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

by Hugh Miller

I had taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There was, I thought, a good deal of over-statement and exaggeration on both sides. On the one hand, the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to the death of Mr. Smith—in reality a valuable patrimony of the people there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the parishioners would have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr. Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tangibility and solidity about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favour. But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the endowment side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow. Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters—most of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntary principle. If the other workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular English belief, persons born at sea are held to belong to the parish of Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both sides; it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the controversy, but a religious controversy it was not.

The position of my grandmother's family, including of course Uncles James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the Establishment. My grandmother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do—remained an attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however, married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald into the ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry, who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call upon them every time he came to town; and my uncle James, in turn (Uncle Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or its neighbourhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of intercourse kept up between the families, not without effect. Most of the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books, recommended by their cousin; and the religious magazine for which they subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it; and there was, in especial, one of the contributors whose papers they used to pick out as of peculiar excellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of Leumas, as if the writer had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his epistles; but it was soon discovered that Leumas was merely the proper name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles never knew. They had both passed away ere, in perusing the "Second Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found myself introduced to worthy old Leumas, also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father of the writer of that brilliant work—the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my uncles, and, through them, on the family: it kept up our respect for the Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably faulty institution. My uncles took an interest in missions; and the Church had none: nay, its deliberate decision against them—that of 1796—remained still unreversed. It had had, besides, its forced settlements in our immediate neighbourhood; and Moderatism, wise and politic in its generation, had perpetrated them by the hands of some of the better ministers of the district, who had learned to do what they themselves believed to be very wicked things, when their Church bade them—a sort of professional license which my uncles could not in the least understand. In short, the Secession better pleased them, in the main, than the Establishment, though to the Establishment they continued to adhere, and failed to see on what Seceder principle their old friends were becoming Voluntaries. On the breaking out of the controversy, I remembered all this; and, when told by good men of the Established Church that well-nigh all the vital religion of the country was on our side, and that it had left the Voluntary Seceders, though the good men themselves honestly believed what they said, I could not. Further, the heads of a conversation which I had overheard in my cousin the Seceder minister's house when I was a very young boy, and to which it could have been little suspected that I was listening—for I was playing at the time on the floor—had taken a strong hold of my memory, and often returned upon me at this period. My cousin and some of his elders were mourning—very sincerely, I cannot doubt—over the decay of religion among them: they were falling far short, they said, of the attainments of their fathers; there were no Donald Roys among them now; and yet they felt it to be a satisfaction, though a sad one, that the little religion which there was in the district seemed to be all among themselves. And now here was there exactly the same sort of conviction, equally strong, on the other side. But with all that liberally-expressed charity which forms one of the distinctive features of the present time, and is in reality one of its best things, there is still a vast amount of appreciation of this partial kind. Friends are seen in the Christian aspect; opponents in the polemic one; and it is too often forgotten that the friends have a polemic aspect to their opponents, and the opponents a Christian aspect to their friends. And not only in the present, but at all former periods, the case seems to have been the same. I am sometimes half disposed to think, that either the Prophet Elijah, or the seven thousand honest men who had not bowed the knee to Baal, must have been dissenters. Had the Prophet been entirely at one in his views with the seven thousand, it is not easy to conceive how he could have been wholly ignorant of their existence.

