fact, that ‘the crimes of rapine, murder, and plunder, though not 400 unusual in the county during the feuds and conflicts of the clans, were put an end to about the year 1640’––a full century before our other Highland districts had become even partially civilised. ‘Pious earls and barons of former times,’ says a native of the county, in a small work published in Edinburgh about sixteen years ago, ‘encouraged and patronized pious ministers, and a high tone of religious feeling came thus to be diffused throughout the country.’ Its piety was strongly of the Presbyterian type; and in no district of the south were the questions which received such prominence in our late ecclesiastical controversy better understood by both the people and the patrons, than in Sutherland a full century ago. We have before us an interesting document, the invitation of the elders, parishioners, and heritors of Lairg, to the Rev. Thomas M’Kay, 1748, to be their minister, in which, ‘hoping that’ he would find their ‘call, carried on with great sincerity, unanimity, and order, to be a clear call from the Lord,’ they faithfully promise to ‘yield him, in their several stations and relations, all dutiful respect and encouragement.’ William Earl of Sutherland was patron of the parish, but we find him on this occasion exercising no patronate powers: at the head of parishioners and elders he merely adhibits his name. He merely invites with the others. The state of morals in the county was remarkably exemplified at a later period by the regiment of Sutherland Highlanders, embodied originally in 1793, under the name of the Sutherlandshire Fencibles, and subsequently in 1800 as the 93d Regiment. Most other troops are drawn from among the unsettled and reckless part of the population; not so the Sutherland Highlanders. On the breaking out of the revolutionary war, the mother of the present Duke summoned them from their hills, and five hundred fighting men marched down to Dunrobin Castle, to make a tender of their swords to their country, at the command of their 401 chieftainess. The regiment, therefore, must be regarded as a fair specimen of the character of the district; and from the description of General Stewart of Garth, and one or two sources besides, we may learn what that character was.
‘In the words of a general officer by whom they were once reviewed,’ says General Stewart, ‘they exhibited a perfect pattern of military discipline and moral rectitude.’
‘When stationed at the Cape of Good Hope, anxious to enjoy the advantages of religious instruction agreeably to the tenets of their national Church, and there being no religious service in the garrison except the customary one of reading prayers to the soldiers on parade, the Sutherland men formed themselves into a congregation, appointed elders of their own number, engaged and paid a stipend (collected among themselves) to a clergyman of the Church of Scotland (who had gone out with an intention of teaching and preaching to the Caffres), and had divine service performed agreeably to the ritual of the Established Church.... In addition to these expenses, the soldiers regularly remitted money to their relatives in Sutherland. When they disembarked at Plymouth in August 1814, the inhabitants were both surprised and gratified. On such occasions it had been no uncommon thing for soldiers to spend in taverns and gin-shops the money they had saved. In the present case the soldiers of Sutherland were seen in book-sellers’ shops, supplying themselves with Bibles and such books and tracts as they required. Yet, as at the Cape, where their religious habits were so free of all fanatical gloom that they occasionally indulged in social meetings and dancing, so here, while expending their money on books, they did not neglect their personal appearance; and the haberdashers’ shops had also their share of trade, from the purchase of additional feathers to their bonnets, and such extra decorations as the correctness of military regulations allow to be introduced into the uniform. Nor, while thus 402 mindful of themselves––improving their mind and their personal appearance––did such of them as had relations in Sutherland forget their destitute condition, occasioned by the loss of their lands, and the operation of the improved state of the country. During the short period that the regiment was quartered at Plymouth, upwards of £500 were lodged in one banking house to be remitted to Sutherland, exclusive of many sums sent through the Post Office and by officers. Some of the sums exceeded £20 from an individual soldier.’
‘In the case of such men,’ continues the General, ‘disgraceful punishment was as unnecessary as it would have been pernicious. Indeed, so remote was the idea of such a measure in regard to them, that when punishments were to be inflicted on others, and the troops in camp, garrison, or quarters assembled to witness the execution, the presence of the Sutherland Highlanders––either of the fencibles or of the line––was dispensed with; the effect of terror, as a check to crime, being in their case uncalled for, “as examples of that nature were not necessary for such honourable soldiers.” Such were these men in garrison. How thoroughly they were guided by honour and loyalty in the field, was shown at New Orleans. Although many of their countrymen who had emigrated to America were ready and anxious to receive them, there was not an instance of desertion; nor did one of those who were left behind, wounded or prisoners, forget their allegiance and remain in that country, at the same time that desertions from the British army were but too frequent.’
This is testimony which even men of the world will scarce suspect. We can supplement it by that of the missionary whom the Sutherlandshire soldiers made choice of at Cape Town as their minister. We quote from a letter by the Rev. Mr. Thom, which appeared in the Christian Herald of October 1814:––
‘When the 93d Sutherland Highlanders left Cape Town 403 last month,’ writes the reverend gentleman, ‘there were among them 156 members of the church (including three elders and three deacons), all of whom, so far as man can know the heart from the life, were pious persons. The regiment was certainly a pattern for morality and good behaviour to every other corps. They read their Bibles; they observed the Sabbath; they saved their money in order to do good; 7000 rix-dollars (£1400 currency) the non-commissioned officers and privates gave for books, societies, and the support of the gospel––a sum perhaps unparalleled in any other corps in the world, given in the short space of seventeen or eighteen months. Their example had a general good effect on both the colonists and heathen. How they may act as to religion in other parts is known to God; but if ever apostolic days were revived in modern times on earth, I certainly believe some of these to have been granted to us in Africa.’
One other extract of a similar kind: we quote from a letter to the Committee of the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society, Fourth Annual Report:––
‘The regiment (93d) arrived in England, when they immediately received orders to proceed to North America; but before they re-embarked, the sum collected for your Society was made up, and has been remitted to your treasurer, amounting to seventy-eight pounds sterling.’
We dwell with pleasure on this picture; and shall present the reader, in our next chapter, with a picture of similar character, taken from observation, of the homes in which these soldiers were reared. The reverse is all too stern, but we must exhibit it also, and show how the influence which the old Earls of Sutherland employed so well, has been exerted by their descendants to the ruin of their country. But we must first give one other extract from General Stewart. It indicates the track in which the ruin came.
‘Men like these,’ he says, referring to the Sutherland 404 Highlanders, ‘do credit to the peasantry of the country. If this conclusion is well founded, the removal of so many of the people from their ancient seats, where they acquired those habits and principles, must be considered a public loss of no common magnitude. It must appear strange, and somewhat inconsistent, when the same persons who are loud in their professions of an eager desire to promote and preserve the religious and moral virtues of the people, should so frequently take the lead in approving of measures which, by removing them from where they imbibed principles which have attracted the notice of Europe, and placed them in situations where poverty, and the too frequent attendants, vice and crime, will lay the foundation of a character which will be a disgrace, as that already obtained has been an honour, to this country. In the new stations where so many Highlanders are now placed, and crowded in such numbers as to preserve the numerical population, while whole districts are left without inhabitants, how can they resume their ancient character and principles, which, according to the reports of those employed by the proprietors, have been so deplorably broken down and deteriorated––a deterioration which was entirely unknown till the recent change in the condition of the people, and the introduction of that system of placing families on patches of potato ground, as in Ireland––a system pregnant with degradation, poverty, and disaffection, and exhibiting daily a prominent and deplorable example, which might have forewarned Highland proprietors, and prevented them from reducing their people to a similar state? It is only when parents and heads of families in the Highlands are moral, happy, and contented, that they can instil sound principles into their children, who, in their intercourse with the world, may once more become what the men of Sutherland have already been, “an honourable example, worthy the imitation of all.’” 405