We shall quote no more, however, from the details of this Blue-book, but it will be remembered that, after taking evidence extending to nearly five hundred pages of print, the committee unanimously concurred in expressing an 'earnest hope that the sites which have hitherto been refused may no longer be withheld.' They held, and all Englishmen will echo the opinion, that 'the compulsion to worship in the open air, without a church, is a grievous hardship inflicted on innocent parties;' while they found that even at that late date of 1847, about 16,000 people were still compelled so to worship, or at least were 'deprived of church accommodation,' and were without 'a convenient shelter from the severity of a northern climate.'
But though the site-refusing caused much distress to the people, still the edge even of this fell chiefly upon the ministers. Driven out of their old homes in one day, they were often refused new ones, and in the great Highland counties denied even temporary shelter. Lodging there was hardly to be got, and in many places the tenantry were haunted with fears of what the consequences might be to themselves if they gave house-room where their landlords had already refused a site. 'Many of these ministers' families,' said Dr. Guthrie in 1845, when the facts were recent,—'some of them motherless families—are thirty, and fifty, and sixty, and seventy miles separated from them. I think of the hardship of many of these men going to see their own children; and of children who see their father so seldom that they do not know him when he visits them.' One of the most curious cases thus produced was that of the parish of Small Isles—so called because it consists of four little islands clustered together in the Atlantic. The minister, Mr. Swanson, well known now as the friend from youth of Hugh Miller—famous as a geologist, and much more famous as a Scottish stonemason, gave up his home, 'placed far amid the melancholy main,' and came out with the others in 1843; and a site both for manse and Church being refused on the central island, where the whole congregation adhered to him, he betook himself to what his friend, the gifted editor of the Witness, dubbed the 'Floating Manse.' It was a little yacht, 30 feet by 11 feet, in which he lived when visiting his parish, his family, however, residing in Skye.
In 1844, Hugh Miller set out to visit his friend on a geological excursion, the scientific record of which he has preserved in his volume 'The Cruise of the Betsy,' where he also gives a most curious account of the relations of Mr. Swanson, the minister, to the people to whom he so clung. On one Sunday morning the geologist and his host got ashore on their way to a low dingy cottage of turf and stone (just opposite the windows of the deserted manse), which its former occupant had built with his own money as a Gaelic school for the people, and which they were obliged to use as a place of worship—'the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas protected atop by a genuine sou'-wester, of which the broad posterior rim sloped half-a-yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my grey maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating powers of a true Hebridean drizzle.' When they got in, the minister took off his sou'-wester, and preached on 'God so loved the world,' and the visitor remarks how the attention of his hearers to him who was not only their pastor, but the sole physician, and that without fee or reward, in the island, was increased by his new life of hardship and danger undertaken for their sakes; for they had seen his little vessel driven from her anchorage just as the evening had fallen, and always feared for his safety when stormy nights closed over the sea. Next year Miller had himself an opportunity of judging of this, for while he was on board the Betsy 'the water, pouring in through a hundred opening chinks in her upper works, rose, despite of our exertions, high over plank, and beam, and cabin door, and went dashing against beds and lockers. She was evidently fast filling, and bade fair to terminate all her voyagings by a short trip to the bottom.' They barely saved themselves by the Point of Sleat interposing between them and the roll of the sea. The 'Floating Manse' will not be forgotten while the works of this charming writer survive; but very much later than this, on Loch Sunart, also in the West, a 'floating church' also had to be provided in consequence of the refusal of a site; and the Sheriff of Edinburghshire, himself a naval officer in his youth, testified to the Committee of the House that in the winter of 1846 it answered very well. It was moored about a hundred yards from the shore, and although there was a little difficulty in the people going out in boats, still it was possible to manage it. Many English pedestrians in Sutherland have seen the famous Cave of Smoo, a vast cavern protected by a natural gateway of rock, and with an interior chamber where a black stream flows in perpetual darkness. It was here that the Free Church congregation of Durness met.
'One minister has preached for two years in a deep sea pit, which I saw in Sutherlandshire; God's sea is their protection. No man can say he is ruler of the sea, though he boasts himself possessor of the land. In a deep gully, where the rocks are some hundred feet high, a hollow has been closed in from the sea by a barrier of rocks, which protects them from the Western Ocean, behind this they meet; and there, some hundred feet down, where no man can see them till he stands on the verge of the precipice, and where they might have been safe from Claverhouse in the days of old, that minister with his congregation, while the waves of the Atlantic Ocean were roaring beside them, and protected by that barrier of rock, met two winters and two summers; and I know, from the determination of that man and his people, that there they would have met till their dying day if the Duke of Sutherland had not granted them redress.'
