327A VISION OF THE RAILROAD.
[Private.]–––,Isle of Skye.
[Private.]
–––,Isle of Skye.
.... I know not when this may reach you. We are much shut out from the world at this dead season of the year, especially in those wilder solitudes of the island that extend their long slopes of moor to the west. The vast Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by tempest, a solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off from the land by an impassable line of breakers. Even from the elevation where I now write––for my little cottage stands high on the hill-side––I can hear the measured boom of the waves, swelling like the roar of distant artillery, above the melancholy moanings of the wind among the nearer crags, and the hoarser dash of the stream in the hollow below. We are in a state of siege: the isle is beleaguered on its rugged line of western coast, and all communication within that quarter cut off; while in the opposite direction the broken and precarious footways that wind across the hills to our more accessible eastern shores, are still drifted over in the deeper hollows of the snow of the last great storm. It was only yester-evening that my cousin Eachen, with whom I share your newspaper, succeeded in bringing me the number published early in the present month, in which you furnish your readers with a report of the great railway meeting at Glasgow.
My cousin and I live on opposite sides of the island. We met at our tryst among the hills, not half an hour, before sunset; and as each had far to walk back, and as a storm seemed brewing––for the wind had suddenly lowered,328and the thick mists came creeping down the hill-sides, all dank and chill, and laden with frost-rime, that settled crisp and white on our hair––we deemed it scarce prudent to indulge in our usual long conversation together.
‘You will find,’ said Eachen, as he handed me the paper, ‘that things are looking no better. The old Tories are going on in the old way, bitterer against the gospel than ever. They will not leave us in all Skye a minister that has ever been the means of converting a soul; and what looks as ill, our great Scotch railway, that broke the Sabbath last year, in the vain hope of making money by it, is to break it this year at a dead loss. And this for no other purpose that people can see, than just that an Edinburgh writer may advertise his business by making smart speeches about it. Depend on’t, Allister, the country’sfey.’
‘The old way of advertising,’ said I, ‘before it became necessary that an elder should have at least some show of religion about him, was to get into the General Assembly, and make speeches there. If the crisis comes, we shall see the practice in full blow again. We shall see our anti-Sabbatarian gentlemen transmuted into voluble Moderate elders, talking hard for clients without subjecting themselves to the advertisement duty,––and the railway mayhap keeping its Sabbaths.’
‘Keeping its Sabbaths,’ replied Eachen; ‘ay, but the shareholders, perhaps, have little choice in the matter. I wish you heard our catechist on that. Depend on’t, Allister, the country’sfey.’
‘Keeping its Sabbaths? Yes,’ said I, catching at his meaning, ‘if we are to be visited by a permanent commercial depression––and there are many things less likely at the present time––the railwaymaykeep its Sabbaths, and keep them as the land of Judea did of old. It would be all too easy, in a period of general distress, to touch that line of necessarily high expenditure below which it would329be ruin for the returns of the undertaking to fall. Let but the invariably great outlay continue to exceed the income for any considerable time, and the railwaymustkeep its Sabbaths.’
‘Just the catechist’s idea,’ rejoined my cousin. ‘He spoke on the subject at our last meeting. “Eachen,” he said, “Eachen, the thing lies so much in the ordinary course of providence, that our blinded Sabbath-breakers, were it to happen, would recognise only disaster in it, not judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my father would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and a crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artisans; and that the lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands and tens of thousands their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let but the evil continue to grow––nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade sink into the circumstances of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley––and the railwaymustkeep its Sabbaths. But alas! there would be no triumph for party in the case. Great, ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country be, and they would be sufferings that would extend to all.” What think you, Allister, of the catechist’s note?’
‘Almost worth throwing into English,’ I said. ‘But the fog still thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home.’ And so we parted.
Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it was pleasant, when I had reached my little cottage, to pile high the fire on the hearth, and to hear the blast roaring330outside, and shaking the window-boards, as if some rude hand were striving to unfasten them. I lighted my little heap of moss fir on the projecting stone that serves the poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and bent me over your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns of a Scottish railroad. But my rugged journey and the beating of the storm had induced a degree of lassitude; the wind outside, too, had forced back the smoke, until it had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere, the whole of my dingy little apartment: Mr. M’Neill seemed considerably less smart than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, and in the middle of his speech I fell fast asleep. The scene changed, and I found myself still engaged in my late journey, coming down over the hill, just as the sun was setting red and lightless through the haze behind the dark Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so shortly before was restored in all its features: there was the blank, leaden-coloured sea, that seemed to mix all around with the blank, leaden-coloured sky; the moors spread out around me, brown and barren, and studded with rock and stone; the fogs, as they crept downwards, were lowering the overtopping screen of hills behind to one dead level. Through the landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre, there ran one long line of somewhat brighter hue: it was a long line of breakers tumbling against the coast far as the eye could reach, and that seemed interposed as a sort of selvage between the blank, leaden sea, and the deep, melancholy russet of the land. Through one of those changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no longer round headland and bay, but stretched out through the centre of the landscape, straight as an extended cord, and the bright white saddened down to the fainter hue of decaying vegetation. The entire landscape underwent a change. Under the gloomy sky of a stormy evening, I331could mark on the one hand the dark blue of the Pentlands, and on the other the lower slopes of Corstorphine. Arthur’s Seat rose dim in the distance behind; and in front, the pastoral valley of Wester Lothian stretched away mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear mound running through the midst,––from where I stood beside one of the massier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread on the far edge of the horizon.
