‘Ay,’ said a well-known voice that half mingled with my dreaming fancies, half recalled me to consciousness; ‘nothing can be plainer, Donald. That lawyer-man is evidently not making his smart speeches or writing his clever circulars with an eye to the pecuniary interests of the railroad. No person can know better than he knows that the company are running their Sabbath trains at a 336 sacrifice of some four or five thousand a year. Were there not a hundred thousand that took the pledge? and can it be held by any one that knows Scotland, that they aren’t worth over-head a shilling a year to the railway? No, no; depend on’t, the man is guiltless of any design of making the shareholders rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is merely supporting a desperate case in the eye of the country, and getting into all the newspapers, that people may see how clever a fellow he is. He is availing himself of the principle that makes men in our great towns go about with placards set up on poles, and with bills printed large stuck round their hats.’
Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long mile through the storm to see whether I had got my newspaper, had taken their seats beside me when I was engaged with my dream; and after reading your railway report, they were now busied in discussing the various speeches and their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite unsuited for your columns, and yet I send it to you. There are none of its pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of possibility––nay, there are perhaps few of them that at this stage may not actually be feared; but if so, it is at least equally sure that there can be none of them that at this stage might not be averted.
THE TWO MR. CLARKS.
Among the some six or eight and twenty volumes of pamphlets which have been already produced by our Church controversy, and which bid fair to compose but a part of the whole, there is one pamphlet, in the form of a Sermon, which bears date January 1840, and two other pamphlets, in the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 1843. The Sermon and the Dialogues discuss exactly the same topics. They are written in exactly the same style. They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They are equally strong in the same confidence of representing, on their respective subjects, the true mind of Deity. They solicit the same circle of readers; they seem to have employed the same fount of types; they have emanated from the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the twin brothers in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors; and the only material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to discover is, that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This, however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed the same pen––that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 338 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 1843.
We spent an hour at the close of twilight a few evenings ago, in running over the Sermon and the Dialogues, and in comparing them, as we went along, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. We had before us also one of Mr. Clark’s earlier publications, his Rights of Members of the Church of Scotland, and a complete collection of his anti-patronage speeches for a series of years, as recorded in The Church Patronage Reporter, with his speech ‘anent lay patronage’ in the General Assembly, when in 1833 he led the debate on the popular side. The publications, in all, extended over a period of fourteen years. They exhibited Mr. Clark, and what Mr. Clark had held, in 1829, in 1831, in 1832, in 1836, in 1840, and in 1843. We found that we could dip down upon him, as we went along, like a sailor taking soundings in the reaches of some inland frith or some navigable river, and ascertain by year and day the exact state of his opinions, and whether they were rising or falling at the time. And our task, if a melancholy, was certainly no uninteresting one. We succeeded in bringing to the surface, from out of the oblivion that had closed over them, many a curious, glittering, useless little thing, somewhat resembling the decayed shells and phosphoric jellies that attach themselves to the bottom of the deep-sea lead. Here we found the tale of a peroration, set as if on joints, that clattered husky and dry like the rattles of a snake; there an argument sprouting into green declamation, like a damaged ear of corn in a wet harvest; yonder a piece of delightful egotism, set full in sentiment like a miniature of Mr. Clark in a tinsel frame. What seemed most remarkable, however, in at least his earlier productions, was their ceaseless glitter of surface, if we may so speak. We found them literally sprinkled over with little bits of broken figures, as if the reverend gentleman had pounded his metaphors and comparisons 339 in a mortar, and then dusted them over his style. It is thus, thought we, that our manufacturers of fancy wax deal by their mica. In his Rights of Members, for instance, we found in one page that ‘the gross errors of Romanism had risen in successive tides, until the light of truth suffered a fearful eclipse during a long period of darkness;’ and we had scarce sufficiently admired the sublime height of tides that occasion eclipses, when we were further informed, in the page immediately following, that the god of this world was mustering his multifarious hosts for the battle, hoping, amidst the waves of popular commotion, ‘to blot out the name of God from the British Constitution.’ Assuredly, thought we, we have the elements of no commonplace engagement here. ‘Multifarious hosts,’ fairly mustered, and ‘battling’ amid ‘waves’ in ‘commotion’ to ‘blot out a name,’ would be a sight worth looking at, even though, like the old shepherd in the Winter’s Tale, their zeal should lack footing amid the waters. But though detained in the course of our search by the happinesses of the reverend gentleman, we felt that it was not with the genius of Mr. Clark that we had specially to do, but with his consistency.
