During this visit there came to him rumours of a movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Conference, held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever spent on earth. ‘What a prayer was that of Octavius Winslow’s! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the tears pour down my cheeks.’ There was developed in him a new love for his ministerial brethren. ‘I felt like a man who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and he had never seen them before.’ The Alliance was formed in August at the Freemasons’ Hall, London, in an assembly composed of a thousand representative Christians from America and the Colonies, and from almost every country in Europe. The project sprang from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference, a general conference once every lustrum in some European capital, reports from branches on events touching religious liberty: such were the methods by which these good men proposed to bring about the golden year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth, that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at least we are told. There was doubtless at first a powerful tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president, ‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not been presented to the eyes of God or man.... And is there not another class of eyes which may be said to be upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of your meeting much of their interests may be suspended. But, brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason to think that no such gathering as this would take place, and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10); we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are directed towards us.’ A few days later he told the Conference that he had been in the committee-room, and ‘he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when he said that the world’s interests and the interests of humanity were trembling in the balance.’ At a point in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects, ‘The respected speaker here paused, evidently overcome by his feelings.’ The orator ‘hoped brethren would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other subject but that which concerned religion and its great interests: but from his childhood he never could refrain from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed he was a perfect child.’ Did Norman cry, Hear, hear? On the contrary, he also would be greetin’. The time came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach. Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being a member of the business committee, a frequent chairman of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony; and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans, all united by the bond of a common religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another good thing he owed to the Alliance—the privilege of visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr. Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain progressive movements which had been reported from these countries. By the year 1847 he had seen the working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen his attachment to the Church of Scotland.
How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental susceptibility. He came under the influence of his heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and holy man; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed ‘thou true man, poet of the backwoods.’ He was getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling, not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had become of the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tübingen, dying. After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge. There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists, and had assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He calls him his ‘dearest Norman,’ his ‘beloved Norman,’ whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss; speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest hours of his life, much mental development, and not a few faithful and well-timed warnings—a friend the thought of whom brightened his future. ‘Think of you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.’ When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for Tübingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty-four hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was two o’clock in the morning when he arrived in the town. He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid’s door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs. Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that he had received his relatives on their arrival with a strange coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst not enter his room without an invitation. Pondering this mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions, was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere the final victory of Christ was achieved? He sent a note into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his friend would see him. The answer was, ‘Come now.’ The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black hair with an ‘intense and painful lustre.’ With loving gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible voice said, ‘I am holding communion with God,’ and they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world, mentioned an hour at which he would be glad to have another meeting. So he was brought back completely to his old self. He had been mentally disturbed by his mother’s arrival, because, thinking that he might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he would sit of an evening ‘with closed eyes, and head drooping on his breast,’ listening in silence to old Scottish tunes—’Wandering Willie,’ ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest,’ ‘The Land o’ the Leal’; and, again, with an air of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of soon meeting Chalmers. ‘My spirit,’ wrote Norman, ‘felt no less than awed before him.’ The companions took farewell of each other on the 11th of March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was dead.
In July Macleod was inducted to the Barony Church, Glasgow. A month later he was married to Catherine Ann Macintosh, the sister of his friend.
CHAPTER IV
1851-1860
THE BARONY PARISH—MACLEOD AS PASTOR—AS PREACHER—HIS SYMPATHY—POSITION IN THE CITY.
The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father—was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasm went far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears.
Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.