With all these latitudinarian convictions, however, I was thoroughly an Establishment man. The revenues of the Scottish Church I regarded, as I have said, as the patrimony of the Scottish people; and I looked forward to a time when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end. What I specially wanted, in short, was, not the confiscation of the people's patrimony, but simply its restoration from the Moderates and the lairds. And in the enactment of the Veto law I saw the process of restoration fairly begun. I would have much preferred seeing a good broad anti-patronage agitation raised on the part of the Church. As shrewdly shown at the time by the late Dr. M'Crie, such a course would have been at once wiser and safer. But for such an agitation even the Church's better ministers were not in the least prepared. From 1712 to 1784—a period of seventy-two years—the General Assembly had yearly raised its voice against the enactment of the patronage law of Queen Anne, as an unconstitutional encroachment on those privileges of the Church and those rights of the Scottish people which the Treaty of Union had been framed to secure. But the half century which had passed, since through the act of a Moderate majority the protest had been dropped, had produced the natural effect. By much the greater part of even the better ministers of the Church had been admitted into their offices through the law of patronage; and, naturally grateful to the patrons who had befriended them, they hesitated to make open war on the powers that had been exerted in their own behalf. According to Solomon, the "gift" had to a certain extent "destroyed the heart;" and so they were prepared to take up merely a half-way position, which their predecessors, the old popular divines, would have liked exceedingly ill. I could not avoid seeing that, fixed in a sort of overtopped hollow, if I may so speak, between the claims of patronage on the one hand, and the rights of the people on the other, it was a most perilous position, singularly open to misconception and misrepresentation on both sides; and as it virtually stripped the patrons of half their power, and extended to the people only half their rights, I was not a little afraid that the patrons might be greatly more indignant than the people grateful, and that the Church might, in consequence, find herself exposed to the wrath of very potent enemies, and backed by the support of only lukewarm friends. But however perilous and difficult as a post of occupation, it was, I could not avoid believing, a position conscientiously taken up; nor could I doubt that its grounds were strictly constitutional. The Church, in a case of disputed settlement, might, I believed, have to forfeit the temporalities if her decision differed from that of the law courts, but only the temporalities connected with the case at issue; and these I deemed worth risking in the popular behalf, seeing that they might be regarded as already lost to the country in every case in which a parish was assigned to a minister whom the parishioners refused to hear. It rejoiced me, too, to see the revival of the old spirit in the Church; and so I looked with an interest on the earlier stages of her struggle with the law courts, greatly more intense than that with which any mere political contest had ever inspired me. I saw with great anxiety decision after decision go against her; first that of the Court of Session in March 1838, and next that of the House of Lords in May 1839; and then, with the original Auchterarder case of collision, I saw that of Lethendy and Marnoch mixed up; and, as one entanglement succeeded another, confusion becoming worse confounded. It was only when the Church's hour of peril came that I learned to know how much I really valued her, and how strong and numerous the associations were that bound her to my affections. I had experienced at least the average amount of interest in political measures whose tendency and principles I deemed good in the main—such as the Reform Bill, the Catholic Emancipation Act, and the Emancipation of the Negroes; but they had never cost me an hour's sleep. Now, however, I felt more deeply; and for at least one night, after reading the speech of Lord Brougham, and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case, I slept none.

In truth, the position of the Church at this time seemed critical in the extreme. Offended by the usage which she had received at the hands of the Whigs, in her claims for endowments to her new chapels, and startled by their general treatment of the Irish Establishment, and the suppression of the ten bishoprics, she had thrown her influence into the Tory scale, and had done much to produce that reaction against the Liberal party in Scotland which took place during the Ministry of Lord Melbourne. In the representation of at least one county in which he was all-potent—Ross-shire—she had succeeded in substituting a Tory for a Whig; and there were few districts in the kingdom in which she had not very considerably increased the votes on the Tory, or, as it was termed, Conservative side. The people, however, though they might, and did, become quite indifferent enough to the Whigs, could not follow her into the Tory ranks. They stood aloof—very suspicious, not without reason, of her new political friends—no admirers of the newspapers which she patronized, and not in the least able to perceive the nature of the interest which she had begun to take in supernumerary bishops and the Irish Establishment. And now, when once more in a position worthy of her old character, and when her Tory friends—converted at once into the bitterest and most ungenerous of enemies—were turning upon her to rend her, she had at once to encounter the hostility of the Whigs, and the indifferency of the people. Further, with but one, or at most two exceptions, all the newspapers which she had patronized declared against her, and were throughout the struggle the bitterest and most abusive of her opponents. The Voluntaries, too, joined with redoubled vehemence in the cry raised to drown her voice, and misinterpret and misrepresent her claims. The general current of opinion ran strongly against her. My minister, warmly interested in the success of the Non-Intrusion principle, has told me, that for many months past I was the only man in his parish that seemed thoroughly to sympathize with him; and I have no doubt that the late Dr. George Cook was perfectly correct and truthful when he about this time remarked, in one of his public addresses, that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the Church Courts.

