Passing from the more servile ranks of the clergy to those of the laity it appeared as the party cry of a class. To many it has often appeared strange how such an absurd and illogical doctrine could become even the shibboleth of a political party. Yet at bottom the doctrine of the divine right of the king was not very unfavourable to the divine right of squires, and king and cavaliers were bound together by obvious ties of interest in the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the rising tide of political opposition. Holy Alliances in recent times have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till James VII. began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see what was logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, and in their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal smiter. Only when the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, not for any loyalty to the country or to the constitution, but through a selfish maintenance of their own interests as a class, did the Anglican body bethink themselves of resistance, and of texts that reminded them of the hammer of Jael and the dagger of Ehud no less than of the balm of the anointed of the Lord. History has repeated itself. The landed and clerical classes associated their triumph with the triumph of Episcopacy, and their humiliation with the triumph of the Independents. The exaltation of the prerogative, therefore, again made its appearance at the Restoration, to be shaken by the high-handed measures of James, and pass to extinction at the Revolution. The same thing has practically been seen in Spain. Spain, remarks Borrow, is not naturally a fanatical country. It was by humouring her pride only that she was induced to launch the Armada and waste her treasures in the wars of the Low Countries. But to the Spaniard, Catholicism was the mark of his own ascendency; it was the typification of his elevation over the Moor. The Most Catholic King was therefore flattered to exalt the claims of the Holy See no less than the English clergy had exalted the prerogative of the king. Far different the condition of affairs in Scotland. When Knox landed at Leith, in May 1559, he found the whole people ripe for a change, so that by August of next year the Scottish Parliament could pass a resolution to abolish the Papacy with the entire consent of the nation, and in December 1560 the First General Assembly met. Its laic element was strong and was emphasised from the beginning. To six ministers there were thirty-four elders, and it met by no sanction of the Crown, but by its own authority. At its second meeting, Maitland of Lethington could craftily raise the question as to the legality of such conventions without the consent of the Queen. It was retorted that, if they were dependent merely upon the Queen for their liberty of meeting, they would be deprived of the public preaching of the gospel. 'Take from us,' said Knox, 'the freedom of assemblies, and take from us the Gospel'; but it was left to her to send a commissioner. So early was the doctrine of the Headship maintained by the Church of Scotland. In 1560, no less than 1843, the question was clear. In 1557 they had resolved that the election of ministers, according to the custom of the primitive church, should be made by the people; and in the First Book of Discipline of 1560, re-enacted in 1578, it was laid down that 'it appertaineth to the people and to every several congregation to elect their minister, and it is altogether to be avoided that any man be violently intruded or thrust in upon any congregation.' The fabric was laid: three hundred years have not started a plank.
The difference of the Reformation in England and in Scotland at once emerges. Knox had the nation at his back; and, besides being, as Milton said, 'the Reformer of a nation,' he had found the people by mental temperament, or by concurrent historical reasons, anchored to a doctrinal system with a political side which has coloured ever since the stream of its existence. Calvinism, in every one of its forms, exaggerated or diluted, has this double side. It is felt in this way. To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. To the nation, and to the individual alike, regarding itself or himself as fellow-workers with God in the furtherance of His immutable decrees, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers have for ever lost their awe or a power to coerce. Wherever the belief has been carried these results have been seen. There has been, what Buckle failed completely to see, a rooted aversion to ecclesiasticism, and a no less rooted aversion to tyranny. And in no better words could the doctrinal and political principles be laid down than in the famous words of Andrew Melville which we have set at the head of this chapter.