It seemed as if years had passed––many years. I had an indistinct recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, of the shouts of maddened multitudes engaged in frightful warfare, of the cries of famishing women and children, of streets and lanes flooded with blood, of raging flames enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, of the flashing of arms and the roaring of artillery; but all was dimness and confusion. The recollection was that of a dream remembered in a dream. The solemn text was in my mind, ‘Voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great;’ and I now felt as if the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. All around was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, that rose against the sides, and intertwisted their prickly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the furze, and the bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the brake; and where his track had opened up a way through the fern, I could see the red and corroded bars stretching idly across. There was a viaduct beside me: the flawed and shattered masonry had exchanged its raw hues for a crust of lichens; one of the taller piers, undermined by the stream, had drawn two of the arches along with it, and lay adown the water-course a shapeless mass of ruin,332o’ermasted by flags and rushes. A huge ivy, that had taken root under a neighbouring pier, threw up its long pendulous shoots over the summit. I ascended to the top. Half-buried in furze and sloe-thorn, there rested on the rails what had once been a train of carriages; the engine ahead lay scattered in fragments, the effect of some disastrous explosion, and damp, and mould, and rottenness had done their work on the vehicles behind. Some had already fallen to pieces, so that their places could be no longer traced in the thicket that had grown up around them; others stood comparatively entire, but their bleached and shrivelled panels rattled to the wind, and the mushroom and the fungus sprouted from between their joints. The scene bore all too palpably the marks of violence and bloodshed. There was an open space in front, where the shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered; and here the rails had been torn up by violence, and there stretched across, breast-high, a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the winds; there was a broken pike beside it; and, stuck fast in the naked skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the rusty fragment of a sword. The space behind resembled the floor of a charnel-house––bindwood and ground-ivy lay matted over heaps of bones; and on the top of the hugest heap of all, a skull seemed as if grinning at the sky from amid the tattered fragments of a cap of liberty. Bones lay thick around the shattered vehicles; a trail of skeletons dotted the descending bank, and stretched far into a neighbouring field; and from amid the green rankness that shot up around them, I could see soiled and tattered patches of the British scarlet. A little farther on there was another wide gap in the rails. I marked beside the ruins of a neighbouring hovel a huge pile of rusty bars, and there lay inside the fragment of an uncouth cannon marred in the casting.333
I wandered on in unhappiness, oppressed by that feeling of terror and disconsolateness so peculiar to one’s more frightful dreams. The country seemed everywhere a desert. The fields were roughened with tufts of furze and broom; hedgerows had shot up into lines of stunted trees, with wide gaps interposed; cottage and manor-house had alike sunk into ruins; here the windows still retained their shattered frames, and the roof-tree lay rotting amid the dank vegetation of the floor; yonder the blackness of fire had left its mark, and there remained but reddened and mouldering stone. Wild animals and doleful creatures had everywhere increased. The toad puffed out his freckled sides on hearths whose fires had been long extinguished, the fox rustled among its bushes, the masterless dog howled from the thicket, the hawk screamed shrill and sharp as it fluttered overhead. I passed what had been once the policies of a titled proprietor. The trees lay rotting and blackened among the damp grass––all except one huge giant of the forest, that, girdled by the axe half a man’s height from the ground, and scorched by fire, stretched out its long dead arms towards the sky. In the midst of this wilderness of desolation lay broken masses, widely scattered, of what had been once the mansion-house. A shapeless hollow, half filled with stagnant water, occupied its immediate site; and the earth was all around torn up, as if battered with cannon. The building had too obviously owed its destruction to the irresistible force of gunpowder.
There was a parish church on the neighbouring eminence, and it, too, was roofless and a ruin. Alas! I exclaimed, as I drew aside the rank stalks of nightshade and hemlock that hedged up the breach in the wall through which I passed into the interior––alas! have the churches of Scotland also perished? The inscription of a mutilated tombstone that lay outside caught my eye, and I paused334for a moment’s space in the gap to peruse it. It was an old memorial of the times of the Covenant, and the legend was more than half defaced. I succeeded in deciphering merely a few half sentences––‘killing-time,’ ‘faithful martyr,’ ‘bloody Prelates;’ and beneath there was a fragmentary portion of the solemn text, ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood?’ I stepped into the interior: the scattered remains of an altar rested against the eastern gable. There was a crackling as of broken glass under my feet, and stooping down I picked up a richly-stained fragment: it bore a portion of that much-revered sign, the pelican giving her young to eat of her own flesh and blood––the sign which Puseyism and Popery equally agree in regarding as adequately expressive of their doctrine of the real presence, and which our Scottish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the characteristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had run riot along the walls of this parish church. There were carvings chipped and mutilated, as if in sport, less apparently with the intention of defacing, than rendering them contemptible and grotesque. A huge cross of stone had been reared over the altar, and both the top and one of the arms had been struck away, and from the surviving arm there dangled a noose. The cross had been transformed into a gibbet. Nor were there darker indications wanting. In a recess set apart as a cabinet for relics, there were human bones all too fresh to belong to a remote antiquity; and in a niche under the gibbet lay the tattered remains of a surplice dabbled in blood. I stood amid the ruins, and felt a sense of fear and horror creeping over me: the air darkened under the scowl of the coming tempest and the closing night, and the wind shrieked more mournfully amid the shattered and dismantled walls.335
There came another change over my dream. I found myself wandering in darkness, I knew not whither, among bushes and broken ground; there was the roar of a large stream in my ear, and the savage howl of the storm. I retain a confused, imperfect recollection of a light streaming upon broken water––of a hard struggle in a deep ford––and of at length sharing in the repose and safety of a cottage, solitary and humble almost as my own. The vision again strengthened, and I found myself seated beside a fire, and engaged with a few grave and serious men in singing the evening psalm, with which they closed for the time their services of social devotion.
