The guide-books are content to dismiss Abernethy as an “ancient Pictish capital,” but it was also a famed sanctuary till the Reformation, and even later, a place of pilgrimage to the oak-tree shading the grave of nine holy maidens. For a generation this became the metropolis of the Church of Alban, while its primacy was passing from Dunkeld to St. Andrews. Later on, it made a hotbed of Protestant zeal and of the fissiparous energy that rent Scottish Presbyterianism with fresh secessions. This is a matter on which I am tempted to be garrulous, as several progenitors of mine were leaders here, both of Kirk and Dissent, among them Archibald Moncrieff, minister of Abernethy for more than half a century, through the trying times of the Covenant. The parish church contains two communion cups given by those pious ancestors, in whose memory its font was presented by the late Sir Alexander Moncrieff, his own name better known to warriors than to priests.
In Bonnie Scotland, I made bold to bring up my generations-back grandparent, Alexander Moncrieff, one of the four Original Seceders; and now I would still further trespass on the reader’s patience by borrowings from the Travels of the Rev. James Hall of Walthamstow, who more than a century ago, halting at Abernethy, noted some amusing memories of those early Seceders. Ebenezer Erskine, ex-minister of Stirling, was the leader of the body; but Hall calls Abernethy their metropolis, and Moncrieff their patron, as being not only dissenting minister but chief laird of the parish—no very exalted rank when, according to this author, the title was given to any rent-free yeoman of the Ochils, such as one he mentions who supplemented an income of ten pounds a year by the trade of a carpenter, while the family “mansion” made a small public-house.
The dissenting minister of Abernethy was at least wealthy enough to build a new church for his adherents, which for a time served also as college of the new sect. Some score of students boarded with the farmers—at the modest rate of two shillings or so a week—attending divinity lectures of the laird, who is said, in case of need, to have ministered to their carnal as well as their spiritual wants. For further instruction they would walk into Perth to sit at the feet of Mr. Wilson, another father of Secession. In his old age Moncrieff was fain to hold classes at his own house of Culfargie. After his death in 1761, this Stoic school became peripatetic, moved first to Alloa with his younger son, William Moncrieff, then straggling about in the wake of its best qualified teachers, till the Seceders stooped their spiritual pride to share the national provision of university training, supplemented by a regular divinity college at Edinburgh. But it seems that their teaching in philosophy, apart from divinity, with Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding as text book, went on for a time longer at Abernethy, under Matthew Moncrieff, heir to Alexander’s estate and ministry. Mr. Hall tells a sly story of a callow student in those later days, who from the Established minister borrowed a Euclid, which he got through in a week: “I have read all the enunciations, which seem to be true enough and very good reading; I did not trouble myself about the A’s and B’s.”
The poverty of the Seceders was not helped by their split into Burghers and Anti-burghers, the latter the more strict sect, who flourished rather in the north half of Scotland; then these sects again became cross-divided as “New Lichts” and “Auld Lichts,” burning dimly still in Mr. Barrie’s kailyard. Hall, himself a benighted Erastian, describes the Secession theory in general as “a mixture of Popish tenets with those of English dissenters.” He was so far right that the Seceders held, as strongly as any Hildebrand, that the State should be the servant of the Church, also that their body was the only true Church of Scotland, which clung faithfully to the Covenant, consecrated for a century as quasi-sacramental. Alexander Moncrieff, who stood doughtily by the Cæsarship of the house of Hanover, is said to have been hardly restrained from setting off for London to present the Covenant, on full cock, at the wigged head of George II.