Again, when Knox laid hold of the nation his schemes in their very first draft embraced the people as a whole. It was not a merely piecemeal or monarchical business as in England. The Reformers were not content with merely formulating an Act like Henry; they proceeded to carry out in detail their plans for a national system of education. They had no idea of setting up a church of their own invention. There is something in the Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French, that seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. As Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is really not caution, with which it is so frequently credited, but emphasis. While the English Independents during the later years of the Civil War appear as either sectaries or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was ever for a national system. This feature in the character of the nation is really at the root of what Hallam calls the 'Presbyterian Hildebrandism' of the elder M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some considerable truth say to Boswell, 'You are the only instance of a Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other sentence bring in some other Scotchman.' But this is the very feature that Buckle has overlooked, and it is this that explains how the new church spoke in the authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how, outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all mere branches of the parent stock, retaining in detail its fundamental nature in discipline and worship, the established church in England finds itself face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land, Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. Dean Stanley found that 'the questionable idols' of the Episcopalian sect were Mary Queen of Scots, Montrose, and Dundee. These have never been the idols of the Scottish people: the last, indeed, occupies in its memory the peculiar niche of infamy.
The political side of the national religion is expressed no less clearly in facts. The Scottish Crown is held by a contract,[1] and the coronation oath is the deliberate expression of it. In his De Jure Regni in 1579, dedicated to the king, Buchanan had made this apparent to Europe, and in his Lex Rex, in 1644, Buchanan was reinforced by Rutherfurd in the doctrine that the people is the source of power, and his officers are merely ministri regni non regis, 'servants of the kingdom, not of the king.' Startling doctrine this to the slobbering vicegerent of God, conceding to the people acts to be revoked at his pleasure. In the light of ordinary facts, therefore, what are the national covenants of 1580 and 1638, but very simple Magna Chartas or Reform Bills with a religious colouring? One half of the statements of Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, austerity, gloom, enthusiasm, democracy, and popular ferocity, and all the bugbears of the writers so terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be discounted by a simple regard for facts. When Leighton and Burnet went into the west in 1670 to try and induce the people to recognise the establishment of Charles, what did they find? Wranglings or harangues after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to hear us. We were amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of the civil magistrate and princes in matters of religion: upon all these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to everything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, their cottagers and servants.' Leighton might well have remembered the case of his own father. History loves not the Coriolani, says Mommsen, and Miller has well seized this incident to bring out the popular side of the national religion. To the question, in an inn at Newcastle, what the Scottish religion had done for the people, he could reply, 'Independently altogether of religious considerations, it has done for our people what your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours; it has awakened their intellects and taught them to think.'
But the exigencies of the romance-writer are often the means of corrupting history, and the largest class of readers will ever prefer to read it, in the phrase of Macaulay, with their feet on the fender. To that class, therefore, the political crisis of 1638, one of no less magnitude than the French Revolution, will ever be obscured by airy talk about religious intolerance and popular fanaticism. The history of Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of 'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. The courtly Dean Stanley approaches the maudlin in his remarks at this stage, and he thinks of Scott as he 'murmured the lay of Prince Charlie on the hills of Pausilippo, and stood rapt in silent devotion before the tomb of the Stuarts in St. Peter.' But the admirers of the greatest of all novelists will remember also no less his statement that he gave the heart without giving the head, and will even regard it as a merely temporary aberration, like his presence at Carlton House with the Prince Regent, where, says Lockhart with curious lack of humour, 'that nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs!' The spell of Sir Walter should not blind us to the real and the false in the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers! Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness—these are the traditional marks of the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's perfervidum ingenium is surely much truer, and mere calculation is just what is not the national mark. If her poverty and pride were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of persecution: nec tamen consumebatur. Perhaps, in the circumstances under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx—a danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a commentary—had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people. The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland, and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost upon the ignorant class, who were not overdrawn in the Squire Western of Fielding's novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits. The nobility of the land were only too ready to seize upon the poor spoils of the national endowment in order to renew their waning power in the country, and in so doing they managed to set themselves and their descendants in hereditary opposition to the great mass of the people. The English peerage has done much for the English people. In Scotland, it may be asked, which of the four Scottish Universities has had a farthing of the money of the nobility, and what have they done for the Church in any one of her branches?
