‘But the text, the text, my lady?’
‘My text would be,’ said Kate, ‘“Is not a man better than a sheep?”’[3]
The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting the lines—
‘From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas,
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’
Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no indictment of the social structure; there was nothing for it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of the boarding-out system; but it was for those whom legal relief might not reach that his heart bled. ‘There is many a desolate cry of pain,’ he wrote, ‘smothered within the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon.’ To aid the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest objects that could engage the attention of good men;—one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, from New York to Elberfelt; but vain was his dream of building a bridge between east and west by charity,—the wary remorse and discount of the Vandals.
The working men of Glasgow more than once testified in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and gold they had none, they said, but they would retain for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, ‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it was the same. Free Church people and people of all Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me; cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets, asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time a surreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His name was oftener heard in common talk than that of any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’ Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom he did not know. Thinking that they might be new adherents, he went to the house, which was up three flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it would never dae to risk Norman.’[4]
There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5] ‘As for sadness and gloom,’ he says somewhere, ‘in accepting all things from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see—— drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were never written, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?
‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. ‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, and vice versâ: some avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod not only attended to all departments of a minister’s work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it implied service to the Church or the community. Early in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiastical barriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the repeal of the theological tests for university professors. But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen that his name rose in the religious world. He preached every year for the London Missionary Society, and when he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission Reports there was always a crowd.