Could I do nothing for my Church in her hour of peril? There was, I believed, no other institution in the country half so valuable, or in which the people had so large a stake. The Church was of right theirs—a patrimony won for them by the blood of their fathers, during the struggles and sufferings of more than a hundred years; and now that her better ministers were trying, at least partially, to rescue that patrimony for them from the hands of an aristocracy who, as a body at least, had no spiritual interest in the Church—belonging, as most of its members did, to a different communion—they were in danger of being put down, unbacked by the popular support which in such a cause they deserved. Could I not do something to bring up the people to their assistance? I tossed wakefully throughout a long night, in which I formed my plan of taking up the purely popular side of the question; and in the morning I sat down to state my views to the people, in the form of a letter addressed to Lord Brougham. I devoted to my new employment every moment not imperatively demanded by my duties in the bank office, and, in about a week after, was able to despatch the manuscript of my pamphlet to the respected manager of the Commercial Bank—Mr. Robert Paul—a gentleman from whom I had received much kindness when in Edinburgh, and who, in the great ecclesiastical struggle, took decided part with the Church. Mr. Paul brought it to his minister, the Rev. Mr. Candlish of St. George's (now Dr. Candlish), who, recognising its popular character, urged its immediate publication; and the manuscript was accordingly put into the hands of Mr. Johnstone, the well-known Church bookseller. Dr. Candlish had been one of a party of ministers and elders of the Evangelical majority who had met in Edinburgh shortly before, to take measures for the establishment of a newspaper. All the Edinburgh press, with the exception of one newspaper, had declared against the ecclesiastical party; and even that one rather received articles and paragraphs in their behalf through the friendship of the proprietor, than was itself on their side. There had been a larger infusion of Whiggism among the Edinburgh Churchmen than in any other part of the kingdom. They had seen very much, in consequence, that the line taken by the Conservative portion of their friends, in addressing the people through the press, had not been an efficient one;—their friends had set themselves to make the people both good Conservatives and good Churchmen, and of course had never got over the first point, and never would; and what they now proposed was, to establish a paper that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, should be as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchmanship. But there was a preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the ready-made editors of the kingdom, if I may so speak, had declared against them; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal recognition, in a few resolutions, of its desirableness and importance. On reading my pamphlet in manuscript, however, Dr. Candlish at once concluded that the desiderated want was to be supplied by its writer. Here, he said, is the editor we have been looking for. Meanwhile, my little work issued from the press, and was successful. It ran rapidly through four editions of a thousand copies each—the number, as I subsequently ascertained, of a popular non-intrusion pamphlet that would fairly sell—and was read pretty extensively by men who were not Non-Intrusionists. Among these there were several members of the Ministry of the time, including the late Lord Melbourne, who at first regarded it, as I have been informed, as the composition, under a popular form and a nom de guerre, of some of the Non-Intrusion leaders in Edinburgh; and by the late Mr. O'Connell, who had no such suspicions, and who, though he lacked sympathy, as he said, with the ecclesiastical views which it advocated, enjoyed what he termed its "racy English," and the position in which it placed the Noble Lord to whom it was addressed. It was favourably noticed, too, by Mr. Gladstone, in his elaborate work on Church Principles; and was, in short, both in the extent of its circulation, and the circles into which it found its way, a very successful pamphlet.

So filled was my mind with our ecclesiastical controversy, that, while yet unacquainted with the fate of my first brochure, I was busily engaged with a second. A remarkable case of intrusion had occurred in the district rather more than twenty years before; and after closing my week's labours in the bank, I set out for the house of a friend in a neighbouring parish on a Saturday evening, that I might attend the deserted church on the following Sabbath, and glean from actual observation the materials of a truthful description, which would, I trusted, tell in the controversy. And as the case was one of those in which truth proves stronger than fiction, what I had to describe was really very curious; and my description received an extensive circulation. I insert the passage entire, as properly a part of my story.

