My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

CHAPTER XXII.

"They lay aside their private cares,

To mend the Kirk and State affairs;

They'll talk o' patronage and priests,

Wi' kindling fury in their breasts;

Or tell what new taxation 's comin',

An' ferlie at the folk in Lon'on."—Burns.

We had, as I have already stated, no Dissenters in the parish of Cromarty. What were known as the Haldanes' people, had tried to effect a lodgment among us in the town, but without success: in the course of several years they failed to acquire more than six or eight members; and these were not of the more solid people, but marked as an eccentric class, fond of argument, and possessed by a rage for the novel and the extreme. The leading teachers of the party were a retired English merchant and an ex-blacksmith, who, quitting the forge in middle life, had pursued the ordinary studies to no very great effect, and become a preacher. And both were, I believe, good men, but by no means prudent missionaries. They said very strong things against the Church of Scotland, in a place where the Church of Scotland was much respected; and it was observed, that while they did not do a great deal to convert the irreligious to Christianity, they were exceedingly zealous in their endeavours to make the religious Baptists. Much to my annoyance in my younger days, they used to waylay Uncle Sandy on his return from the Hill, on evenings when I had gone to get some lessons from him regarding sand-worms, or razor-fish, or the sea-hare, and engage him in long controversies about infant baptism and Church Establishments. The matters which they discussed were greatly too high for me, nor was I by any means an attentive listener; but I picked up enough to know that Uncle Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presbyterianism; and it did not require any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and to talk tolerably loud—louder, at least, than was at all necessary in the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the National Church for theirs, they usually employed language borrowed from the Revelations; and that, calling his Church Babylon, they bade him come out of her, that he might not be a partaker of her plagues. Uncle Sandy had seen too much of the world, and read and heard too much of controversy, to be out of measure shocked by the phrase; but with a decent farmer of the parish the hard words of the proselytizers did them a mischief. The retired merchant had urged him to quit the Establishment; and the farmer had replied by asking, in his simplicity, whether he thought he ought to leave his Church to sink in that way? "Yes," exclaimed the merchant, with great emphasis; "leave her to sink to her place—the lowest hell!" This was terrible: the decent farmer opened his huge eyes at hearing what he deemed a bold blasphemy. The Church of which the Baptist spoke was, in Cromarty at least, the Church of the outed Mr. Hugh Anderson, who gave up his all in the time of the persecution, for conscience' sake; it was the Church of Mr. Gordon, whose ministry had been so signally countenanced during the period of the great revival; it was the Church of devout Mr. Monro, and of worthy Mr. Smith, and of many a godly elder and God-fearing member who had held by Christ the Head; and yet here was it denounced as a Church whose true place was hell. The farmer turned away, sick of the controversy; and the imprudent speech of the retired merchant flew like wildfire over the parish. "Surely," says Bacon, "princes have need, in tender matters and ticklish times, to beware what they say, especially in those short speeches which fly about like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions." Princes are, however, not the only men who would do well to beware of short speeches. The short speech of the merchant ruined the Baptist cause in Cromarty; and the two missionaries might, on its delivery, have just done, if they but knew the position to which it reduced them, what they were content to do a few years after—pack up their moveables and quit the place.

Having for years no antagonists to contend with outside the pale of the Establishment, it was of course natural that we should find opponents within. But during the incumbency of Mr. Smith—the minister of the parish for the first one-and-twenty years of my life—even these were wanting; and we passed a very quiet time, undisturbed by controversy of any kind, political or ecclesiastical. Nor were the first few years of Mr. Stewart's incumbency less quiet. The Catholic Relief Bill was a pebble cast into the pool, but a very minute one; and the ripple which it raised caused scarce any agitation. Mr. Stewart did not see his way clearly through all the difficulties of the measure; but, influenced in part by some of his brethren in the neighbourhood, he at length made up his mind to petition against it; and to his petition, praying that no concessions should be made to the Papists, greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the male parishioners affixed their names. The few individuals who kept aloof were chiefly lads of an extra-liberal turn, devoid, like most extreme politicians, of the ordinary ecclesiastical sympathies of their countryfolk; and as I cultivated no acquaintance with them, and was more ecclesiastical than political in my leanings, I had the satisfaction of finding myself standing, in opposition to all my friends, on the Catholic Relief measure, in a respectable minority of one. Even Uncle Sandy, after some little demur, and an explosion against the Irish Establishment, set off and signed the petition. I failed, however, to see that I was in the wrong. With the two great facts of the Irish Union and the Irish Church before me, I could not petition against Roman Catholic Emancipation. I felt, too, that were I myself a Roman Catholic, I would listen to no Protestant argument until what I held to be justice had first been done me. I would have at once inferred that a religion associated with what I deemed injustice was a false, not a true, religion; and, on the strength of the inference, would have rejected it without further inquiry; and could I fail to believe that what I myself would have done in the circumstances, many Roman Catholics were actually doing? And believing I could defend my position, which was certainly not an obtrusive one, and was at times assailed in conversation by my friends, in a way that showed, as I thought, they did not understand it, I sat down and wrote an elaborate letter on the subject, addressed to the editor of the Inverness Courier; in which, as I afterwards found, I was happy enough to anticipate in some points the line taken up, in his famous emancipation speech, by a man whom I had early learned to recognise as the greatest and wisest of Scottish ministers—the late Dr. Chalmers. On glancing over my letter, however, and then looking round me on the good men among my townsfolk—including my uncle and my minister—with whom it would have the effect of placing me in more decided antagonism than any mere refusal to sign their petition, I resolved, instead of dropping it into the post-office, to drop it into the fire, which I accordingly did; and so the matter took end; and what I had to say in my own defence, and in that of emancipation, was in consequence never said.