Later on, the Covenant was quietly allowed to drop, and the Seceders relaxed their strict aloofness. Matthew Moncrieff, it seems, was of a cheerfully social disposition counteracting his hereditary fanaticism. There is a tradition that he had worn a red coat for a short time, fighting, as his father preached, for King George. He had a worldly turn for sport, and though he did not dare to shoot, he kept a couple of greyhounds, to the scandal of his congregation. The English parson reports a tale of him as well known. One Sunday, as he was riding across the Ochils to preach, a hare started up, at which he flicked with his whip, and even forgot himself so far as to gallop a little way after poor puss. For this offence he was delated by his own servant before the Presbytery, that rebuked him to contrition; then it would long be cast up against him how he had broken the Sabbath. When his name came up among the more severe, heads were gravely shaken: “He is a man that would gar anybody like him—but oh! that beast”—to which less strait-laced admirers would respond, “Hoot! he’s no’ a wrang man, for a’ the beast.” This phrase, “for a’ the beast,” Mr. Hall declares to have become proverbial in that part of the country as denoting a fly in the amber of character.
Matthew’s wife had a disintegrating effect on the body, a Miss Scott from Fife, who, if we may believe Hall’s informants, was only a Seceder skin-deep, and turned a natural bent for wit and raillery to making fun of her husband’s congregation. She did not scruple to be close friends with the parish minister, Dr. Gray, and his wife; then, while the dissenting laird still thumped his pulpit every Sabbath against the errors of Erastianism, the rival spiritual authorities lived on the best of terms through the week, as could not but go to temper sectarian bitterness, though for a time the more zealous Seceders frowned on this compromising intimacy, as Mr. Pickwick at Sergeant Buzfuz exchanging salutations with his own advocate. So, by and by, acrimonious zeal cooled down all round, dying out altogether in my own family, as “Sandemanianism” did among their neighbours the Sandemans. Some members of our line seem, indeed, to have backslidden far from ancestral austerity. A descendant of the Abernethy ministers became a London tradesman—landlord of the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street by some accounts—whose son, William Thomas Moncrieff, put on the stage Tom and Jerry, with other once popular plays that did not keep him from dying at the Charterhouse, a fellow-pensioner of Colonel Newcome. About the same time as John Home scandalised even the lukewarm Establishment by coming out as a playwriter, a tragedy less famous than Douglas had been published by John Moncrieff, who seems not to have long survived it; and nothing else is known of him but that he was a dominie of sorts at Eton, apparently private tutor to some sprig of nobility.
Of what came to be called United Presbyterianism and is now grafted on to the United Free Church, a sturdier root first flowered in this parish, ripening through generations into the gracious and kindly nature of the author of Rab and his Friends. The first of a notable succession of John Browns was a herd laddie here, who, like other barefooted Scottish loons, contrived to pick up Latin and Greek almost without schooling. There is a well-known story of his leaving his sheep for a night walk of twenty-four miles into St. Andrews to buy a Greek Testament, which was given him for nothing, on his proving that he could read it. He is said to have tried the packman’s trade, but to have carried it on in too unworldly spirit for success. When he applied for ordination among the Seceders, I am sorry to say that my forefather would have barred him out on suspicion that his learning came from the devil; but this firm believer in witchcraft was overruled, and the self-taught scholar grew to be famed as Dr. John Brown of Haddington.
These are hints of what spirit was fermenting about Abernethy under the cold Georgian star, when in Scottish straths and glens plain living nourished much high or hot thinking. A coarser spirit was not wanting when, as Mr. Hall notes, the public-houses of the neighbourhood did their chief trade on Sundays, with people tramping into Abernethy to attend the Seceder meetings, and those of the Relief Church that soon set up another standard of dissent. He gives at some length an anonymous report of the “occasion” here in 1776, that is, the annual administration of the Sacrament, spread out over a week, when preaching flowed all day in a great tent, surrounded with booths and stands to supply refreshment to a crowd estimated by thousands, the whole encampment stretching out the best part of a mile. If the preacher failed in fire or unction, his hearers, as in the House of Commons, would drop off to the beer-barrels, flocking back to the tent when some popular Boanerges broached hotter eloquence. Such scenes, a survival of Covenanting conventicles, often degenerated into the scandals of Burns’s “Holy Fair”; and it is only in our time that they cease to be recalled by the “Preachings,” now abolished among the leading churches as having become too much of a worldly holiday.
Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie, extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such an “inimitable landscape.”
This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide