To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them.
It has been said that he is priest-ridden.
It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy.
We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on his advice can spring only from two causes—an intellectual feebleness, which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice, which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of having them dealt with vicariously.
But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions. Their monasteries were the repositories of learning; they themselves were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely through training and position, but by a species of natural selection, the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation, or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred. Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning and the upholders of their human rights.
On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social points round which the national life centred, and from which have radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.
It has often been scornfully described how when, in some remote Boer farmhouse, one son showed unusual mental alertness, he was predestined for the Church; how often, by rigid economy on the part of other members of the family, the money was accumulated to send him to college in Europe, and how on his return Mynheer was regarded with profound reverence and almost awe, even by his aged parents and the boys with whom he had minded lambs in childhood. This is true; but to suppose the feeling took its rise merely in a superstitious reverence for the black coat and ghostly prerogatives of the preacher would be to err profoundly. The man who returned from his studies differed materially, in the extent of his information and in his grasp on many aspects of life, from his brothers and companions who had remained tending the paternal flocks, or labouring in the family vineyards; and he had therefore necessarily certain social functions to perform, which could be performed by no other members of his community, and this apart entirely from his priestly office. The feelings with which he was regarded combined, with relation to one person, the feeling which the modern man entertains for his skilled lawyer, his family physician, his favourite writer, and his political leader. For years the clergy of the Dutch Church formed of necessity the connecting link between the Boer, widely scattered through remote districts, and the outer world. They were his advisers, often his representatives when he entered into contact with keen social and political elements of the hungry modern world. It was largely through them that such conditions of culture and knowledge as he had brought with him into the desert were maintained and enlarged; and they formed the channels through which were conveyed to him whatever influence of the modern world reached him. And nobly, on the whole, have they performed their task.
We believe that no one who is aware of our attitude towards sacerdotalism generally, to dogmatic theology everywhere, will accuse us of any undue bias in favour of the Dutch Reformed clergy on account of their function or abstract theological views, when we say that not only the Boer but South Africa generally is under debt to them.