That he should have chosen Dalkeith when he had the chance of going to Edinburgh has been remarked as strange. ‘I prefer,’ he said in explanation, ‘a country parish to a town, because the fever and excitement and the kind of work on Sabbath days and week days in Edinburgh would do me much harm bodily and spiritually.’ This is not enough, and indeed, though he did not state them, he confessed that he had other reasons. As the citadel of a glorying dissent, Edinburgh would scarcely be inviting to a man of his temperament. And it is clear that his mind had been stirred to its depths by the secession. At Dalkeith he would have leisure for reading and reflection, and yet be close to the headquarters of the Church.
Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc that had been made by the Disruption, than the minister of Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings as to the side which he had taken in the great controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the Establishment might have been in the end more irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained within. He veered between angry lamentation over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, and aversion from the faults of the new zealots—’vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. At the same time he perceived only too well what was good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in full sympathy with them in their devotion to the evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. He saw the seceders popular and victorious,—theirs all the energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,—her ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more to their stipends than their work. Among other instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’ On the question of policy it is probable that he changed his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How was the National Church to be revived? The aristocracy had but one thing in view—the landed interest; Peel was a trimmer; there was nothing in mere numbers. What was wanted was an inner work in the hearts of clergy and people. ‘If we were right in our souls,’ he wrote, ‘out of this root would spring the tree and fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living water.’ Two vows he took, one that he would devote himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among all who loved Christ.
At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with the help of his congregation, which he developed into a society of Christian workers. He went about preaching in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got hung round with placards of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary, the minister showed that money would be better spent in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his days among his ‘brothers and sisters.’ There is a little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions of his tales. ‘On coming home this evening, I saw a number of boys following and speaking to, and apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close by the wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild birds. I asked the boys who he was. “Eh! he’s a wee boy gaun’ aboot beggin’, wi’out faither or mither.”’ The minister took him to the manse, and consigned him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By and by ‘the door was opened, and in marched my poor boy, paraded in by Jessie,—a beautiful boy, clean as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful clean shirt, his hair combed and divided; and Jessie gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips; he looked round him in bewilderment. “There he is,” said Jessie; “I am sure ye’re in anither warld the night, my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore?” “No.” “What will ye dae noo?” “I dinna ken.” “Will ye gang awa’ and beg the night?” “If ye like.” “No,” said I, “be off to your bed and sleep.”’
He was led to ponder the social as well as the religious problem presented by life in the slums. In the events of the year of revolution he took a keen interest. ‘The Chartists are put down,’ he remarked scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by no means end with the victory of the special constable. ‘Snug the joiner,’ he observed, ‘is a man as other men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered, which in rags shivers in the cold, while the “special” goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair, saying, “The scoundrels are put down.” We demand from them patience while starving—do we meet their demands for bread? Special! what hast thou done for thy brother? Ay—don’t stare at me or at thy baton—thy brother, I say! Hast thou ever troubled thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast about giving him a broken head?’ He rejected the remedies of the politicians—reform of taxation, high wages, the suffrage,—holding that the only cure lay ‘in the personal and regular communion of the better with the worse—man with man—until each Christian, like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be saved.’ Such was the spirit in which he toiled among the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod.
He was no sooner settled in Dalkeith than he began to take part in the reparation of the ecclesiastical agencies that had been ruined by the Disruption. Of these the chief was in his eyes the India Mission. In 1844 he went, as one of a deputation, to the north of Scotland, in order to organise societies for the furtherance of female education in Hindostan. This was the first of a long series of religious embassies which compassed the round earth. Thirty associations were formed, but he returned from the tour lamenting the general apathy.
The year following he was charged, along with his uncle the minister of Morven, and another, with a more distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the Secession had been felt; shrieks of Veto, Cæsar, Headship, mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods. The deputies were for British North America; their business was to preach, and to explain the action of the constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of Morven? And such an expedition would peculiarly suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign countries, and having an object that excited his religious enthusiasm.
On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool in June) he found in one of the berths a dying man, and conversed with him about the state of his soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of his sincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship reached its destination, the passengers drank the health of the deputies with three times three.
At Washington he had an interview with the President, Mr. Polk,—’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought, ‘shall I now see the strange sight—a brother-man for sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’ Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its most mitigated form, and yet the impression made upon him ‘by seeing instead of hearing was overwhelmingly bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime—without their consent—slaves for life—slaves from childhood;—it was enough.’ During the American war he declared that the British sympathy for the South was to him an inscrutable mystery.
In the States he was not slow to pick up hints for his future work from Sunday School Unions and Mission Boards; but that the customs of a foreign country are not to be inferred from a surface glance, he learned by an incident which he never forgot. He had mounted the box of a coach, and was surprised to find the driver seated at his left hand. ‘Just as I had noted the great fact that “all drivers in America sit on the left side of the box,” I thought I would ask what was gained by this. “Why, I guess,” replied Jonathan, “I can’t help it; I’m left-handed.”’
In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he was busy taking in the primeval forest—the tufted heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the chop-chop-chop of the pioneer’s axe in the weird silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be an Englishman, and would quiz them about their savage language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same as in the old land. ‘This angry spirit of Churchism,’ he says, ‘which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland, thunders at the door of every shanty in the backwoods.’ For himself, in explaining the Church question, he avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who (unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings confessed that he could not find fault with one expression. Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed, in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment. At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country; on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service in the open air. ‘The tent,’ writes Norman, ‘was on a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld the most touching and magnificent sight. There were (in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about four thousand people here assembled! John had finished a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head bare at the head of the white communion table, and was about to exhort the communicants. There was on either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I entered the tent and looked around; I have seen grand and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or clime—as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the communicants, every head bent down to the white board, and watched the expressions of the weather-beaten, true Highland countenances around me, and remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness—as these and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came from the Lord’s Table, can you wonder that I hid my face, and “lifted up my voice and wept”? Oh that my father had been with us! what a welcome he would have received!’ At various spots he met men from Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod found a woman who, the moment he entered her house, burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife’s sister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the exiles! In one place two old elders put their arms about Norman’s neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new sources of emotion; it was more that at the age of thirty-three he could say: ‘I have had peeps into real Canadian life: I have seen the true Indians in their encampment; I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men with their canoes and the North-westers on their way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I have been shaken to atoms over “corduroy” roads, and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to defend my poor and calumniated Church from many aspersions.’