Could scarce forbear to cheer.”
Hundreds of highly educated men,—men of large experience and sound judgment, many of whom had near and dear ones entirely dependent on them, and most of them with no means of providing for their households or themselves excepting their incomes as clergymen,—men of like passions and wants, and weaknesses and necessities, as are common to all mankind, left the Church of their fathers, the Church of their life-work, the Church that they loved and had tried to protect and beautify, because they considered that to be their duty to their divine Master. The result has happily shown that in Scotland, and in various parts of the world, tens of thousands both of men and women could not only applaud such heroism as a grand sentiment, but that they could and did rally round the heroes, espouse their cause, and provide abundantly and with alacrity the means not only for the supply of their temporal wants, but also for pushing forward the cause they had at heart. Nor was personal effort awanting; for the Disruption leaders and ministers were themselves surprised as well as delighted by the zeal, energy, and devotion with which persons of all ranks became fellow-workers with them in building up the Free Church of Scotland.
The present generation knows but little of the occasional but determined opposition that many landowners displayed, particularly in the refusal of sites for Free churches, expecting and even resolving that they would thereby starve the people out, and bring them back to the Established Church.
THE HIGH PLACES OF THE FIELD.
I cannot and should not do more than refer to the great hardships and privations to which ministers and congregations were exposed, not only by the refusal of sites for churches, but by petty tyrannies exercised on them and on those who befriended, even on those who only pitied, these humble worshippers among the fir woods of Strathspey, on the stormy headlands of Mull or Skye, or on the bleak shores and barren moors of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
Even in the Lowlands, among the pastoral solitudes of Canonbie, or the gusty winds of Wanlockhead, said to be the highest inhabited place in Scotland, sites were not only refused, but our common humanity was outraged by wanton and sustained interference with such little protection as a thin tent, an old barn, or even an old quarry might afford; and this not only in the year of the Disruption, but for years thereafter, until it was made the subject of parliamentary inquiry.
To those to whom these facts are new, I would recommend the perusal of the Annals of the Disruption Part III., recently issued by authority of the Free Church of Scotland. Besides giving many interesting facts of the trials and privations I have referred to, this book tells that, owing to not being able to procure a site, the expedient was resorted to of a floating manse—the “Betsy,” an old boat of 12 tons burden, which, although very unfit to stand the storms of the Atlantic, was used by the Rev. Mr. Swanson as he passed from one stormy shore to another amongst the Highlands and islands of Scotland, and has been immortalized by Hugh Miller in his interesting book, The Cruise of the “Betsy.”
I had written the greater part of these “Bits,” and was asking a friend for information on a kindred subject, when he drew my attention to the Annals; and since I have perused the book, I add my humble testimony to the admirable manner in which it presents the interesting and well-told tales of those recent Scottish worthies.
The story of the determined adherence of these suffering witnesses to their conscientious convictions in the face of ill-treatment and persecution, reached Blinkbonny, and it awakened not only a burst of indignation towards those who did the wrong, but it provoked a feeling which manifested itself in substantial help, as well as sympathetic admiration towards those who suffered the wrong; and to this cause, coupled with the high esteem in which Mr. Barrie was held, quite as much as to an intelligent adherence to any well-thought-out theory of church government, may be attributed the strong hold that the Free Church took of Blinkbonny.
ONE TOUCH OF NATURE.