‘The period of trial wears fast away,’ said one of the number, when all was over––a grey-haired, patriarchal-looking old man––‘The period of trial is well-nigh over, the storms of our long winter are past, and we have survived them all. Patience! a little more patience, and we shall see the glorious spring-time of the world begin! The vial is at length exhausted.’
‘How very simple,’ said one of the others, as if giving expression rather to the reflection that the remark suggested, than speaking in reply,––‘how exceedingly simple now it seems to trace to their causes the decline and fall of Britain! The ignorance and the irreligion of the land have fully avenged themselves, and have been consumed in turn in fires of their own kindling. How could even mere men of the world have missed seeing the great moral evil that lay at the root of’––
‘Ay,’ said a well-known voice that half mingled with my dreaming fancies, half recalled me to consciousness; ‘nothing can be plainer, Donald. That lawyer-man is evidently not making his smart speeches or writing his clever circulars with an eye to the pecuniary interests of the railroad. No person can know better than he knows that the company are running their Sabbath trains at a336sacrifice of some four or five thousand a year. Were there not a hundred thousand that took the pledge? and can it be held by any one that knows Scotland, that they aren’t worth over-head a shilling a year to the railway? No, no; depend on’t, the man is guiltless of any design of making the shareholders rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is merely supporting a desperate case in the eye of the country, and getting into all the newspapers, that people may see how clever a fellow he is. He is availing himself of the principle that makes men in our great towns go about with placards set up on poles, and with bills printed large stuck round their hats.’
Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long mile through the storm to see whether I had got my newspaper, had taken their seats beside me when I was engaged with my dream; and after reading your railway report, they were now busied in discussing the various speeches and their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite unsuited for your columns, and yet I send it to you. There are none of its pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of possibility––nay, there are perhaps few of them that at this stage may not actually be feared; but if so, it is at least equally sure that there can be none of them that at this stage might not be averted.
337THE TWO MR. CLARKS.
Among the some six or eight and twenty volumes of pamphlets which have been already produced by our Church controversy, and which bid fair to compose but a part of the whole, there is one pamphlet, in the form of a Sermon, which bears date January 1840, and two other pamphlets, in the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 1843. The Sermon and the Dialogues discuss exactly the same topics. They are written in exactly the same style. They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They are equally strong in the same confidence of representing, on their respective subjects, the true mind of Deity. They solicit the same circle of readers; they seem to have employed the same fount of types; they have emanated from the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the twin brothers in Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors; and the only material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to discover is, that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This, however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed the same pen––that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in3381840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 1843.
We spent an hour at the close of twilight a few evenings ago, in running over the Sermon and the Dialogues, and in comparing them, as we went along, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. We had before us also one of Mr. Clark’s earlier publications, hisRights of Members of the Church of Scotland, and a complete collection of his anti-patronage speeches for a series of years, as recorded inThe Church Patronage Reporter, with his speech ‘anent lay patronage’ in the General Assembly, when in 1833 he led the debate on the popular side. The publications, in all, extended over a period of fourteen years. They exhibited Mr. Clark, and what Mr. Clark had held, in 1829, in 1831, in 1832, in 1836, in 1840, and in 1843. We found that we could dip down upon him, as we went along, like a sailor taking soundings in the reaches of some inland frith or some navigable river, and ascertain by year and day the exact state of his opinions, and whether they were rising or falling at the time. And our task, if a melancholy, was certainly no uninteresting one. We succeeded in bringing to the surface, from out of the oblivion that had closed over them, many a curious, glittering, useless little thing, somewhat resembling the decayed shells and phosphoric jellies that attach themselves to the bottom of the deep-sea lead. Here we found the tale of a peroration, set as if on joints, that clattered husky and dry like the rattles of a snake; there an argument sprouting into green declamation, like a damaged ear of corn in a wet harvest; yonder a piece of delightful egotism, set full in sentiment like a miniature of Mr. Clark in a tinsel frame. What seemed most remarkable, however, in at least his earlier productions, was their ceaseless glitter of surface, if we may so speak. We found them literally sprinkled over with little bits of broken figures, as if the reverend gentleman had pounded his metaphors and comparisons339in a mortar, and then dusted them over his style. It is thus, thought we, that our manufacturers of fancy wax deal by their mica. In hisRights of Members, for instance, we found in one page that ‘the gross errors of Romanism had risenin successive tides, until thelight of truth suffered a fearful eclipseduring a long period of darkness;’ and we had scarce sufficiently admired the sublime height of tides that occasion eclipses, when we were further informed, in the page immediately following, that the god of this world was mustering hismultifarious hosts for the battle, hoping,amidst the wavesof popular commotion, ‘toblot out the nameof God from the British Constitution.’ Assuredly, thought we, we have the elements of no commonplace engagement here. ‘Multifarious hosts,’ fairly mustered, and ‘battling’ amid ‘waves’ in ‘commotion’ to ‘blot out a name,’ would be a sight worth looking at, even though, like the old shepherd in theWinter’s Tale, their zeal should lack footing amid the waters. But though detained in the course of our search by the happinesses of the reverend gentleman, we felt that it was not with the genius of Mr. Clark that we had specially to do, but with his consistency.
