CHAPTER VI.
We have exhibited to our readers, in the clearing of Sutherland, a process of ruin so thoroughly disastrous, that it might be deemed scarce possible to render it more complete. And yet, with all its apparent completeness, it admitted of a supplementary process. To employ one of the striking figures of Scripture, it was possible to grind into powder what had been previously broken into fragments,––to degrade the poor inhabitants to a still lower level than that on which they had been so cruelly precipitated,––though persons of a not very original cast of mind might have found it difficult to say how; and the Duke of Sutherland has been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one proper expedient for supplementing their ruin. All in mere circumstance and situation that could lower and deteriorate, had been present as ingredients in the first process; but there still remained for the people, however reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that consoles and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with their humanizing influences; and, under the teachings of the gospel, the poor and oppressed looked longingly forward to a future scene of being, in which there is no poverty and no oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery, something positively good, of which it was possible to deprive them; and hence the ability derived to the present lord of Sutherland, of deepening and rendering more signal the ruin accomplished by his predecessor.
Napoleon, when on the eve of re-establishing Popery in France, showed his conviction of the importance of national religions, by remarking that, did there exist no ready-made 437 religion to serve his turn, he would be under the necessity of making one on purpose. And his remark, though perhaps thrown into this form merely to give it point, and render it striking, has been instanced as a proof that he could not have considered the matter very profoundly. It has been said, and said truly, that religions of stamina enough to be even politically useful cannot be made: that it is comparatively easy to gain great battles, and frame important laws; but that to create belief lay beyond the power of even a Napoleon. France, instead of crediting his manufactured religion, would have laughed at both him and it. The Duke of Sutherland has, however, taken upon himself a harder task than the one to which Napoleon could refer, probably in joke. His aim seems to be, not the comparatively simple one of making a new religion where no religion existed before, but of making men already firm in their religious convictions believe that to be a religion which they believe to be no such thing. His undertaking involves a discharging as certainly as an injecting process,––the erasure of an existing belief, as certainly as the infusion of an antagonistic belief that has no existence. We have shown how evangelism took root and grew in Sutherland, as the only form of Christianity which its people could recognise; how the antagonist principle of Moderatism they failed to recognise as Christianity at all; and how, when the latter was obtruded into their pulpits, they withdrew from the churches in which their fathers had worshipped, for they could regard them as churches no longer, and held their prayer and fellowship meetings in their own homes, or travelled far to attend the ministrations of clergymen in whose mission they could believe. We have shown that this state of feeling and belief still pervades the county. It led to an actual disruption between its evangelized people and its moderate clergy, long ere the disruption of last May took place: that important event has 438 had but the effect of marshalling them into one compact body under a new name. They are adherents of the Free Church now, just because they have been adherents to its principles for the last two centuries. And to shake them loose from this adherence is the object of his Grace; to reverse the belief of ages; to render them indifferent to that which they feel and believe to be religion; and to make them regard as religion that which they know to be none. His task is harder by a great deal than that to which Napoleon barely ventured to advert; and how very coarse and repulsive his purposed means of accomplishing it!