In Miller's Letter to Brougham this cardinal point of 1712 is made clear:—
'Bolingbroke engaged in his deep-laid conspiracy against the Protestant succession and our popular liberties; and again the law of patronage was established. But why established? Smollett would have told your Lordship of the peculiarly sinister spirit which animated the last Parliament of Anne; of feelings adverse to the cause of freedom which prevailed among the people when it was chosen; and that the Act which re-established patronage was but one of a series, all bearing on an object which the honest Scotch member who signified his willingness to acquiesce in one of those, on condition that it should be described by its right name—an Act for the Encouragement of Immorality and Jacobitism in Scotland—seems to have discovered. Burnet is more decided. Instead of triumphing on the occasion, he solemnly assures us that the thing was done merely "to spite the Presbyterians, who, from the beginning, had set it up as a principle that parishes had, from warrants in Scripture, a right to choose their ministers," and "who saw, with great alarm, the success of a motion made on design to weaken and undermine their establishment"; and the good Sir Walter, notwithstanding all his Tory prejudices, is quite as candid. The law which re-established patronage in Scotland—which has rendered Christianity inefficient in well-nigh half her parishes, which has separated some of her better clergymen from her Church, and many of her better people from her clergymen, the law through which Robertson ruled in the General Assembly, and which Brougham has eulogised in the House of Lords, that identical law formed, in its first enactment, no unessential portion of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against the liberties of our country.'
The immediate result was seen in the conduct of the patrons. As the Regent Morton had established tulchan bishops and secured the revenues of the sees, the patrons now named such presentees as they deliberately saw would be unacceptable to the people, protected as they were by the appeal to the Presbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism[2] within the Church gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756, in the days of Donald Roy, Miller's relative. The secessions of the Erskines in 1733 and of the Relief under Gillespie in 1752 were the results of intolerant Moderatism, and its long reign under Robertson the historian, lasted for well-nigh thirty years in the Assembly, till his withdrawal in 1780.
Were we to credit the eulogies of Dean Stanley and others upon Home, Blair, and Robertson, we should regard this as the golden age of the Church of Scotland. Robertson he describes as 'the true Archbishop of Scotland.' But there are men who seem fated, in the pregnant phrase of Tacitus, to make a solitude and call it peace. The reign of Robertson was simply coincident with the very lowest spiritual ebb in the country, to which his own long régime had in no slight degree contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country from the days of Philip II., segundo sin segundo, as Cervantes bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with it. They found 'a hundred and twenty meetinghouses, to which more than a hundred thousand persons resorted.' Patronage was found, after debate, to be the cause. It is no tribute to Alva that he found the Low Countries a peaceful dependency of Spain and left them a free nation; none to the policy of 'thorough' that it sent Laud and Strafford to the block. An impartial verdict will be that Robertson undermined for ever the edifice which Carstares had reared.
An attempt has been recently made again to cast a glamour over the old Scottish moderates of the eighteenth century. Their admirers point to Watson the historian of Philip II., to Henry the historian of Britain, to Robertson, to Thomas Reid the philosopher, Home the dramatist, Blair the sermon-writer, Adam Ferguson, Hill of St. Andrews, and George Campbell of Aberdeen. Not even the Paraphrases have escaped being pressed into the field to witness to the literary and other gifts of Oglivie, Cameron, Morrison, and Logan. But the merits of a class are not best seen by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by the average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads Home's Douglas. Young Norval has gone the way, as the critic says, of all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great Blair: he lives not for the works upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for having given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. 'I have read them,' says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are sermones aurei ac auro magis aurei. I had the honour of first finding and first praising his excellencies. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public. I love Blair's sermons, though the dog is a Scotchman and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not be.' This avalanche of laudation seems strange to the modern reader, who will find in them the rhetoric of Hervey's Meditations on the Tombs, united to a theology that could pass muster in a deistical writer. Burns, though he lent himself to be the squib-writer of the Ayrshire Moderates, was fully aware of the merely negative tenets of the school, and in his Holy Fair he asks