For eleven of the fourteen years over which our materials extended, we found the Rev. Mr. Clark one of the most consistent of men. From his appearance on the platform at Aberdeen in 1829, when he besought his audience not to deem it obtrusive in a stranger that he ventured to address them, and then elicited their loud applauses by soliciting their prayers for ‘one minister labouring in northern parts,’ who ‘aspired to no higher distinction on earth than that he should spend and be spent in the service of his dear Lord and Master,’ down to 1840, when he published his sermon on the ‘Present Position of the Church, and the Duty of its Members,’ and urged, with the solemnity of an oath, that ‘the Church of Scotland was engaged in asserting principles which the allegiance it owes to Christ would never permit340it to desert,’ Mr. Clark stood forward on every occasion the uncompromising champion of spiritual independence, and of the rights of the Christian people. He took his place far in the van. He was no mere half-and-half non-intrusionist,––no complaisant eulogist of the Veto,––no timid doubter that the Church in behalf of her people might possibly stretch her powers too far, and thus separate her temporalities from her cures. Nothing could be more absurd, he asserted, than to imagine such a thing. On parade day, when she stood resting on her arms in the sunshine, Mr. Clark was fugleman to his party,––not merely a front man in the front rank, but a man far in advance of the front rank. Nay, even after the collision had taken place, Mr. Clark could urge on his brethren that all that was necessary to secure them the victory was just to go a little further ahead, and deprive their refractory licentiates of their licences. We found that for eleven of the fourteen years, as we have said, Mr. Clark was uniformly consistent. But in the twelfth year the conflict became actually dangerous, and Mr. Clark all at once dropped his consistency. The great suddenness––the extreme abruptness––of the change, gave to it the effect of a trick of legerdemain. The conjurer puts a pigeon into an earthen pipkin, gives the vessel a shake, and then turns it up, and lo! out leaps the little incarcerated animal, no longer a pigeon, but a rat. It was thus with the Rev. Mr. Clark. Adversity, like Vice in the fable, took upon herself the character of a juggler, and stepping full into the middle of the Church question, began to play at cup and ball. Nothing, certainly, could be more wonderful than the transformations she effected; and the special transformation effected on the Rev. Mr. Clark surpassed in the marvellous all the others. She threw the reverend gentleman into a box, gave him a smart shake, and then flung him out again, and lo! to the astonishment of all men, what went in Mr. Clark, came out Mr. Bisset of341Bourtie. In order, apparently, that so great a marvel should not be lost to the world, Mr. Clark has been at no little trouble in showing himself, both before he went in and since he came out. His pamphlet of 1840 and his pamphlets of 1843 represent him in the two states: we see him going about in them, all over the country, to the extent of their circulation, like the mendicant piper in his go-cart,––making open proclamation everywhere, ‘I am the man wot changed;’ and the only uncomfortable feeling one has in contemplating them as curiosities, arises solely from the air of heavy sanctity that pervades equally all their diametrically opposed doctrines, contradictory assertions, and contending views, as if Deity could declare equally for truth and error, just as truth and error chanced to be held by Mr. Clark. Of so solemn a cast are the reverend gentleman’s belligerent pamphlets, that they serve to remind one of antagonist witnesses swearing point blank in one another’s faces at the Old Bailey.
Such were some of the thoughts which arose in our mind when spending an hour all alone with the Rev. Mr Clark’s pamphlets. We bethought us of an Eastern story about a very wicked prince who ruined the fair fame of his brother, by assuming his body just as he might his greatcoat, and then doing a world of mischief under the cover of his name and appearance. What, thought we, if this, after all, be but a trick of a similar character? Dr. Bryce has been long in Eastern parts, and knows doubtless a great deal about the occult sciences. We would not be much surprised should it turn out, that having injected himself into the framework of the Rev. Mr. Clark, he is now making the poor man appear grossly inconsistent, and both an Erastian and an Intrusionist, simply by acting through the insensate carcase. The veritable Mr. Clark may be lying in deep slumber all this while in the ghost cave of Munlochy, like one of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, or standing342entranced, under theinfluencesof fairy-land, in some bosky recess of the haunted Tomnahurich. We must just glance over these Dialogues again, and see whether we cannot detect Dr. Bryce in them.
And glance over them we did. There could be no denying that the Doctor was there, and this in a much more extreme shape than he ever yet wore in his own proper person. Dr. Bryce asserts, for instance, in his speeches and pamphlets, that the liberty for which the Church has been contending is a liberty incompatible with her place and standing as an Establishment––and there he stops; but we found him asserting in Mr. Clark’s Dialogues, that it is a liberty at once so dangerous and illegal, that Voluntaries must not be permitted to enjoy it either. We saw various other points equally striking as we went along. Our attention, however, was gradually drawn to another matter. Thedramatis personæto which the reader is introduced are a minister and two of his parishioners, the one a Moderate, the other a Convocationist. It is intended, of course, that the clerical gentleman should carry the argument all his own way; and we could not help admiring how, with an eye to this result, the writer had succeeded in making the parishioners so amazingly superficial in their information, and so ingeniously obtuse in their intellects. They had both been called into existence with the intention of being baffled and beaten, and made, with a wise adaptation of means to the desired end, consummate blockheads for the express purpose. ‘A man is a much nobler animal than a lion,’ said the woodman in the fable to the shaggy king of the forest; ‘and if you but come to yonder temple with me, I will show you, in proof of the fact, the statue of a man lording it over the statue of a prostrate lion.’ ‘Aha!’ said the shaggy king of the forest in reply, ‘but was the sculptor a lion? Let us lions become sculptors, and then we will show you lions343lording it over prostrate men.’ In Mr. Clark’s argumentative Dialogues, Mr. Clark is the sculptor. It is really refreshing, however, in these days of cold ingratitude, to see how the creatures called into existence by his pen draw round him, and singIo Pæansin his praise. A brace of Master Slenders attend the great Justice Shallow, who has been literally the making of them; and when at his bidding they engage with him in mimic warfare, they but pelt him with roses, or sprinkle him over witheau de Cologne. ‘Ah,’ thought we, ‘had we but the true Mr. Clark here to take a part in this fray––the Mr. Clark who published the great non-intrusion sermon, and wrote theRights of Members, and spoke all the long anti-patronage speeches, and led the debate in the Assembly anent the rights of the people, and declared it clear as day that the Church had power to enact the Veto,––had we but him here, he would be the man to fight this battle. It would be no such child’s play to grapple with him. Unaccustomed as we are to lay wagers, we would stake a hundred pounds to a groat on the true Mr. Clark!’
