Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

CHAPTER XI.

“Give us, for our abstractions, solid facts—

For our disputes, plain pictures.”

—Wordsworth.

IMPORTANT EVENTS WHICH AFFECT THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER.

Religion never operates on the human mind without stamping upon it the more prominent traits of its own character, and very rarely without being impressed in turn (if I may so speak) with some of the peculiar traits of every individual mind on which it acts. Like a chemical test applied to a heterogeneous mixture, it meets much that it must necessarily repel, and much also with which it combines. And we find it not only accommodating itself in this way to the peculiarities of character, but, in many instances, even adding a new force to these. In the mind of the deep thinker it is moulded into a sublime and living philosophy, and he cannot subsist under its influence without thinking more deeply, and becoming more truly a philosopher than before. And what does it prove to the ignorant and credulous man?—no superstition certainly, and yet so exceedingly akin in some of its effects to superstition, that we find it lending, as if it were really such, an indirect sanction to at least the less heterodox of his superstitious beliefs—the wonders of Revelation moulding themselves into a kind of corroborate evidences of whatever else of the supernatural he had previously credited. It imparts a higher tone of ecstasy to the raptures of the enthusiast—furnishes the visionary with his brightest dreams—gives a more intense gaiety to the joyous—a deeper gravity to the serious—and not unfrequently a darker gloom to the melancholy. Like the most fervent of its apostles, and in much the same degree, it becomes all things to all men. And if this hold true in individual character, its truth is not less strikingly apparent in the character of an age or country. The schoolmaster of Cromarty and the elder of Nigg belonged each to a numerous class; and the brief notices of these men which I have introduced into the foregoing chapter, may properly enough be regarded rather as national than individual in their character. No one who has perused the more popular writings of the Covenanters—Naphtali, the Hind let Loose, the Tracts of Peter Walker, and the older editions of the Scots Worthies—will fail of recognising, in my quotation from Morrison, the self-same spirit which animated the writers of these volumes, or be disposed to question the propriety of classing Donald Roy with our Cargills, Pedens, and Rutherfords.

The aspect of religion, when thus amalgamated with the enthusiasm or the superstitions of a country, is always in accordance with the direction which that enthusiasm has taken, or with the peculiar cast of these superstitions, or with the nature of the circumstances and events by which they were modified or produced. These last (circumstances and events) must be regarded as primary agents in this process of amalgamation; and they may be divided into three distinct classes. In the first are great political convulsions, which agitate and unsettle the minds of whole communities. In every period of the history of every country, there exists a certain quantum of superstition and enthusiasm—a certain proportion of the men who see visions and dream dreams; but in times of quiet, when every visionary has his own distinct province assigned to him by some little chance peculiar to himself, the quantum is variously directed; and thus, flowing in a thousand obscure channels, it can have no marked effect on the body of a people. But it is not thus in times of convulsion, when all men look one way, are interested in the same events, and direct their energies on the same objects. The quantum, swollen in bulk by the workings of these storms of the people, flows also in one channel; and thus, to a force increased in all its details, there is added a collective impetus. Hence its overmastering power. No one acquainted with English history need be reminded of those times of the Commonwealth, in which, through an atmosphere of lightning and tempest, whole hordes of visionaries gazed on what they deemed a still brighter, but more placid future, and called each one on his own little sect to rejoice in the prospect. And the first French Revolution was productive of similar effects. I need not refer to the singular interest elicited in our own country among the humbler people by the wild predictions of Brothers, or to the many soberer dreamers who were led, by the general excitement and portentous events of the period, to interpret amiss a surer word of prophecy. No one intimate enough with human nature to recognise its impulses and passions in their various disguises of belief and opinion, can be ignorant that there is a superstition of scepticism as surely as of credulity, or fail of identifying the wild infidelity of the French Commonwealth with the almost equally wild fanaticism of the English one.