These harmonize but too well with the mode in which the interior of Sutherland was cleared, and the improved cottages of its sea-coasts erected. The plan has its two items. No sites are to be granted in the district for Free churches, and no dwelling-houses for Free Church ministers. The climate is severe; the winters prolonged and stormy; the roads which connect the chief seats of population with the neighbouring counties dreary and long. May not ministers and people be eventually worn out in this way? Such is the portion of the plan which his Grace and his Grace’s creatures can afford to present to the light. But there are supplementary items of a somewhat darker kind. The poor cottars are, in the great majority of cases, tenants at will; and there has been much pains taken to inform them, that to the crime of entertaining and sheltering a protesting minister, the penalty of ejection from their holdings must inevitably attach. The laws of Charles have again returned in this unhappy district; and free and tolerating Scotland has got, in the nineteenth century, as in the seventeenth, its intercommuned ministers. We shall not say that the intimation has emanated from the Duke. It is the misfortune of such men that there creep around them creatures whose business it is to anticipate their wishes; but who, at times, doubtless, instead of anticipating, misinterpret 439 them; and who, even when not very much mistaken, impart to whatever they do the impress of their own low and menial natures, and thus exaggerate in the act the intention of their masters. We do not say, therefore, that the intimation has emanated from the Duke; but this we say, that an exemplary Sutherlandshire minister of the Protesting Church, who resigned his worldly all for the sake of his principles, had lately to travel, that he might preach to his attached people, a long journey of forty-five miles outwards, and as much in return, and all this without taking shelter under the cover of a roof, or without partaking of any other refreshment than that furnished by the slender store of provisions which he had carried with him from his new home. Willingly would the poor Highlanders have received him at any risk; but knowing from experience what a Sutherlandshire removal means, he preferred enduring any amount of hardship, rather than that the hospitality of his people should be made the occasion of their ruin. We have already adverted to the case of a lady of Sutherland threatened with ejection from her home because she had extended the shelter of her roof to one of the protesting clergy––an aged and venerable man, who had quitted the neighbouring manse, his home for many years, because he could no longer enjoy it in consistency with his principles; and we have shown that that aged and venerable man was the lady’s own father. What amount of oppression of a smaller and more petty character may not be expected in the circumstances, when cases such as these are found to stand but a very little over the ordinary level?
The meannesses to which ducal hostility can stoop in this hapless district impress with a feeling of surprise. In the parish of Dornoch, for instance, where his Grace is fortunately not the sole landowner, there has been a site procured on the most generous terms from Sir George 440 Gun Munro of Poyntzfield; and this gentleman––believing himself possessed of a hereditary right to a quarry, which, though on the Duke’s ground, had been long resorted to by the proprietors of the district generally––instructed the builder to take from it the stones which he needed. Here, however, his Grace interfered. Never had the quarry been prohibited before; but on this occasion a stringent interdict arrested its use. If his Grace could not prevent a hated Free Church from arising in the district, he could at least add to the expense of its erection. We have even heard that the portion of the building previously erected had to be pulled down, and the stones returned.
How are we to account for a hostility so determined, and that can stoop so low? In two different ways, we are of opinion, and in both have the people of Scotland a direct interest. Did his Grace entertain a very intense regard for Established Presbytery, it is probable that he himself would be a Presbyterian of the Establishment. But such is not the case. The Church into which he would so fain force the people has been long since deserted by himself. The secret of the course which he pursues can have no connection therefore with religious motive or belief. It can be no proselytizing spirit that misleads his Grace. Let us remark, in the first place,––rather, however, in the way of embodying a fact than imputing a motive,––that with his present views, and in his present circumstances, it may not seem particularly his Grace’s interest to make the county of Sutherland a happy or desirable home to the people of Sutherland. It may not seem his Grace’s interest that the population of the district should increase. The clearing of the sea-coast may seem as little prejudicial to his Grace’s welfare now, as the clearing of the interior seemed adverse to the interests of his predecessor thirty years ago; nay, it is quite possible that his Grace may be led to regard the clearing of the coast as the better and more important clearing 441 of the two. Let it not be forgotten that a poor-law hangs over Scotland; that the shores of Sutherland are covered with what seems one vast straggling village, inhabited by an impoverished and ruined people; and that the coming assessment may yet fall so weighty, that the extra profits derived to his Grace from his large sheep-farms, may go but a small way in supporting his extra paupers. It is not in the least improbable that he may live to find the revolution effected by his predecessor taking to itself the form, not of a crime––for that would be nothing––but of a disastrous and very terrible blunder.