The twilight had fallen, the flames rose blue and languid in the grate, the deep shadows flickered heavily on the walls and ceiling; there was a drowsy influence in the hour, and a still drowsier influence in the Dialogues, and we think––for what followed could have been only a dream––we think we must have fallen asleep. At all events, the scene changed without any exertion on our part, and we found ourselves in a quiet retired spot in the vicinity of Inverness. The ‘hill of the ship,’ that monarch of Fairy Tomhans, rose immediately in front, gaily feathered over with larch and forest trees; and, terminating a long vista in the background, we saw Mr. Clark’s West Kirk, surmounted by a vast weathercock of gilded tin. Ever and anon the bauble turned its huge side to the sun, and the reflected light went dancing far and wide athwart the landscape.344Immediately beneath the weathercock there flared an immense tablet, surmounted by a leaden Fame, and bordered by a row of gongs and trumpets, which bore, in three-feet letters, that, ‘in order to secure so valuable an addition to the church accommodation of the parish, the Rev. Mr. Clark had not hesitated, on his own personal risk, to guarantee the payment of three thousand pounds.’ Our eyes were at first so dazzled by the blaze of the lackering––for the characters shone to the sun as if on fire––that we could see nothing else. As we gazed more attentively, however, we could perceive that every stone and slate of the building bore, like the tablet, the name of Mr. Clark. The endless repetition presented the appearance of a churchyard inscription viewed through a multiplying glass; but what most astonished us was that the Gothic heads, carved by pairs beside the labelled windows, opened wide their stony lips from time to time, and shouted aloud, in a voice somewhat resembling that of the domestic duck when she breaks out into sudden clamour in a hot, dry day, ‘Clark, Clark, Clark!’ We stood not a little appalled at these wonders, marvelling what was to come next, when lo! one of the thickets of the Tomhan beside us opened its interlaced and twisted branches, and out stepped the likeness of Mr. Clark, attired like a conjurer, and armed with a rod. His portly bulk was enwrapped in a voluminous scarf of changing-coloured silk, that, when it caught the light in one direction, exhibited the deep scarlet of a cardinal’s mantle, and presented, when it caught it in another, the sober tinge of our Presbyterian blue. Like the cloak of Asmodeus, it was covered over with figures. In one corner we could see the General Assembly done in miniature, and Mr. Clark rising among the members like Gulliver in Lilliput, to move against the deposition of the seven ministers of Strathbogie. In another the same reverend gentleman, drawn on the same large scale, was just getting on his legs345at a political dinner, to denounce his old friends and allies the Evangelicals, as wild destructives, ‘engaged in urging on the fall of the Establishment, in the desperation of human pride.’ Here we could see him baptizing the child of a person who, as he had fallen out of church-going habits, could get it baptized nowhere else; there examined in his presbytery for the offence with closed doors; yonder writing letters to the newspapers on the subject, to say that, if hehadbaptized the man’s child, it was all because the man was, like himself, a good hater of forced settlements. There were a great many other vignettes besides; and the last in the series was the scene enacted at the late Inverness Presbytery, when Mr. Clark rose to congratulate his old associates, in all the stern severity of consistent virtue, on the facile and ‘squeezable’ character of their representative for the Assembly.
The conjurer came out into an open space, drew a circle around him, and then began to build up on the sward two little human figures about three feet high, as boys build up figures of snow at the commencement of a thaw. Harlequin performs a somewhat similar feat in one of the pantomimes. He first sets up two carrots on end, to serve for legs; balances on them the head of a large cabbage, to serve for a body; sticks on two other carrots, to serve for arms; places a round turnip between them, to serve for a head; gives the crazy erection a blow with his lath sword, and straightway off it stalks, a vegetable man. Mr. Clark had, in like manner, no sooner built up his figures, than, with a peculiarly bland air, and in tones of the softest liquidity, he whispered into the ear of the one, Be you a Convocationist, and into that of the other, Be you a Moderate; and then with his charmed rod he tapped them across the shoulders, and set them a-walking. The creatures straightway jerked up their little heads to the angle of his face, bowed like a brace of automaton dancing-masters,346and after pacing round his knees for a few seconds, began Dialogue the first, in just the set terms in which we had been reading it beside our own fire not half an hour before. It seemed, for a few seconds, as if the conjurer and his creations had joined together in a trio, to celebrate the conjurer’s own praises. ‘Excellent clergyman!’ said the Convocationist. ‘Incomparable man!’ exclaimed the Moderate. ‘No minister like our minister!’ said the two in a breath. ‘Ah, gentlemen,’ said the conjurer, looking modestly down, ‘even my very enemies never venture to deny that.’ ‘You, sir,’ said the Convocationist, ‘bring on no occasion the Church question to the pulpit; you know better––you have more sense: we have quite as much of the Church question as is good for us through the week.’ ‘For you, sir,’ chimed in the Moderate, ‘I have long cherished the most thorough respect; but as for your old party, I dislike them more than ever.’ ‘I am not mercenary, gentlemen,’ said the conjurer, laying his hand on his breast; ‘I am not timid, I am not idle; I am a generous, diligent, dauntless, attached pastor; I give alms of all I possess––in especial to the public charities; I make long prayers,––my very best friends often urge on me that my vast labours, weekly and daily, are undermining my strength; I fast often,––I have guaranteed the payment of three thousand pounds for the West Kirk, and three-fourths of my stipend have gone this year to the liquidation of self-imposed liabilities. True, I will beeventually repaid,––that is, if my people don’t leave me;but I have no other security beyond my confidence in the goodness of the cause, and the continued liberality of my countrymen.’ And in this style would the reverend gentleman have continued down to the bottom of the fifth page in his first Dialogue, had it not been for a singularly portentous and terrible interruption.