For eleven of the fourteen years over which our materials extended, we found the Rev. Mr. Clark one of the most consistent of men. From his appearance on the platform at Aberdeen in 1829, when he besought his audience not to deem it obtrusive in a stranger that he ventured to address them, and then elicited their loud applauses by soliciting their prayers for ‘one minister labouring in northern parts,’ who ‘aspired to no higher distinction on earth than that he should spend and be spent in the service of his dear Lord and Master,’ down to 1840, when he published his sermon on the ‘Present Position of the Church, and the Duty of its Members,’ and urged, with the solemnity of an oath, that ‘the Church of Scotland was engaged in asserting principles which the allegiance it owes to Christ would never permit 340 it to desert,’ Mr. Clark stood forward on every occasion the uncompromising champion of spiritual independence, and of the rights of the Christian people. He took his place far in the van. He was no mere half-and-half non-intrusionist,––no complaisant eulogist of the Veto,––no timid doubter that the Church in behalf of her people might possibly stretch her powers too far, and thus separate her temporalities from her cures. Nothing could be more absurd, he asserted, than to imagine such a thing. On parade day, when she stood resting on her arms in the sunshine, Mr. Clark was fugleman to his party,––not merely a front man in the front rank, but a man far in advance of the front rank. Nay, even after the collision had taken place, Mr. Clark could urge on his brethren that all that was necessary to secure them the victory was just to go a little further ahead, and deprive their refractory licentiates of their licences. We found that for eleven of the fourteen years, as we have said, Mr. Clark was uniformly consistent. But in the twelfth year the conflict became actually dangerous, and Mr. Clark all at once dropped his consistency. The great suddenness––the extreme abruptness––of the change, gave to it the effect of a trick of legerdemain. The conjurer puts a pigeon into an earthen pipkin, gives the vessel a shake, and then turns it up, and lo! out leaps the little incarcerated animal, no longer a pigeon, but a rat. It was thus with the Rev. Mr. Clark. Adversity, like Vice in the fable, took upon herself the character of a juggler, and stepping full into the middle of the Church question, began to play at cup and ball. Nothing, certainly, could be more wonderful than the transformations she effected; and the special transformation effected on the Rev. Mr. Clark surpassed in the marvellous all the others. She threw the reverend gentleman into a box, gave him a smart shake, and then flung him out again, and lo! to the astonishment of all men, what went in Mr. Clark, came out Mr. Bisset of 341 Bourtie. In order, apparently, that so great a marvel should not be lost to the world, Mr. Clark has been at no little trouble in showing himself, both before he went in and since he came out. His pamphlet of 1840 and his pamphlets of 1843 represent him in the two states: we see him going about in them, all over the country, to the extent of their circulation, like the mendicant piper in his go-cart,––making open proclamation everywhere, ‘I am the man wot changed;’ and the only uncomfortable feeling one has in contemplating them as curiosities, arises solely from the air of heavy sanctity that pervades equally all their diametrically opposed doctrines, contradictory assertions, and contending views, as if Deity could declare equally for truth and error, just as truth and error chanced to be held by Mr. Clark. Of so solemn a cast are the reverend gentleman’s belligerent pamphlets, that they serve to remind one of antagonist witnesses swearing point blank in one another’s faces at the Old Bailey.
Such were some of the thoughts which arose in our mind when spending an hour all alone with the Rev. Mr Clark’s pamphlets. We bethought us of an Eastern story about a very wicked prince who ruined the fair fame of his brother, by assuming his body just as he might his greatcoat, and then doing a world of mischief under the cover of his name and appearance. What, thought we, if this, after all, be but a trick of a similar character? Dr. Bryce has been long in Eastern parts, and knows doubtless a great deal about the occult sciences. We would not be much surprised should it turn out, that having injected himself into the framework of the Rev. Mr. Clark, he is now making the poor man appear grossly inconsistent, and both an Erastian and an Intrusionist, simply by acting through the insensate carcase. The veritable Mr. Clark may be lying in deep slumber all this while in the ghost cave of Munlochy, like one of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, or standing 342 entranced, under the influences of fairy-land, in some bosky recess of the haunted Tomnahurich. We must just glance over these Dialogues again, and see whether we cannot detect Dr. Bryce in them.
And glance over them we did. There could be no denying that the Doctor was there, and this in a much more extreme shape than he ever yet wore in his own proper person. Dr. Bryce asserts, for instance, in his speeches and pamphlets, that the liberty for which the Church has been contending is a liberty incompatible with her place and standing as an Establishment––and there he stops; but we found him asserting in Mr. Clark’s Dialogues, that it is a liberty at once so dangerous and illegal, that Voluntaries must not be permitted to enjoy it either. We saw various other points equally striking as we went along. Our attention, however, was gradually drawn to another matter. The dramatis personæ to which the reader is introduced are a minister and two of his parishioners, the one a Moderate, the other a Convocationist. It is intended, of course, that the clerical gentleman should carry the argument all his own way; and we could not help admiring how, with an eye to this result, the writer had succeeded in making the parishioners so amazingly superficial in their information, and so ingeniously obtuse in their intellects. They had both been called into existence with the intention of being baffled and beaten, and made, with a wise adaptation of means to the desired end, consummate blockheads for the express purpose. ‘A man is a much nobler animal than a lion,’ said the woodman in the fable to the shaggy king of the forest; ‘and if you but come to yonder temple with me, I will show you, in proof of the fact, the statue of a man lording it over the statue of a prostrate lion.’ ‘Aha!’ said the shaggy king of the forest in reply, ‘but was the sculptor a lion? Let us lions become sculptors, and then we will show you lions 343 lording it over prostrate men.’ In Mr. Clark’s argumentative Dialogues, Mr. Clark is the sculptor. It is really refreshing, however, in these days of cold ingratitude, to see how the creatures called into existence by his pen draw round him, and sing Io Pæans in his praise. A brace of Master Slenders attend the great Justice Shallow, who has been literally the making of them; and when at his bidding they engage with him in mimic warfare, they but pelt him with roses, or sprinkle him over with eau de Cologne. ‘Ah,’ thought we, ‘had we but the true Mr. Clark here to take a part in this fray––the Mr. Clark who published the great non-intrusion sermon, and wrote the Rights of Members, and spoke all the long anti-patronage speeches, and led the debate in the Assembly anent the rights of the people, and declared it clear as day that the Church had power to enact the Veto,––had we but him here, he would be the man to fight this battle. It would be no such child’s play to grapple with him. Unaccustomed as we are to lay wagers, we would stake a hundred pounds to a groat on the true Mr. Clark!’