"There were associations of a peculiarly high character connected with this northern parish. For more than a thousand years it had formed part of the patrimony of a truly noble family, celebrated by Philip Doddridge for its great moral worth, and by Sir Walter Scott for its high military genius; and through whose influence the light of the Reformation had been introduced into this remote corner, at a period when the neighbouring districts were enveloped in the original darkness. In a later age it had been honoured by the fines and proscriptions of Charles II.; and its minister—one of those men of God whose names still live in the memory of the country, and whose biography occupies no small space in the recorded history of her 'worthies'—had rendered himself so obnoxious to the tyranny and irreligion of the time, that he was ejected from his charge more than a year before any of the other non-conforming clergymen of the Church.[17] I approached the parish from the east. The day was warm and pleasant; the scenery through which I passed, some of the finest in Scotland. The mountains rose on the right, in huge Titanic masses, that seemed to soften their purple and blue in the clear sunshine, to the delicate tone of the deep sky beyond; and I could see the yet unwasted snows of winter glittering, in little detached masses, along their summits. The hills of the middle region were feathered with wood; a forest of mingled oaks and larches, which still blended the tender softness of spring with the full foliage of summer, swept down to the path; the wide undulating plain below was laid out into fields, mottled with cottages, and waving with the yet unshot corn; and a noble arm of the sea winded along the lower edge for nearly twenty miles, losing itself to the west among blue hills and jutting headlands, and opening in the east to the main ocean, through a magnificent gateway of rock. But the little groups which I encountered at every turning of the path, as they journeyed, with all the sober, well-marked decency of a Scottish Sabbath morning, towards the church of a neighbouring parish, interested me more than even the scenery. The clan which inhabited this part of the country had borne a well-marked character in Scottish story. Buchanan had described it as one of the most fearless and warlike in the north. It served under the Bruce at Bannockburn. It was the first to rise in arms to protect Queen Mary, on her visit to Inverness, from the intended violence of Huntly. It fought the battles of Protestantism in Germany, under Gustavus Adolphus. It covered the retreat of the English at Fontenoy; and presented an unbroken front to the enemy, after all the other troops had quitted the field. And it was the descendants of those very men who were now passing me on the road. The rugged, robust form, half bone, half muscle—the springy firmness of the tread—the grave, manly countenance—all gave indication that the original characteristics survived in their full strength; and it was a strength that inspired confidence, not fear. There were grey-haired, patriarchal-looking men among the groups, whose very air seemed impressed by a sense of the duties of the day; nor was there aught that did not agree with the object of the journey, in the appearance of even the youngest and least thoughtful.

"As I proceeded, I came up with a few people who were travelling in a contrary direction. A Secession meeting-house has lately sprung up in the parish, and these formed part of the congregation. A path, nearly obscured by grass and weeds, leads from the main road to the parish church. It was with difficulty I could trace it, and there were none to direct me, for I was now walking alone. The parish burying-ground, thickly sprinkled with graves and tombstones, surrounds the church. It is a quiet, solitary spot, of great beauty, lying beside the sea-shore; and as service had not yet commenced, I whiled away half an hour in sauntering among the stones, and deciphering the inscriptions. I could trace in the rude monuments of this retired little spot, a brief but interesting history of the district. The older tablets, grey and shaggy with the mosses and lichens of three centuries, bear, in their uncouth semblances of the unwieldy battle-axe and double-handed sword of ancient warfare, the meet and appropriate symbols of the earlier time. But the more modern testify to the introduction of a humanizing influence. They speak of a life after death, in the "holy texts" described by the poet; or certify, in a quiet humility of style which almost vouches for their truth, that the sleepers below were "honest men, of blameless character, and who feared God." There is one tombstone, however, more remarkable than all the others. It lies beside the church-door, and testifies, in an antique inscription, that it covers the remains of the "great.man.of.God.and.faithful.minister.of Jesus.Christ.," who had endured persecution for the truth in the dark days of Charles and his brother. He had outlived the tyranny of the Stuarts; and, though worn by years and sufferings, had returned to his parish on the Revolution, to end his course as it had begun. He saw, ere his death, the law of patronage abolished, and the popular right virtually secured; and, fearing lest his people might be led to abuse the important privilege conferred upon them, and calculating aright on the abiding influence of his own character among them, he gave charge on his deathbed to dig his grave in the threshold of the church, that they might regard him as a sentinel placed at the door, and that his tombstone might speak to them as they passed out and in. The inscription, which, after the lapse of nearly a century and a half, is still perfectly legible, concludes with the following remarkable words:—"This.stone.shall.bear.witness.against.the.Parishioners.of.Kiltearn.if.they.bring.ane.ungodly.minister.in.here." Could the imagination of a poet have originated a more striking conception in connexion with a church deserted by all its better people, and whose minister fattens on his hire, useless and contented?