The second class of circumstances includes famine, pestilence, and persecution; and, in particular, the effects of the last are strikingly singular. In the others, the mind, unsettled by suffering and terror, ceases to deduce the evils which are overwhelming it from the old fixed causes which govern the universe, and sends out imagination in quest of the new. Demons are abroad—death itself becomes a living spirit, voices of lamentation are heard in the air—spectres seen on the earth. In such circumstances, however, the very prostration of the mind sets limits to its delusions; the inventive powers are rather passive than active; but it is not so in seasons of persecution, when our fellow-creature—man—is the visible cause of the evils to which we are subjected, and the combative principle, maddened by oppression, is roused into an almost preternatural activity. Hence, and from the energy of excitement and the melancholy of suffering, the persecuted enthusiast becomes more enthusiastical, and the superstitions of the credulous assume a darker aspect. Even the true religion seems impressed with a new character. As Solomon has well expressed it—“wise men become mad;” and, seen through the medium of their disturbed imaginations, the common traits of character and of circumstance are exaggerated into the supernatural. The oppression which is grinding them to the earth, assumes for their destruction a visible form, and a miraculous control over the laws of nature. The evil spirit is no longer formidable merely from his power of biassing the will, and obliterating the better feelings of the heart; for, assuming a still more terrible character, and a real and tangible shape, he assails them in their hiding-places—the cavern and the desert. Even their human enemies, charmed against the stroke of sword and bullet, are rendered invulnerable by the same power. And there are miracles wrought also in their behalf. Their places of hiding are discovered by the persecutor; but a sudden blindness falls on him, and he cannot avail himself of the discovery. They are pursued on the hill-side by a troop of horse; but, when exhausted in the flight, a thick cloud is dropped over them, and they escape. The enemy is removed by judgments sudden and fearful. Their curse becomes terribly potent. There is a power given them of reading the inmost thoughts of the heart; they have visions of the distant—revelations of the future. These, however, are but the traits of a comparatively sober enthusiasm, which persecution cannot altogether goad into madness. In some of the wilder instances we see even the moral principle unsettled. The Huguenots of Languedoc, when driven to their mountains by the intolerance of Louis XIV., were headed by two leaders, a young man whom they named David, and a prophetess whom they termed the Great Mary. These leaders exercised over them a despotic authority; and, when any of them proved refractory, they were condemned by the prophetess without form of trial, and put to death by their infatuated companions. A few years after the battle of Bothwell Bridge, a small party of Covenanters, of whom the greater part, says Walker, “were serious and very gracious souls, though they then stumbled and fell,” assembled in a moor near Stirling, and burned their Bibles. Is it not probable that the terrible feuds which convulsed Jerusalem during the siege of Titus, aggravating in a tenfold degree the horrors of war and famine, were in part the effects of a similar frenzy?

The third class of circumstances is of a quieter, but not less influential character. When a false religion gives place in any country to the true, there is commonly a mass of what may be termed neutral superstitions which survive the change. Thor and Woden are dethroned and forgotten, but the witch, the fairy, and the seer, the ghost of the departed, and the wraith of the dying, the spirits of the moor and the forest, of the sea and the river, remain as potent as before. The great national colossuses of heathenism are prostrated before the genius of Christianity; but the little idols of the household can be vanquished by only philosophy and the arts. For religion, as has been already remarked, instead of militating against the minor superstitions, lends them, in at least the darker ages, the support of what seems a corroborative evidence. And as, from natural causes, they must still be receiving fresh accessions of strength in every country in which they have taken root, and which remains unvisited by the arts, the testimony of the heathen fathers regarding them is confirmed by what is deemed the experience of the Christian children. The visions of the seer are as distinct as ever, the witch as malignant, the spectre as terrible. Enthusiasm and superstition go hand in hand together as before, and under the supposed sanction of a surer creed. The one works miracles, the other inspires a belief in them; the one predicts, the other traces the prediction to its fulfilment; the one calls up the spirits of the dead, the other sees them appear, even when uncalled.

From a peculiar circumstance in the past state of this country, its traditional history presents us both with the appearance assumed by superstition when thus connected with religion, and the very similar aspect which it bears when left to itself. The country had its two distinct tribes of people, believers in nearly the same superstitions, but as unlike as can well be imagined in their degree of religious feeling. No pagan of the past ages differed more in this respect from the Christians of the present, than the clansmen of the Highland host did from the poor Covenanters, on whom they were turned loose by the Archbishop of St. Andrews. And yet neither Peden nor Cargill, nor any of the other prophets of the Covenant, were favoured with clearer revelations of the future than some of the Highland seers. What was deemed prophecy in the one class, was reckoned indeed merely the second-sight in the other; but there seems to be little danger of error in referring what are so evidently the same effects to the same causes. Donald Roy’s vision of the foundering boat, and of the woman perishing in the snow, is quite in character with the visions of the seers. Peden was forty miles from Bothwell Bridge on the day of the battle; but he saw his friends “fleeing and falling before the enemy, with the hanging and hashing, and the blood running like water.” “Oh the monzies! the monzies!” he exclaimed on another occasion, when foretelling a bloody invasion of the French which was to depopulate the country, “See how they run! see how they run! they are at our firesides, slaying men, women, and children.” “Be not afraid,” said Bruce of Anwoth, in a sermon preached on the day the battle of Killiecrankie was stricken; “be not afraid, I see the enemy scattered, and Claverhouse no longer a terror to God’s people. This day I see him killed—lying a corpse!” But there is no lack of such instances, nor of the stories of second-sight with which they may be so clearly identified. The Tracts of Peter Walker, and the Lives of the Scots Worthies, abound with the former; some very striking specimens of the latter may be found in Pepys’ Correspondence with Lord Rea.