Unfortunately, owing to the rapacity of the nobles, this splendid scheme of national education was not carried out in its entirety. But though the enlightened views which the Reformers thus endeavoured to impress both upon the Parliament and the country were not so heartily and widely adopted as they should have been, a beginning was made in the establishment of parochial schools, and by this means the benefits of education were brought within the reach of the great body of the people. It has been justly remarked that if the counsel of the Reformers had been followed, no country in the world would have been so well supplied as Scotland with the means of extending the benefits of a liberal education to every man capable of intellectual improvement.
The state of the Borders, however, for at least fifty years after the Reformation, was such as to make it difficult in some places, and all but impossible in others, to establish and maintain parochial schools. But in course of time, as things began to improve, owing to the more systematic and impartial administration of the law, the work of training the youth of the district was entered upon with energy and enthusiasm. The beneficial results of the new regime in matters educational soon became apparent. Crime steadily decreased. The old reiving habits were gradually, if with difficulty, abandoned, and increased attention was given to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture and other industries; and out of the social chaos which had so long been a notorious feature of Border life, a healthy, vigorous, law-abiding community was evolved.
But the most potent factor in the pacification and moral regeneration of the Borders was the influence and teaching of the Church. The religious condition of the people in this part of the country, both before and after the Reformation, can only be described as utterly deplorable. The fierce fighting Border clans had practically broken with institutional religion in all its forms. It is frequently said of them, and not without good reason, that they feared neither God nor man. They delighted in robbing and burning churches, and held both priest and presbyter in high disdain. Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie is credited with having destroyed, during the course of his career, no fewer than fifty-two parish churches. The picture of the religious condition of the Borders, as reflected in the State Papers, is well fitted to awaken painful reflections. Eure, for example, in a letter addressed to Queen Elizabeth, in the year 1596, says:—“Another most grievous decay is the ‘want of knowledge of God,’ whereby the better sort forget oath and duty, let malefactors go without evidence, and favour a partie belonging to them or their friends. The churches mostly ruined to the ground, ministers and preachers ‘comfortless to come and remain where such heathenish people are,’ so there are neither teachers nor taught.”[134] In a still more doleful strain the Bishop of Durham describes the irreligious condition of the Borders. “Diverse persons,” he says, “under pretext of danger to their persons, and some through a careless regard of their conscience toward their flocks, besides also other out of a continual corruption of their patrons, turn residence into absence, whereby the people are almost totally negligent and ignorant of the truth professed by us, and so the more subject to every subtile seducer.”[135] So completely, indeed, had religious teaching fallen into abeyance that one writer even goes the length of affirming that “many die, and cannot say the Lord’s Prayer.”[136]
The Commission appointed to inquire into the state of affairs on the Borders, after the breaking of Carlisle castle by Buccleuch, and to discover, if possible, some remedy for the clamant evils which prevailed, suggested in the first paragraph of their report “that ministers be planted at every Border Church to inform the lawless people of their duty, and watch over their manners—the principals of each parish giving their prime surety for due reverence to the pastor in his office; the said churches to be timely repaired.”[137]
The propriety and wisdom of this deliverance will not be seriously questioned by those who have some knowledge of the motives and principles by which human life is moulded and governed. Religion is the bulwark of society and the State—the necessary condition alike of their existence and wellbeing. It was therefore clearly perceived by those responsible for the social and moral wellbeing of this much distracted region that some effective measures must be adopted to revive the religious life of the people. The task was none of the easiest. Ruined churches had to be restored; ministers had to be found, and “honest stipends” provided; and the community from an ecclesiastical point of view reorganized. And, as might be expected, the changes contemplated were not easily or quickly effected. Old habits are not readily abandoned, and consequently it took many years to raise the general religious life of the Borders to the level of that of other districts of the country where the conditions, to begin with, were more favourable. Even in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when that renowned minister, the Rev. Thomas Boston, began his pastorate in Ettrick, the state of matters from a religious point of view was such as might well have appalled the stoutest heart. His parishioners were rude and lawless to a degree. We are told that on Sundays some of them went, not to church, but to the churchyard, and tried to drown the voice of the preacher by producing all sorts of discordant sounds; and even those who ventured within the walls ostensibly to worship, would rise up during the service with “rude noise and seeming impatience,” and leave the building. The condition of this parish—and others in the district were probably not much better—has been not inaptly described as “an unploughed field covered with tangled weeds and thorns, and sheltering many foul creatures.” But the morals of the people, under the influence of the faithful ministrations of Boston, were gradually reformed, and the desert was made to bud and blossom like the rose. And what was effected in this particular district may be taken as a fair sample of the good work accomplished by the Church throughout the whole length of the Borders. Its influence was potent and far-reaching, and mighty to the pulling down of the strongholds of evil. “How did it happen,” says a modern writer, “that the raiding and reiving race which inhabited the Borders became so peaceful and law-abiding? That were a long tale to tell, but the credit of it belongs to those preachers Sir Walter was too superfine and cavalier to understand. In this work his own great-grandfather, for nineteen years the faithful and diligent minister of Yarrow, bore his own part, and, though the great-grandson owed his genius to his mother, the minister’s grand-daughter, he failed to appreciate the most characteristic treasure of his inheritance. He remembered that Richard Cameron—founder of the Cameronians, sternest of Presbyterian sects—was once chaplain to the Harden Scotts, but he could see no heroism in the uncompromising preacher, who had dared to rebuke Harden’s too compliant faith and indulgent temper. Yet over Annandale, throughout Moffatdale, thence flowing over into the Forest, the name of Cameron was one of power. The heroic strain in him suited the mood of the ancient reivers, who loved strength and iron in the blood. But the Scotts had ridden and lorded it over the Marches too long to love iron in any blood save their own. Their feud with the preachers began early, for John Welsh, Knox’s son-in-law, was persecuted out of Selkirk, whither he had gone to convert the souters and reform the freebooters of the Forest, by a Scott of Headshaw. But the man who ought here to be placed foremost is a man who became minister of Ettrick three years before John Rutherford, Scott’s ancestor, died—Thomas Boston. Cotter Morrison quoted some of his fierce sayings with the horror of a son of light suddenly confronting an altogether incredible darkness. But no man ignorant of the deeds of Boston can judge his speech. In some of his words there is a wonderful tenderness, in his acts a marvellous integrity, and in his thought a rare power to move the hearts, stir the consciences, and awaken the intellects of his people. It was a brave thing to make the stern Presbyterian discipline a reality among these men of the Forest, in whom the old reiving instinct was still strong, at once kept alive and glorified by the ballads which were known in every cottage, and recited at every hearth. But the man was patient and strong enough to do it; nothing was too minute to escape his eye; nothing was too inveterate to silence or too ancient to overcome his religion.”[138] It is undoubtedly to the influence of such preachers, men of faith and character, scholarship and genius, that Borderers owe many of the best qualities, both of intellect and heart, for which, in later times, they have become distinguished.
XVI.
THE HARVEST OF PEACE.
| When this loose behaviour I throw off, And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hope; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes, Than that which hath no foil to set it off. |
| Shakespeare. |