"I entered the church, for the clergyman had just gone in. There were from eight to ten persons scattered over the pews below, and seven in the galleries above; and these, as there were no more 'Peter Clarks' or 'Michael Tods'[18] in the parish, composed the entire congregation. I wrapped myself up in my plaid, and sat down; and the service went on in the usual course; but it sounded in my ears like a miserable mockery. The precentor sung almost alone; and ere the clergyman had reached the middle of his discourse, which he read in an unimpassioned, monotonous tone, nearly one-half his skeleton congregation had fallen asleep; and the drowsy, listless expression of the others showed that, for every good purpose, they might have been asleep too. And Sabbath after Sabbath has this unfortunate man gone the same tiresome round, and with exactly the same effects, for the last twenty-three years;—at no time regarded by the better clergymen of the district as really their brother;—on no occasion recognised by the parish as virtually its minister;—with a dreary vacancy and a few indifferent hearts inside his church, and the stone of the Covenanter at the door. Against whom does the inscription testify? for the people have escaped. Against the patron, the intruder, and the law of Bolingbroke—the Dr. Robertsons of the last age, and the Dr. Cooks of the present. It is well to learn from this hapless parish the exact sense in which, in a different state of matters, the Rev. Mr. Young would have been constituted minister of Auchterarder. It is well, too, to learn, that there may be vacancies in the Church where no blank appears in the Almanac."

On my return home from this journey, early on the following Monday, I found a letter from Edinburgh awaiting me, requesting me to meet there with the leading Non-Intrusionists. And so after describing, in the given extract, the scene which I had just witnessed, and completing my second pamphlet, I set out for Edinburgh, and saw for the first time men with whose names I had been familiar during the course of the Voluntary and Non-Intrusion controversies. And entering into their plans, though with no little shrinking of heart, lest I should be found unequal to the demands of a twice-a-week paper, that would have to stand, in Ishmael's position, against almost the whole newspaper press of the kingdom, I agreed to undertake the editorship of their projected newspaper, the Witness. Save for the intense interest with which I regarded the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I believed, by the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have induced me to take a step so fraught, as I thought at the time, with peril and discomfort. For full twenty years I had never been engaged in a quarrel on my own account: all my quarrels, either directly or indirectly, were ecclesiastical ones;—I had fought for my minister, or for my brother parishioners: and fain now would I have lived at peace with all men; but the editorship of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a portion of its duties, war with all the world. I held, besides—not aware how very much the spur of necessity quickens production—that its twice-a-week demands would fully occupy all my time, and that I would have to resign, in consequence, my favourite pursuit—geology. I had once hoped, too—though of late years the hope had been becoming faint—to leave some little mark behind me in the literature of my country; but the last remains of the expectation had now to be resigned. The newspaper editor writes in sand when the flood is coming in. If he but succeed in influencing opinion for the present, he must be content to be forgotten in the future. But believing the cause to be a good one, I prepared for a life of strife, toil, and comparative obscurity. In counting the cost, I very considerably exaggerated it; but I trust I may say that, in all honesty, and with no sinister aim, or prospect of worldly advantage, I did count it, and fairly undertook to make the full sacrifice which the cause demanded.

It was arranged that our new paper should start with the new twelvemonth (1840); and I meanwhile returned to Cromarty, to fulfil my engagements with the bank till the close of its financial year, which in the Commercial Bank offices takes place at the end of autumn. Shortly after my return, Dr. Chalmers visited the place on the last of his Church Extension journeys; and I heard, for the first time, that most impressive of modern orators address a public meeting, and had a curious illustration of the power which his "deep mouth" could communicate to passages little suited, one might suppose, to call forth the vehemency of his eloquence. In illustrating one of his points, he quoted from my "Memoir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in description of a kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigour and force. The extraordinary impressiveness which he communicated to the passage served to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be represented by their written speeches. Admirable as the published sermons and addresses of Dr. Chalmers are, they impart no adequate idea of that wonderful power and impressiveness in which he excelled all other British preachers.[19]