‘When the 93d Sutherland Highlanders left Cape Town 403 last month,’ writes the reverend gentleman, ‘there were among them 156 members of the church (including three elders and three deacons), all of whom, so far as man can know the heart from the life, were pious persons. The regiment was certainly a pattern for morality and good behaviour to every other corps. They read their Bibles; they observed the Sabbath; they saved their money in order to do good; 7000 rix-dollars (£1400 currency) the non-commissioned officers and privates gave for books, societies, and the support of the gospel––a sum perhaps unparalleled in any other corps in the world, given in the short space of seventeen or eighteen months. Their example had a general good effect on both the colonists and heathen. How they may act as to religion in other parts is known to God; but if ever apostolic days were revived in modern times on earth, I certainly believe some of these to have been granted to us in Africa.’
One other extract of a similar kind: we quote from a letter to the Committee of the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society, Fourth Annual Report:––
‘The regiment (93d) arrived in England, when they immediately received orders to proceed to North America; but before they re-embarked, the sum collected for your Society was made up, and has been remitted to your treasurer, amounting to seventy-eight pounds sterling.’
We dwell with pleasure on this picture; and shall present the reader, in our next chapter, with a picture of similar character, taken from observation, of the homes in which these soldiers were reared. The reverse is all too stern, but we must exhibit it also, and show how the influence which the old Earls of Sutherland employed so well, has been exerted by their descendants to the ruin of their country. But we must first give one other extract from General Stewart. It indicates the track in which the ruin came.
‘Men like these,’ he says, referring to the Sutherland 404 Highlanders, ‘do credit to the peasantry of the country. If this conclusion is well founded, the removal of so many of the people from their ancient seats, where they acquired those habits and principles, must be considered a public loss of no common magnitude. It must appear strange, and somewhat inconsistent, when the same persons who are loud in their professions of an eager desire to promote and preserve the religious and moral virtues of the people, should so frequently take the lead in approving of measures which, by removing them from where they imbibed principles which have attracted the notice of Europe, and placed them in situations where poverty, and the too frequent attendants, vice and crime, will lay the foundation of a character which will be a disgrace, as that already obtained has been an honour, to this country. In the new stations where so many Highlanders are now placed, and crowded in such numbers as to preserve the numerical population, while whole districts are left without inhabitants, how can they resume their ancient character and principles, which, according to the reports of those employed by the proprietors, have been so deplorably broken down and deteriorated––a deterioration which was entirely unknown till the recent change in the condition of the people, and the introduction of that system of placing families on patches of potato ground, as in Ireland––a system pregnant with degradation, poverty, and disaffection, and exhibiting daily a prominent and deplorable example, which might have forewarned Highland proprietors, and prevented them from reducing their people to a similar state? It is only when parents and heads of families in the Highlands are moral, happy, and contented, that they can instil sound principles into their children, who, in their intercourse with the world, may once more become what the men of Sutherland have already been, “an honourable example, worthy the imitation of all.’” 405
CHAPTER III.
We have exhibited the Sutherland Highlanders to the reader as they exhibited themselves to their country, when, as Christian soldiers,––men, like the old chivalrous knight, ‘without fear or reproach,’––they fought its battles and reflected honour on its name. Interest must attach to the manner in which men of so high a moral tone were reared; and a sketch drawn from personal observation of the interior of Sutherland eight-and-twenty years ago, may be found to throw very direct light on the subject. To know what the district once was, and what it is now, is to know with peculiar emphasis the meaning of the sacred text, ‘One sinner destroyeth much good.’
The eye of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty; but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis in which Goldsmith sums up his description of Italy,––the only growth that had not dwindled in it was man. The cottage in which we resided with an aged relative and his two stalwart sons, might be regarded as an average specimen of the human dwellings of the district. It was a low long building of turf, consisting of four apartments on the ground floor,––the one stuck on to the end of the other, and threaded together by a passage that connected the whole. From the nearest hill the cottage reminded one of a huge black snail crawling up the slope. 406 The largest of the four apartments was occupied by the master’s six milk cows; the next in size was the ha’, or sitting-room,––a rude but not uncomfortable apartment, with the fire on a large flat stone in the middle of the floor. The apartment adjoining was decently partitioned into sleeping places; while the fourth and last in the range––more neatly fitted up than any of the others, with furniture the workmanship of a bred carpenter, a small bookcase containing from forty to fifty volumes, and a box-bed of deal––was known as the stranger’s room. There was a straggling group of buildings outside, in the same humble style,––a stable, a barn, a hay-barn, a sheep-pen with a shed attached, and a milk-house; and stretching around the whole lay the farm,––a straggling patch of corn land of from twelve to fifteen acres in extent, that, from its extremely irregular outline, and the eccentric forms of the parti-coloured divisions into which it was parcelled, reminded one of a coloured map. Encircling all was a wide sea of heath studded with huge stones––the pasturage land of the farmer for his sheep and cattle––which swept away on every hand to other islands of corn and other groups of cottages, identical in appearance with the corn land and the cottages described.
