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

by Hugh Miller

CHAPTER XVI.

"Let not this weak, unknowing hand,

Presume thy bolts to throw."—Pope.

The great fires of the Parliament Close and the High Street were events of this winter. A countryman, who had left town when the old spire of the Tron Church was blazing like a torch, and the large group of buildings nearly opposite the Cross still enveloped in flame from ground-floor to roof-tree, passed our work-shed, a little after two o'clock, and, telling us what he had seen, remarked that, if the conflagration went on as it was doing, we would have, as our next season's employment, the Old Town of Edinburgh to rebuild. And as the evening closed over our labours, we went in to town in a body, to see the fires that promised to do so much for us. The spire had burnt out, and we could but catch between us and the darkened sky, the square abrupt outline of the masonry a-top that had supported the wooden broach, whence, only a few hours before, Fergusson's bell had descended in a molten shower. The flames, too, in the upper group of buildings, were restricted to the lower stories, and flared fitfully on the tall forms and bright swords of the dragoons, drawn from the neighbouring barracks, as they rode up and down the middle space, or gleamed athwart the street on groups of wretched-looking women and ruffian men, who seemed scanning with greedy eyes the still unremoved heaps of household goods rescued from the burning tenements. The first figure that caught my eye was a singularly ludicrous one. Removed from the burning mass but by the thickness of a wall, there was a barber's shop brilliantly lighted with gas, the uncurtained window of which permitted the spectators outside to see whatever was going on in the interior. The barber was as busily at work as if he were a hundred miles from the scene of danger, though the engines at the time were playing against the outside of his gable wall; and the immediate subject under his hands, as my eye rested upon him, was an immensely fat old fellow, on whose round bald forehead and ruddy cheeks the perspiration, occasioned by the oven-like heat of the place, was standing out in huge drops, and whose vast mouth, widely opened to accommodate the man of the razor, gave to his countenance such an expression as I have sometimes seen in grotesque Gothic heads of that age of art in which the ecclesiastical architect began to make sport of his religion. The next object that presented itself was, however, of a more sobering description. A poor working man, laden with his favourite piece of furniture, a glass-fronted press or cupboard, which he had succeeded in rescuing from his burning dwelling, was emerging from one of the lanes, followed by his wife, when, striking his foot against some obstacle in the way, or staggering from the too great weight of his load, he tottered against a projecting corner, and the glazed door was driven in with a crash. There was hopeless misery in the wailing cry of his wife—"Oh, ruin, ruin!—it's lost too!" Nor was his own despairing response less sad:—"Ay, ay, puir lassie, its a' at an end noo." Curious as it may seem, the wild excitement of the scene had at first rather exhilarated than depressed my spirits; but the incident of the glass cupboard served to awaken the proper feeling; and as I came more into contact with the misery of the catastrophe, and marked the groups of shivering houseless creatures that watched beside the broken fragments of their stuff, I saw what a dire calamity a great fire really is. Nearly two hundred families were already at this time cast homeless into the streets. Shortly before quitting the scene of the conflagration for the country, I passed along a common stair, which led from the Parliament Close towards the Cowgate, through a tall old domicile, eleven stories in height, and I afterwards remembered that the passage was occupied by a smouldering oppressive vapour, which, from the direction of the wind, could scarce have been derived from the adjacent conflagration, though at the time, without thinking much of the circumstance, I concluded it might have come creeping westwards on some low cross current along the narrow lanes. In less than an hour after that lofty tenement was wrapt in flames, from the ground story to more than a hundred feet over its tallest chimneys, and about sixty additional families, its tenants, were cast into the streets with the others. My friend William Ross afterwards assured me, that never had he witnessed anything equal in grandeur to this last of the conflagrations. Directly over the sea of fire below, the low-browed clouds above seemed as if charged with a sea of blood, that lightened and darkened by fits as the flames rose and fell; and far and wide, tower and spire, and tall house-top, glared out against a background of darkness, as if they had been brought to a red heat by some great subterranean, earth-born fire, that was fast rising to wrap the entire city in destruction. The old church of St. Giles, he said, with the fantastic masonry of its pale grey tower, bathed in crimson, and that of its dark rude walls suffused in a bronzed umber, and with the red light gleaming inwards through its huge mullioned windows, and flickering on its stone roof, formed one of the most picturesque objects he had ever seen.[10]