The haunted Tomnahurich rose, as we have said, immediately behind us, leafy and green; and not one of its347multitude of boughs trembled in the sunshine. Suddenly, however, the hill-side began to move. There was a low deep noise like distant thunder; and straightway thedébrisof a landslip came rolling downwards, half obliterating in its course the circle of the conjurer. Turf, and clay, and stone lay in a mingled ruin at our feet; and wriggling in the midst, like a huge blue-bottle in an old cobweb, there was a reverend gentleman dressed in black. He gathered himself up, sprung deftly to his feet, and stood fronting the conjurer. Wonderful to relate, the man in black proved to be the veritable Mr. Clark of three years ago––Mr. Clark of 1840––Mr. Clark who published the great non-intrusion discourse, who wrote theRights of Members, who spoke the long anti-patronage speeches, who led the debate in the Assembly anent the rights of the people, and who declared it clear as day that the Church had power to enact the Veto. The conjurer started backwards like a man who receives a mortal wound: the two little figures uttered a thin scrannel shriek apiece, and then slunk out of existence. ‘Avoid ye,’ exclaimed the conjurer, ‘Avoid ye!Conjuro te, conjuro te!’ He then went on to mutter, as if by way of exorcism, in low and very rapid tones, ‘I have no anxiety to refute the charge of inconsistency, which some have endeavoured to fasten on me, from detached portions of what I have written or spoken, during several years, on what may be termed Church politics. In matters not essential to salvation, increased light or advanced experience may properly produce change of sentiment in the most enlightened and conscientious Christian. For a man to assert that he is subject to no change, is to lay claim to one of the perfections–––’Dialogue 1st, p. 6.
‘And so you won’t go out,’ said the true Mr. Clark, interrupting him.
‘No, sir,’ replied the conjurer. ‘I have maturely considered the proposed secession from the Established Church,348and, without pronouncing any judgment on the motives or doings of others who may think or act differently, I deeply feel that in such a measure I could not join without manifest sin against the light of my conscience.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 4.
‘Ah,’ rejoined the true Mr. Clark, ‘did I not say it would be so? I knew there would be found a set of recreant priests, who, for a pitiful morsel of the world’s bread, would submit to be the instruments of trampling on the blood-bought rights of the Scottish people, and call themselves a Church, while departing from their allegiance to Him who is the source of all true ecclesiastical authority; but never can these constitute the Church of Scotland!’––Sermon, p. 40.
‘I cannot reconcile it with the views I have long entertained of my duty to the Church and to the country,’ said the conjurer, ‘to secede from the National Establishment, simply because it wants what it wanted when I became one of its ministers.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 12.
‘Wanted when you became one of its ministers!’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark. ‘No, sir. The civil courts are now compelling obedience in cases in which they have no jurisdiction, and have levelled with the ground the independent jurisdiction of the Church,––a Church bearing in its diadem a host of martyrs, and which never hitherto submitted to the supremacy of any power, excepting that of the Son of God.’––Sermon, pp. 59-63.
‘I won’t go out,’ reiterated the conjurer.
‘Well, you have told me what you have long deemed to be your duty,’ said the true Mr. Clark. ‘I shall repeat to you, in turn, what I three years ago recorded as mine. “It is the duty of the Church,” I said, “to maintain its position, confirmed as it is by solemn statutes and by the faith of national treaties, until that shall be overthrown by the deliberate decision of the State itself. Should such a circumstance really occur, as that the Legislature should insist that the Church holds its endowments on the express condition349of its rendering to civil authority the subjection which it can consistently yield to Christ alone, there being then a plain violation of the terms on which the Church entered into alliance with the State, that alliance must be dissolved, as one which can be no longer continued, but by rendering to men what is due to God.’”––Sermon, p. 28.
‘I deny entirely andin toto,’ said the conjurer, ‘that the present controversy involves the doctrine of the Headship.’––See 2d Dialogue.
‘Admit,’ said the true Mr. Clark, ‘but the right of secular courts to review, and thus to confirm or annul, the proceedings of the Scottish Church in one of the most important spiritual functions, and the same power may soon be, under various pretexts, used to control all the inferior departments of its ecclesiastical procedure. Will any man say that a society thus acknowledging the supremacy of a different power from that of Christ is any longer to be regarded as a branch of the Church whose unity chiefly exists in adherence to Him as its Head?’––Sermon, p. 45.
‘The claim,’ said the conjurer, ‘is essentially Papal.’––Dialogue 2d, p. 6.
‘No,’ replied the true Mr. Clark, ‘not Papal, but Protestant: our confessors and martyrs chose to suffer for it the loss of all their worldly goods, and to incur the pains of death in its most appalling forms.’––Sermon, p. 45.
‘Papal notwithstanding,’ reiterated the conjurer. ‘But it is not to be wondered at, that in the earliest stages of the Reformation, men newly come out of the Church of Rome should have been led to assert for the office-bearers of their Church the prerogatives which Romanism claimed for her own.’––Dialogue 2d, p. 7.
‘What!’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark, ‘is not the present contest clearly for the rights of the members of Christ,––rights manifestly recognised in His word, and involving His Headship?’––Sermon, p. 37.See alsop. 31.350
‘Not at all,’ replied the conjurer. ‘The question is one of faction, and of faction only. Struggles for the victory of mere parties have been as injurious to vital godliness in the Church as the same cause has been to the true prosperity of the State.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 15.
