A.P. STANLEY.
DEAN RAMSAY to Rev. MALCOLM CLERK,
Kingston Deverell, Warminster, Wilts.
23 Ainslie Place, Edin., Sept. 5 [1872].
My dear Malcolm Clerk--Many thanks for your remarks touching the Athanasian Creed. I agree quite, and am satisfied we gain nothing by retaining it, and lose much. You ask if I could help to get facsimiles; I am not likely--not in my line I fear. Should anything turn up I will look after it. One of the propositions to which unlimited faith must be given, is drawn from an analogy, which expresses the most obscure of all questions in physics--i.e. the union of mind and matter, the what constitutes one mortal being--all very well to use in explanation or illustration, but as a positive article of faith in itself, monstrous. Then the Filioque to be insisted on as eternal death to deny!
People hold such views. A writer in the Guardian (Mr. Poyntz) maintains that God looks with more favour upon a man living in SIN than upon one who has seceded ever so small from orthodoxy. Something must be done, were it only to stop the perpetual, as we call it in Scottish phrase, blethering!
I am always glad to hear of your boys. My love to Stuart, and same to thyself.--Thine affectionate fourscore old friend,
E.B. RAMSAY.
I am preparing a twenty-second edition of Reminiscences. Who would have thought it? No man.
I have not hitherto made any mention of the Dean's most popular book, the Reminiscences. I cannot write but with respect of a work in which he was very much interested, and where he showed his knowledge of his countrymen so well. As a critic, I must say that his style is peculiarly unepigrammatic; and yet what collector of epigrams or epigrammatic stories has ever done what the Dean has done for Scotland? It seems as if the wilful excluding of point was acceptable, otherwise how to explain the popularity of that book? All over the world, wherever Scotch men and Scotch language have made their way--and that embraces wide regions--the stories of the Reminiscences, and Dean Ramsay's name as its author, are known and loved as much as the most popular author of this generation. In accounting for the marvellous success of the little book, it should not be forgotten that the anecdotes are not only true to nature, but actually true, and that the author loved enthusiastically Scotland, and everything Scotch. But while there were so many things to endear it to the peasantry of Scotland, it was not admired by them alone. I insert a few letters to show what impression it made on those whom one would expect to find critical, if not jealous. Dickens, the king of story-tellers; Dr. Guthrie, the most picturesque of preachers; Bishop Wordsworth, Dean Stanley, themselves masters of style--how eagerly they received the simple stories of Scotland told without ornament.
BISHOP WORDSWORTH to DEAN RAMSAY.
The Feu House, Perth, January 12, 1872.
My dear Dean--Your kind, welcome and most elegant present reached me yesterday--in bed; to which, and to my sofa, I have been confined for some days by a severe attack of brow ague; and being thus disabled for more serious employment, I allowed my thoughts to run upon the lines which you will find over leaf. Please to accept them as being well intended; though (like many other good intentions) I am afraid they give only too true evidence of the source from which they come--viz., disordered head.--Yours very sincerely,