But we were treating of the hardships rather of the ministers than of the congregations, and Dr. Guthrie's question is pertinent,
'Where does the minister go after having preached in such circumstances? Not in the case I have just mentioned, but in another, the minister, after preaching to his hearers in the winter snow, where there was no barrier or creek sheltering them from the salt sea spray, had to go back, not to a comfortable home, like you and me, but to a miserable dwelling, where he had to climb to a lonely and miserable garret, and in a place where there was little ventilation, and in a room where he could have no fire, the minister had to sit from week's end to week's end, till his health was broken down, and he was obliged to retire from the battle-field, forced away from it to save himself from an early, and, I say, a martyr's grave.'
It need not be said that such cases as these were exceptional and extreme; but, on the other hand, it is certain the facts in these cases are accurately given, and are representative of other extreme cases that were never published. Our last quotation from the eloquent divine who laid the foundations of the homes of a whole Church (and to whom we shall not apologize for quoting so many facts which are the inheritance of the Church catholic) is interesting to the writer, because the younger of the two ministers spoken of in it was one of the first men whom he remembers in his childhood to have seen in the pulpit. He gave up no manse in 1843, but belonged to another class, the licentiates or candidates of the Church, who threw in their lot with the body now to be stripped of all its prospects and emoluments. The following visit, narrated by Dr. Guthrie, was to the old minister of Tongue, 'a man of the highest character and the best affections.' His son, whom we remember merely as a gentlemanly young cleric, with a rather plaintive voice, which ranged through endless intonations and cadences, and was provocative of meditation much more than of thought, was at this time his father's assistant, and died of the fever mentioned by Dr. Guthrie.
'The place where Mr. Mackenzie's old manse is situated is near the small village of Tongue, the prettiest place in all that country. He had a sort of ancestral right to it—his family having had possession of it for about a hundred years—and he had spent several hundreds of pounds in improving the property, never dreaming but that his son would inherit it after he was gone. It was told me that his Grace of Sutherland wrote to him, expressing his hope that he would not go out, considering how much he had done for him. Mr. Mackenzie wrote back that he was not forgetful of his Grace's kindness, but that he owed more to the Lord Jesus Christ.... When I went to Tongue, where did I find him? I passed the manse, with its lawns, its trim walks, and its fine trees. I went on till I came to a bleak, heather hill, under the lee of which I found a humble cottage belonging to the parish schoolmaster, where this venerable man and his son had found a shelter, and were accommodated for four shillings a week. There was nothing inviting about the house, though I believe the people were kind enough. Before the door there was an old broken cart, and a black peat stack, and everything was repulsive. I opened the door of the single room, which served for dining-room, drawing-room, parlour, library, study, and bedroom, all and everything in one; and there, beyond the bed, I saw him, nature exhausted. He had never closed his eyes all night, having passed a night of extreme suffering; and there, in exhausted nature, he was sitting half dressed in a chair, in profound slumber, his old grey locks streaming over the back of the chair on which he was sitting—a picture of old age, a picture of disease, a picture of death. I stood for some time before him, and as I looked round the room I thought, Oh! if I had B——, if I had any of the men here who are persecuting our poor Free Church, surely they would be moved by such a sight as this! I pushed open a door, and in a small mean closet I found this venerable man's son—a minister of our Church, and a man who would be an honour to any Church—lying on a fever bed. His children were seventy miles away, for no house could be procured for them in the district. The son had never closed his eyes all night, his own sufferings having been aggravated by his father's. I tried to console him, but I was more fit to weep with him than anything else. I only remember that he said something to this effect: "Ah, Mr. Guthrie, this is bad enough and hard enough, but, blessed be God, I don't lie here a renegade; my own conscience and my father's are in peace." As I came back amid the driving tempest, I confess that I was more like a child than a man, so little was I able to resist what I had seen; and as I came along I saw a little flower, that God in his providence had taught, when the storm came on, to close its leaves; and I thought, if God is so kind to this little flower, he will never see the righteous man forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.... When I returned from the North a few days ago, I found a letter, informing me that this venerable man was dead. Death has tied his tongue: it has loosed mine. I believe that that man may have died as much in consequence of the privations he endured, as John Brown did from the pistol of Claverhouse. There was some mercy in the dragoon's pistol; it put an end to the man's sufferings at once. But he is now in his coffin, and they cannot disturb him there.'
'And what I pray this meeting to remember,' concluded the speaker, 'is that there are other men in similar circumstances.' There were others, not a few; but most of them now dwell where they hear not the voice of the oppressor; and though family records all over Scotland might add not a few pages to our chronicle of constancy, these are generally too sacred to draw upon. Enough has been said to recall us to the circumstances of straitening and suffering under which the extraordinary work of church organization and construction which we formerly sketched was carried on; and to remind us that the favourite motto of the Scottish church, Nec tamen consumebatur, has more modern applications than to those days of the Covenant
'Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour.'