‘Faction!’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark; ‘the Church of Scotland is now engaged in asserting principles which the allegiance it owes to Christ will never permit it to desert. And let it be rung in the ears of the people of Scotland, that the great reason why the asserting of the Church’s spiritual jurisdiction is so clamorously condemned in certain quarters, is because it is employed to maintain the rights of the people.’––Sermon, pp. 37-39.
‘To be above the authority of the law, no Church in this country can be,’ said the conjurer. ‘The Church courts would be able, were their principles fully recognised, to tread under foot the rights of the people as effectually as ever they resisted those of patrons.’––Dialogue 1st, pp. 14 and 16.
‘Nothing can be more absurd than such insinuations,’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark. ‘The Church disclaims every kind of civil authority, and simply requires that there be no interference on the part of civil rulers with its spiritual functions. How that which declines a jurisdiction in civil matters, can in any sense of the word, or in any conceivable circumstances, be injurious to civil liberty, it is impossible to conceive.’––Sermon, p. 32.
‘Alas,’ said the conjurer, ‘if the Church by recent events has been exhibited in a lower position than Scotsmen ever saw it placed in before, this has been occasioned by the unhappy attitude of defiance of the civil tribunals in which it was unadvisedly placed, and which no body, however venerable, can be permitted to occupy with impunity in a well-governed country.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 12.
‘Degradation!’ indignantly exclaimed the true Mr. Clark; ‘did the Church, in consequence of the findings of the351civil courts, proceed to act in opposition to what it believes and has solemnly declared to be founded on the Scripture, and agreeable thereto, it would exhibit itself to the world a disgraced and degraded society, utterly fallen from the faithfulness to religious duty which marked former periods of its history.’––Sermon, p. 21.
‘Clear it is,’ said the conjurer, ‘that the Church must not be permitted to retain with impunity her attitude of defiance to the civil tribunals. Were it otherwise, an ecclesiastical power might come to be established in this kingdom, fully able to trample uncontrolled on the most sacred rights of the nation.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 12.
‘Nothing, I repeat,’ said the true Mr. Clark, ‘can be more absurd than the insinuation. The liberties of the Church of Scotland have been often assailed by the civil authorities of the land, but uniformly by those who were equally hostile to the civil freedom of the country. Its rights were, during one dreary period, so effectually overthrown, that none stood up to assert them but the devoted band who, in the wildest fastnesses of their country, were often compelled by the violence of military rule to water with their blood the moors, where they rendered homage to the King of Zion; while, in the sunshine of courtly favour, ecclesiastics moved, who without fear bartered, for their own sordid gain, the blood-bought liberties of the Church of God, and showed themselves as willing to subvert the civil rights of their countrymen as they had been to destroy their religious privileges.’––Sermon, p. 30.
‘To be above the law,’ reiterated the conjurer, ‘no Church in this country can be.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 16.
‘There may arise various occasions,’ said the true Mr. Clark, ‘on which the injunctions of man may interfere with the injunctions of God; and in every such case a Christian man must yield obedience to the authority of the highest Lord.’––Sermon, p. 22.352
‘Sad case that of Strathbogie!’ ejaculated the conjurer.
‘Very sad,’ replied the true Mr. Clark. ‘What is your version of it?’
‘Listen,’ said the conjurer. ‘What has been termed the Veto Law was enacted less than ten years ago, and after lengthened legal proceedings, was declared illegal by the House of Lords, the highest judicial authority in this kingdom. For proceedings adopted in conformity to this decision, seven ministers in the Presbytery of Strathbogie were first suspended and then deposed from their ministerial offices, without any other charges laid against them than that they sought the protection of the civil courts in acting according to their decision. For refusing to obey a law which the House of Lords declared to be illegal, no minister can be lawfully deposed from his office in this country, unless we are prepared to adopt a principle which would ultimately subvert the entire authority of the law. The civil courts, simply on the ground that these ministers had been deposed for obeying the statutes of the realm, reversed the sentence, as what was beyond the lawful powers of any Church in this land, whether Voluntary or Established. And on the same principle, they interfered to prevent any from treating them as suspended or deposed.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 10.
‘A most injurious representation of the case,’ said the true Mr. Clark. ‘Seven ministers, forming the majority of the Presbytery of Strathbogie, chose to intimate their resolution to take steps towards the settlement of Mr. Edwards as minister of Marnoch, in defiance of the opposition of almost all the parishioners, and in direct contempt of the instructions given them by the superior church courts. The civil courts in the meantime merely declared their opinion of the law, but they issued no injunction whatever, so as to give the presbytery the pretext of choosing between obeying the one or the other jurisdiction; and they violated353the express injunction of the supreme church court, without being able to plead in justification that they had been compelled by the civil authority to do so. They chose to act ultroneously in violation of their duty to the Church. They had solemnly promised to obey the superior church courts, and had never come under any promise to obey in spiritual things any other authority. In proposing to take the usual steps for conferring the spiritual office of a pastor in the Church of Christ, in defiance of the injunction laid upon them by the supreme court of the Church of Scotland, they plainly violated their ordination engagements. And in actually ordaining Mr. Edwards, the whole procedure was a solemn mockery of holy things.’––Sermon, p. 26.
‘After all,’ said the conjurer, with a sigh, ‘the agitated question is but of inferior moment.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 3.
‘Inferior moment!’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark; ‘no religious question of the same magnitude and importance has come before this country since the ever-memorable Revolution in 1688. The divisions of secular partisanship sink into utter insignificance when compared with this. Let the principles once become triumphant for which the Court of Session is now contending, and the Church of Scotland is ruined.’––Sermon, pp. 7 and 59.