I sometimes heard old Dr. Colquhoun of Leith preach. There were fewer authors among the clergy in those days than now; and I felt a special interest in a living divine who had written so good a book, that my uncle Sandy—no mean judge in such matters—had assigned to it a place in his little theological library, among the writings of the great divines of other ages. The old man's preaching days, ere the winter of 1824, were well-nigh done: he could scarce make himself heard over half the area of his large, hulking chapel, which was, however, always less than half filled; but, though the feeble tones teasingly strained the ear, I liked to listen to his quaintly attired but usually very solid theology, and found, as I thought, more matter in his discourses than in those of men who spoke louder and in a flashier style. The worthy man, however, did me a mischief at this time. There had been a great Musical Festival held in Edinburgh about three weeks previous to the conflagration, at which oratorios were performed in the ordinary pagan style, in which amateurs play at devotion, without even professing to feel it; and the Doctor, in his first sermon after the great fires, gave serious expression to the conviction, that they were judgments sent upon Edinburgh, to avenge the profanity of its Musical Festival. Edinburgh had sinned, he said, and Edinburgh was now punished; and it was according to the Divine economy, he added, that judgments administered exactly after the manner of the infliction which we had just witnessed should fall upon cities and kingdoms. I liked the reasoning very ill. I knew only two ways in which God's judgments could be determined to be really such—either through direct revelation from God himself, or in those cases in which they take place so much in accordance with His fixed laws, and in such relation to the offence or crime visited in them by punishment, that man, simply by the exercise of his rational faculties, and reasoning from cause to effect, as is his nature, can determine them for himself. And the great Edinburgh fires had come under neither category. God did not reveal that He had punished the tradesmen and mechanics of the High Street for the musical sins of the lawyers and landowners of Abercromby Place and Charlotte Square; nor could any natural relation be established between the oratorios in the Parliament House or the concerts in the Theatre Royal, and the conflagrations opposite the Cross or at the top of the Tron Church steeple. All that could be proven in the case were the facts of the festival and of the fires; and the further fact, that, so far as could be ascertained, there was no visible connexion between them, and that it was not the people who had joined in the one that had suffered from the others. And the Doctor's argument seemed to be the perilous loose one, that as God had sometimes of old visited cities and nations with judgments which had no apparent connexion with the sins punished, and which could not be recognised as judgments had not He himself told that such they were, the Edinburgh fires, of which He had told nothing, might be properly regarded—seeing that they had in the same way no connexion with the oratorios, and had wrought no mischief to the people who had patronized the oratorios—as special judgments on the oratorios. The good old Papist had said, "I believe because it is impossible." What the Doctor in this instance seemed to say was, "I believe because it is not in the least likely." If, I argued, Dr. Colquhoun's own house and library had been burnt, he would no doubt very properly have deemed the infliction a great trial to himself; but on what principle could he have further held that it was not only a trial to himself, but also a judgment on his neighbour? If we must not believe that the falling of the tower of Siloam was a special visitation on the sins of the poor men whom it crushed, how, or on what grounds, are we to believe that it was a special visitation on the sins of the men whom it did not in the least injure? I fear I remembered Dr. Colquhoun's remarks on the fire better than aught else I ever heard from him; nay, I must add, that nothing had I ever found in the writings of the sceptics that had a worse effect on my mind; and I now mention the circumstance to show how sober in applications of the kind, in an age like the present, a theologian should be. It was some time ere I forgot the ill savour of that dead fly; and it was to beliefs of a serious and very important class that it served for a time to impart its own doubtful character.

But from the minister whose chapel I oftenest attended, I was little in danger of having my beliefs unsettled by reasonings of this stumbling cast. "Be sure," said both my uncles, as I was quitting Cromarty for the south, "be sure you go and hear Dr. M'Crie." And so Dr. M'Crie I did go and hear; and not once or twice, but often. The biographer of Knox—to employ the language in which Wordsworth describes the humble hero of the "Excursion"—

"was a man

Whom no one could have passed without remark."

And on first attending his church, I found that I had unwittingly seen him before, and that without remark I had not passed him. I had extended one of my usual evening walks, shortly after commencing work at Niddry, in the direction of the southern suburb of Edinburgh, and was sauntering through one of the green lanes of Liberton, when I met a gentleman whose appearance at once struck me. He was a singularly erect, spare, tall man, and bore about him an air which, neither wholly clerical nor wholly military, seemed to be a curious compound of both. The countenance was pale, and the expression, as I thought, somewhat melancholy; but an air of sedate power sat so palpably on every feature, that I stood arrested as he passed, and for half a minute or so remained looking after him. He wore, over a suit of black, a brown great-coat, with the neck a good deal whitened by powder, and the rim of the hat behind, which was slightly turned up, bore a similar stain. "There is mark about that old-fashioned man," I said to myself: "who or what can he be?" Curiously enough, the apparent combination of the military and the clerical in his gait and air suggested to me Sir Richard Steele's story, in the "Tattler," of the old officer who, acting in the double capacity of major and chaplain to his regiment, challenged a young man for blasphemy, and after disarming, would not take him to mercy until he had first begged pardon of God upon his knees on the duelling ground, for the irreverence with which he had treated His name. My curiosity regarding the stranger gentleman was soon gratified. Next Sabbath I attended the Doctor's chapel, and saw the tall, spare, clerico-military looking man in the pulpit. I have a good deal of faith in the military air, when, in the character of a natural trait, I find it strongly marking men who never served in the army. I have not yet seen it borne by a civilian who had not in him at least the elements of the soldier; nor can I doubt that, had Dr. M'Crie been a Scotch covenanter of the times of Charles II, the insurgents at Bothwell would have had what they sadly wanted—a general. The shrewd sense of his discourses had great charms for me; and, though not a flashy, nor, in the ordinary sense of the term, even an eloquent preacher, there were none of the other Edinburgh clergy his contemporaries to whom I found I could listen with greater profit or satisfaction. A simple incident which occurred during my first morning attendance at his chapel, strongly impressed me with a sense of his sagacity. There was a great deal of coughing in the place, the effect of a recent change of weather; and the Doctor, whose voice was not a strong one, and who seemed somewhat annoyed by the ruthless interruptions, stopping suddenly short in the middle of his argument, made a dead pause. When people are taken greatly by surprise, they cease to cough—a circumstance on which he had evidently calculated. Every eye was now turned towards him, and for a full minute so dead was the silence, that one might have heard a pin drop. "I see, my friends," said the Doctor, resuming speech, with a suppressed smile—"I see you can be all quiet enough when I am quiet." There was not a little genuine strategy in the rebuke; and as cough lies a good deal more under the influence of the will than most coughers suppose, such was its effect, that during the rest of the day there was not a tithe of the previous coughing.