From such a soil of history and feeling sprang Burns’s inimitable poem, “A man’s a man for a’ that,”—the consummate white flower of the poetry of humanity. It is barely possible that such a poem might have been written in England in the eighteenth century, but, as a matter of fact, it rose out of the heart of a Scotsman. In England the lesson of the equality of man has not, even yet, been fully learned. In America, it is the very foundation on which our Government rests. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech is the answering and antiphonic call to the song of Burns. In fact, we cannot understand how any true history of the United States can be written which neglects the study of Scotland’s history.
The Scottish people called those prelates appointed by the London Government, who collected the revenues of their sees and turned them over to their patrons, “tulchan” bishops. These prelates got their nickname in Scotland from calfskins, stuffed with straw to make them look like cow’s babies, with which the dairymen deceived refractory cattle,—mothers that refused to give down their milk. In 1578, the General Assembly resolved that bishops should be called by their own names and not by their titles or sees, and that no vacant see should be filled until the next December. In 1580, the whole system was abolished when the General Assembly, meeting at Dundee, resolved that the office of bishop was a mere human invention unwarranted by the Word of God.
The custom of British peers signing only their surnames, or by peerage designations, though no older than the times of the Stuart kings, has been imitated by the prelates even on hotel registers. This fashion of using geographical affiliations with their surnames only had an amusing illustration while we were in Scotland. A certain American bishop from our neighborhood, travelling through Europe, subscribed himself, let us say, as “Theophilus of Peoria.” By accident, this worthy man of God was followed around by a clergyman of Scottish descent, who was not loath, for the sake of a good joke, to imitate the example of so noble a son of the Church. He made his sign manual, let us say, as “Bartholomew of Pony Hollow.”
Happily in these our days the Scots and English, though so different in old and fundamental ideas, have come to work hand in hand together in civil government. Even within the fold of salvation, they dwell in Christian charity, ever agreeing to differ—the Episcopalian in Scotland being a “Dissenter” and the Scotch Presbyterian in England the same, each being in his own country a “Churchman,” while the average American is amused at the whole proceeding. With what a hearty roar of merriment a party of us Bostonians, when we saw it, bought, for the fun of the thing, a photograph, of cabinet size, found in the London shop windows, of our neighbor, friend, and fellow Christian, the “Lord” Bishop Phillips Brooks, of Yankee land and Hub fame and beloved by all men. Think of an American shepherd of God’s heritage “lording” it over the flock! Yet we forgave the English printer, who probably never noticed his own joke, or knew how funny he had made himself to Yankees.
A survey of Scottish religious history, such as Melrose, Iona, and St. Andrews suggest, shows that in the first working-out of the human spirit, as it reacted upon form and symbol and developed in submission to discipline and the law of unity, the Scottish churches, of necessity, followed the rule of Rome. The flowering of the human spirit, in the hewn stone of church and abbey, took on forms of beauty akin to those in the south, yet with Gothic luxuriance. The marble blossomed in air as from the native rock, and the artist’s chisel made gardens of beauty. Wonderful and alluring was the reality of the mediæval landscape, gemmed with richest architecture and wealthy in sacred edifices made beautiful with color, carving, gems, and the gifts of the devout, the travelled, and the wealthy. The graceful edifices, the abbeys and monasteries, the parish churches, the tithe-barns, the castles and bishops’ seats, made even this far northland a region of charm and romance. Within these sacred walls, what impressive chants and processions, incense and lights, and all that resplendent paraphernalia of robed and costumed ministers of religion, which, whether in pagan or Christian lands, do so appeal to the senses in spectacular worship!
All this mediæval, dramatic variety, so strongly set in contrast to the simplicity of worship to-day, did, in a certain sense, correspond to the contemporaneous glory of civil and military splendor of feudal days. Then the pageant of the titled knight, in shining steel upon his proud steed, leading his clansmen in their brilliant tartans, with claymore and target,—with a rich background of the visible splendor of castles, lords and ladies, in that feudal life which Scott has idealized, glorified, yes, even transfigured in his poetry and romances,—was matched by outward ecclesiastical magnificence; both systems making irresistible appeal to the senses and both being equally far removed from the primitive simplicity of the Master and his disciples.
In a word, Christianity in Scotland wore the garments of the civilization of the age during which it took on its material forms, changing its outward habiliments as its growing spirit entered more deeply into the old, unchangeable truth. In the case of certain young nations, having characteristics that respond to what is first offered them, and in which native traits can make subtle harmony with the imported religion, history marks out but one course—the standards of religion and civilization usually run in parallel lines.
CHAPTER XXIII
JOHN KNOX: SCOTLAND’S MIGHTIEST SON
Scotland began the active and aggressive Protestantism of Europe. The people, taught by John Knox, led the nations in taking radical measures to apply the principles of democracy, developed by George Buchanan, to the government of the Christian Church. In a word, the Scottish people, and not their kings or nobles, reformed religion and were leaders in social reconstruction.
John Knox would not have been a Scotsman if he had not, when his mind had been changed through the study of the Bible and the writings of Augustine and Jerome, gone at once to the extreme of opposition. He preached first to the soldiers in the garrisons of St. Andrews. Taken prisoner by the French fleet, he spent nineteen months as a galley slave, often in irons and treated cruelly. Meanwhile Providence shaped events that were to influence America and her future.