‘Ruined!’ shouted out the conjurer; ‘it is you who are ruining the Church, by urging on the disruption. For my own part, I promised, as all ministers do at their ordination, never, directly or indirectly, to endeavour her subversion, or to follow divisive courses, but to maintain her unity and peace against error and schism, whatsoever trouble or persecution might arise; and now, in agreement with my solemn ordination engagements, have I determined to hold by her to the last.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 9.
‘What mean you by theChurch?’ asked the true Mr. Clark. ‘The Church and the establishment of it are surely very different things. Men have talked of themselves as354friends of the Church, because they were the friends of its civil establishment, and loudly declaim against the proceedings of the majority of its office-bearers now, as fraught with danger to this object. But what do they mean by the civil establishment of an Erastian Church! Is it possible that they mean by it the receiving of certain pecuniary endowments as a price for rendering a divided allegiance to the Son of God? If that be their meaning, it is time they and the country at large should know that the Church of Scotland was never established on such principles.’––Sermon, p. 42.
‘It is not true, however,’ said the conjurer, ‘that the majority of the faithful ministers of Scotland have resolved to abandon the Establishment, though this may be the case in some parts of the country.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 16.
‘Not true, sir!’ said the true Mr. Clark; ‘nothing can be more true. All––all will leave it except a set of recreant priests, who for a pitiful morsel of this world’s bread will submit to be the instruments of trampling on the blood-bought rights of the Scottish people.’––Sermon, p. 42.
‘What has pained me most in all this controversy,’ remarked the conjurer, ‘has been the insidious manner in which certain persons have endeavoured to sow disunion––in some cases too successfully––between ministers and their hearers.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 3.
‘Sir,’ exclaimed the true Mr. Clark, ‘Sir, every individual would do well to remember, when summoned to such a contest as this, the curse denounced against Meroz for remaining in neutrality when the battle raged in Israel. This curse was denounced by the angel of the Lord, and is written for the admonition of all ages, as a demonstration of the feelings with which God regards the standing aloof, in a great religious struggle, by whatever motives it may be sought to be justified.’––Sermon, p. 59.
‘The men who thus sow disunion,’ said the conjurer,355‘never venture to deny that they, whose usefulness they endeavour to destroy, are ministers of the gospel,––urging on the acceptance of a slumbering world the message of celestial mercy, which must produce results of weal or woe destined to be eternally remembered, when the strifes of words which have agitated the Church on earth are all forgotten.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 4.
‘Hold, hold, sir,’ said the true Mr. Clark. ‘On the event of this struggle depends not merely the temporal interests of our country, but the welfare of many immortal spirits through the ceaseless ages of future being.’––Sermon, p. 60.
‘It is so distracting a subject this Church question,’ said the conjurer, ‘that I make it a point of duty never to bring it to the pulpit.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 3.
‘In that you and I differ,’ said the true Mr. Clark, ‘just as we do in other matters. I have written very long sermons on the subject, ay, and published them too; and in particular beg leave to recommend to your careful perusal my sermon on thePresent Position, preached in Inverness on the evening of the 19th January 1840.’
‘I suppose you have heard it said, that I changed my views from the fear of worldly loss,’ said the conjurer.––Dialogue 1st, p. 4.
‘Heard it said!’ said the true Mr. Clark. ‘You forget that I have been bottled up on the hill-side yonder for the last three years.’
‘Sir,’ said the conjurer, with great solemnity, ‘when the West Church was built, in order to secure this valuable addition to the church accommodation of the parish, I did not hesitate to undertake, on my own personal risk, to guarantee the payment of three thousand pounds. This obliged me to diminish, to no small extent, my personal expenditure, as the only way in which the pecuniary burden could be met, without diminishing my contributions to356the public charities of the town, and to the numerous cases of private distress brought continually under my notice, in the various walks of ministerial duty. And though the original debt is now reduced to half that amount by the liberal benefactions received from various individuals, still nearly three-fourths of my stipend this year has been expended on this object, in terms of my voluntary obligation. The large sum which I am now in advance, I believe, will be eventually repaid; but for this I have no security beyond my confidence in the goodness of the cause, and the continued liberality of my countrymen. All this respecting the West Church is known to few, and would not have been mentioned by me at this time, had it not been for the perseverance with which some, inaccessible to higher motives themselves, have endeavoured to persuade my hearers that mercenary considerations have produced the position I have felt it my duty to take in the present discussion.’––Dialogue 1st, p. 5.
For a few seconds the true Mr. Clark seemed as if struck dumb by the intelligence. ‘Ah! fast anchored!’ he at length ejaculated. ‘Fairly tethered to the Establishment by a stake of fifteen hundred pounds. Demas, happy man, had a silver mine to draw him aside––a positive silver mine. The West Church is merely a negative one. Were it to get into the hands of the Moderates, it would become waterlogged to a certainty, and not a single ounce of the precious metal would ever be fished out of it; whereas you think there is still some little chance of recovery when you remain to ply the pump yourself. Most disinterested man!––let your statement of the case be but fairly printed, and it will serve you not only as an apology, but as an advertisement to boot.’
‘Printed!’ said the conjurer; ‘I have already printed it in English, and Mr. M’Donald the schoolmaster is translating it into Gaelic.’357
But we have far exceeded our limits, and have yet given scarce a tithe of the controversy. We found ourselves sitting all alone in front of our own quiet fire long ere it was half completed; and we recommend such of our readers as are desirous to see the rest of it in the originals, to possess themselves of the Rev. Mr. Clark’sSermon, and the Rev. Mr. Clark’sDialogues. They form, when bound up together, one of the extremest, and at the same time one of the most tangible, specimens of inconsistency and self-contradiction that controversy has yet exhibited; and enable us to anticipate the character and standing of the evangelic minority in the Erastian Church. ‘If the salt has lost its savour, wherewithal shall it be salted?’
April 12, 1843.