There is another remark which may prove not unworthy the consideration of the reader. Ever since the completion of the fatal experiment which ruined Sutherland, the noble family through which it was originated and carried on have betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real results made public. Volumes of special pleading have been written on the subject; pamphlets have been published; laboured articles have been inserted in widely-spread reviews; statistical accounts have been watched over with the most careful surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press could have altered the matter of fact, famine would not have been gnawing the vitals of Sutherland in every year just a little less abundant than its fellows, nor would the dejected and oppressed people be feeding their discontent, amid present misery, with the recollections of a happier past. If a singularly well-conditioned and wholesome district of country has been converted into one wide ulcer of wretchedness and wo, it must be confessed that the sore has been carefully bandaged up from the public eye; that if there has been little done for its cure, there has at least been much done for its concealment. Now, be it remembered that the Free Church threatens to insert a tent into this wound, and so keep it open. It has been said that the Gaelic language removes a district more effectually 442 from the influence of English opinion than an ocean of three thousand miles, and that the British public know better what is doing in New York than what is doing in Lewis and Skye. And hence one cause, at least, of the thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the miseries which the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the oppressions to which he has been subjected. The Free Church threatens to translate her wrongs into English, and to give them currency in the general mart of opinion. She might possibly enough be no silent spectator of conflagrations such as those which characterized the first general improvement of Sutherland, nor yet of such Egyptian schemes of house-building as that which formed part of the improvements of a later plan. She might be somewhat apt to betray the real state of the district, and thus render laborious misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect a diversion in the cause of the people, and shake the foundations of the hitherto despotic power which has so long weighed them down. She might do for Sutherland what Cobbett promised to do for it, but what Cobbett had not character enough to accomplish, and what he did not live even to attempt. A combination of circumstances have conspired to vest in a Scottish proprietor, in this northern district, a more despotic power than even the most absolute monarchs of the Continent possess; and it is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor should be jealous of the introduction of an element which threatens, it may seem, materially to lessen it. And so he struggles hard to exclude the Free Church, and, though no member of the Establishment himself, declaims warmly in its behalf. Certain it is, that from the Establishment, as now constituted, he can have nothing to fear, and the people nothing to hope.
After what manner may his Grace the Duke of Sutherland be most effectually met in this matter, so that the 443 cause of toleration and freedom of conscience may be maintained in the extensive district which God, in His providence, has consigned to his stewardship? We shall in our next chapter attempt giving the question an answer. Meanwhile, we trust the people of Sutherland will continue, as hitherto, to stand firm. The strong repugnance which they feel against being driven into churches which all their better ministers have left, is not ill founded. No Church of God ever employs such means of conversion as those employed by his Grace: they are means which have been often resorted to for the purpose of making men worse, never yet for the purpose of making them better. We know that, with their long-formed church-going habits, the people must feel their now silent Sabbaths pass heavily; but they would perhaps do well to remember, amid the tedium and the gloom, that there were good men who not only anticipated such a time of trial for this country, but who also made provision for it. Thomas Scott, when engaged in writing his Commentary, used to solace himself with the belief that it might be of use at a period when the public worship of God would be no longer tolerated in the land. To the great bulk of the people of Sutherland that time seems to have already come. They know, however, the value of the old divines, and have not a few of their more practical treatises translated into their own expressive tongue: Alleine’s Alarm, Boston’s Fourfold State, Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, Baxter’s Call, Guthrie’s Saving Interest. Let these, and such as these, be their preachers, when they can procure no other. The more they learn to relish them, the less will they relish the bald and miserable services of the Residuary Church. Let them hold their fellowship and prayer meetings; let them keep up the worship of God in their families; the cause of religious freedom in the district is involved in the stand which they make. Above all, let them possess their souls in patience. 444 We are not unacquainted with the Celtic character, as developed in the Highlands of Scotland. Highlanders, up to a certain point, are the most docile, patient, enduring of men; but that point once passed, endurance ceases, and the all too gentle lamb starts up an angry lion. The spirit is stirred that maddens at the sight of the naked weapon, and that, in its headlong rush upon the enemy, discipline can neither check nor control. Let our oppressed Highlanders of Sutherland beware. They have suffered much; but, so far as man is the agent, their battles can be fought on only the arena of public opinion, and on that ground which the political field may be soon found to furnish. Any explosion of violence on their part would be ruin to both the Free Church and themselves. 445