We remember that, coming from a seaport town, where, to give to property the average security, the usual means had to be resorted to, we were first struck by finding that the door of our relative’s cottage, in this inland parish, was furnished with neither lock nor bar. Like that of the hermit in the ballad, it opened with a latch; but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not because there were no stores under the humble roof to demand the care of the master. It was because that, at this comparatively recent period, the crime of theft was unknown in the district. The philosophic Biot, when occupied in measuring the time of the seconds pendulum, resided for several months in one of the 407 smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France,––his imagination bearing about, if we may so speak, the stains of the guillotine,––the state of trustful security in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. ‘Here,’ he exclaimed, ‘during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring herself, the door of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night.’ The whole interior of Sutherland was, at the time of which we write, in a similar condition. It did not surprise us that the old man, a person of deep piety, regularly assembled his household night and morning for the purpose of family worship, and led in their devotions: we had seen many such instances in the low country. But it did somewhat surprise us to find the practice universal in the parish. In every family had the worship of God been set up. One could not pass an inhabited cottage in the evening, from which the voice of psalms was not to be heard. On Sabbath morning, the whole population might be seen wending their way, attired in their best, along the blind half-green paths in the heath, to the parish church. The minister was greatly beloved, and all attended his ministrations. We still remember the intense joy which his visits used to impart to the household of our relative. This worthy clergyman still lives, though the infirmities of a stage of life very advanced have gathered round him; and at the late disruption, choosing his side, and little heeding, when duty called, that his strength had been wasted in the labour of forty years, and that he could now do little more than testify and suffer in behalf of his principles, he resigned his hold of the temporalities as minister of Dornoch, and cast in his lot with his brethren of the Free Church. And his venerable successor in Lairg, a man equally beloved and exemplary, and now on the verge of his eightieth year, has acted a similar part. Had such sacrifices been made in such circumstances for other than the cause of Christ––had they been made 408 under some such romantic delusion as misled of old the followers of the Stuarts––the world would have appreciated them highly; but there is an element in evangelism which repels admiration, unless it be an admiration grounded in faith and love; and the appeal in such cases must lie, therefore, not to the justice of the world, but to the judgment-seat of God. We may remind the reader, in passing, that it was the venerable minister of Lairg who, on quitting his manse on the Disruption, was received by his widowed daughter into a cottage held of the Duke of Sutherland, and that for this grave crime––the crime of sheltering her aged father––the daughter was threatened with ejection by one of the Duke’s creatures. Is it not somewhat necessary that the breath of public opinion should be let in on this remote country? But we digress.
A peculiar stillness seemed to rest over this Highland parish on the Sabbath. The family devotions of the morning, the journey to and from church, and the public services there, occupied fully two-thirds of the day. But there remained the evening, and of it the earlier part was spent in what are known in the north country as fellowship meetings. One of these was held regularly in the ‘ha’’ of our relative. From fifteen to twenty people, inclusive of the family, met for the purposes of social prayer and religious conversation, and the time passed profitably away, till the closing night summoned the members of the meeting to their respective homes and their family duties. We marked an interesting peculiarity in the devotions of our relative. He was, as we have said, an old man, and had worshipped in his family long ere Dr. Stewart’s Gaelic translation of the Scriptures had been introduced into the county; and as he was supplied in those days with only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into their native 409 tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic work from which he was reading. It might have been supposed, however, that the introduction of Dr. Stewart’s edition would have rendered this mode of translation obsolete; but in this and many other families such was not the case. The old man’s Gaelic was Sutherlandshire Gaelic. His family understood it better, in consequence, than any other; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible, ad aperturam libri, many years after the Gaelic edition had been spread over the county. The fact that such a practice should have been common in Sutherland, says something surely for the intelligence of the family patriarchs of the district. That thousands of the people who knew the Scriptures through no other medium, should have been intimately acquainted with the saving doctrines and witnesses of their power (and there can be no question that such was the case), is proof enough, at least, that it was a practice carried on with a due perception of the scope and meaning of the sacred volume. One is too apt to associate intelligence with the external improvements of a country––with well-enclosed fields and whitewashed cottages; but the association is altogether a false one. As shown by the testimony of General Stewart of Garth, the Sutherland regiment was not only the most eminently moral, but, as their tastes and habits demonstrated, one of the most decidedly intellectual under the British Crown. Our relative’s cottage had, as we have said, its bookcase, and both his sons were very intelligent men; but intelligence derived directly from books was not general in the county; a very considerable portion of the people understood no other language than Gaelic, and many of them could not even read; for at this period about one-tenth of the families of Sutherland were distant five or more miles from the nearest school. Their characteristic 410 intelligence was of a kind otherwise derived: it was an intelligence drawn from these domestic readings of the Scriptures and from the pulpit; and is referred mainly to that profound science which even a Newton could recognise as more important and wonderful than any of the others, but which many of the shallower intellects of our own times deem no science at all. It was an intelligence out of which their morality sprung; it was an intelligence founded in earnest belief.