The evangelical party were much against pluralities. The others upheld them on the ground that only thus could the higher intellects of the church be fostered and rewarded. Dr. Walker had been presented to Colinton in the teeth of much popular opposition. He had obtained a professorship at the same time, and this was urged in his favour. “Ah,” said an old countryman, “that makes the thing far waur; he will just make a bye job of our souls.”
Dr. Chalmers is the great figure of the Disruption controversy, but most of his work lay away from Edinburgh. Well known as he was, there existed a submerged mass to whom he was but a name. In 1845 he began social and evangelical work in the West Port. An old woman of the locality, being asked if she went to hear any one, said, “Ou ay, there’s a body Chalmers preaches in the West Port, and I whiles gang to keep him in countenance, honest man!”
Chalmers was the founder of the Free Church; its great popular preacher for years afterwards was Thomas Guthrie. His fame might almost be described as world-wide; his oratory was marked by a certain vivid impressiveness that brought the scenes he described in actual fact before his hearers. A naval officer hearing him picture the wreck of a vessel, and the launching of the lifeboat to save the perishing crew, sprang from one of the front seats of the gallery and began to tear off his coat that he might rush to render aid. He was hardly pulled down by his mother who sat next him. Guthrie had other than oratorical gifts, he was genial and open-hearted. A servant from the country, amazed at the coming and going and the hospitality of the manse, said to her mistress: “Eh, mem, this house is just like a ‘public,’ only there’s nae siller comes in!”
Another leader, second only to Chalmers, was Dr. Candlish, much larger in mind than in body. “Ay,” said an Arran porter to one who was watching the Doctor, “tak’ a gude look, there’s no muckle o’ him, but there’s a deal in him!” Lord Cockburn’s words are to the like effect. “It requires the bright eye and the capacious brow of Candlish to get the better of the smallness of his person, which makes us sometimes wonder how it contains its inward fire.” The eager spirit of this divine chafed and fretted over many matters; his oratory aroused a feeling of sympathetic indignation in its hearers; afterwards they had some difficulty in finding adequate cause for their indignation. When the Prince Consort died his sorrowing widow raised a monument to him on Deeside, whereon a text from the Apocrypha was inscribed. Candlish declaimed against the quotation with all the force of his eloquence. “I say this with the deepest sorrow if it is the Queen who is responsible, I say it with the deepest indignation whoever else it may be.” These words bring vividly before us an almost extinct type of thought. And this, again, spoken eight days before his death and in mortal sickness, has a touch of the age of Knox: “If you were to set me up in the pulpit I still could make you all hear on the deafest side of your heads.”
Times again change, the leaders of religious thought in Scotland are again broad church, if I may use a non-committal term. They have often moved in advance of their flocks. At a meeting in Professor Blackie’s house in 1882 a number of Liberal divines were present. Among them Dr. Macgregor and Dr. Walter C. Smith. They were discussing the personality of the Evil One in what seemed to an old lady a very rationalistic spirit. “What,” she said in pious horror, “would you deprive us of the Devil?”
With this trivial anecdote may go that of another conservative old woman more than a century earlier. The Rev. David Johnson, who died in 1824, was minister of North Leith. In his time a new church was built, which was crowned with a cross wherein lurked, to some, a suggestion of prelacy if not popery. “But what are we to do?” said the minister to a knot of objecting pious dames. “Do!” replied one of them, “what wad ye do, but just put up the auld cock again!” (no doubt the weather-cock). This cock, or one of its predecessors, crows in history centuries before. On the 21st March 1567 the Castle of Edinburgh was given in charge to Cockburn of Skirling. That day there was a great storm which, among greater feats, blew the tail from the cock on the steeple at Leith. An ancient prophecy ran the round of the town as miraculously fulfilled.
“When Skirling sall be capitaine
The Cock sall want his tail.”
Thus the diary of Robert Birrell, at any rate.
The strictness of old-time Sabbath observance is well known. Lord George Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll, was in command of a corps of Fencibles in Edinburgh in the early years of last century. He was skilled in whistling. He sat one Sunday morning at the open window of his hotel in Princes Street, and exercised his favourite art. An old woman passing by to church viewed him with holy horror and shook her fist at him, “Eh! ye reprobate! ye reprobate!” she shouted.