240ORGANSHIP.
Some six or eight months after the Disruption there occurred an amusing dispute between two Edinburgh newspapers, each of which aspired to represent the Establishment solely and exclusively, without coadjutor or rival. The one paper asserted that it was thevehicleof the Established Church, the other that it was the Church’sorgan; and each, in asserting its own claim, challenged that of its neighbour. The organ was sure that the vehicle lacked the true vehicular character; and the vehicle threw grave doubts on the organship of the organ. In somewhat less than half a year, however, the dispute came suddenly to a close: the vehicle––like a luckless opposition coach, weak in its proprietorship––was run off the road, and broke down; and the triumphant organ, seizing eager hold of the name of its defunct rival as legitimate spoil, hung it up immediately under its own, as a red warrior of the West seizes hold of the scalp of a fallen enemy, and suspends it at his middle by his belt of wampum. The controversy, however, lasted quite long enough to lead curious minds to inquire how or on what principle a body so divided as the Established Church could possibly have either vehicle or organ.
If the organ, it was said, adequately represent Dr. Muir, it cannot fail very grievously to misrepresent Dr. Bryce; and if the vehicle be adapted to give public airings to the thoughts and opinions of the bluff old Moderates, those of Dr. Leishman and the Forty must travel out into the wind and the sunlight by an opposition conveyance. One organ241or one vehicle will be no more competent to serve a deliberative ecclesiastical body, diverse in its components, than one organ or vehicle will be able to serve a deliberative political body broken into factions. Single parties, as such––whether secular or ecclesiastical––may have their single organ apiece; but it seems as little possible that a Presbyterian General Assembly should have only one organ representative of the whole, as that aHouse of Lordsor aHouse of Commonsshould have one organ representative of the whole. An organ of the Establishment in its present state of disunion, if at all adequately representative, could not fail to resemble Montgomery’s strange personification of war: ‘A deformed genius, with two heads, which, unlike those of Janus, were placed front to front; innumerable arms, branching out all around his shoulders, sides, and chest; and with thighs and legs as multitudinous as his arms. His twin faces,’ continues the poet, ‘were frightfully distorted: they glared, they grinned, they spat, they railed, and hissed, and roared; they gnashed their teeth, and bit, and butted with their foreheads at each other; his arms, wielding swords and spears, were fighting pell-mell together; his legs, in like manner, were indefatigably at variance, striding contrary ways, and trampling on each other’s toes, or kicking each other’s shins, as if by mutual consent.’ Such would be the true representative of an organ that adequately represented the Establishment.
We are led into this vein on the present occasion by a recent discussion in high quarters on the organship of the Free Church,––a Presbyterian body, be it remarked, as purely deliberative in its courts as the Parliament of the country, and at least sufficiently affected by the spirit of the age to include within its pale a considerable diversity of opinion. It is as impossible, from this cause alone, that the Free Church should be represented by a single organ, as that theHouse of Commonsshould be represented by a242single organ. The organ, for instance, that represented on the education question the Rev. Mr. Moody Stuart, would most miserably misrepresent the party who advocate the views of the great father of the Free Church––the late Dr. Chalmers.
The organ that represented the peculiar beliefs held, regarding the personal advent, by the party to which Mr. Bonar of Kelso belongs, would greatly misrepresent those of the party to which Mr. David Brown of Glasgow and Mr. Fairbairn of Saltoun belong. The organ that advocated Dr. Cunningham’s and Dr. James Buchanan’s views of the College question, would be diametrically opposed to the view of Dr. Brown of Aberdeen and Mr. Gray of Perth. The organ that contended for an ecclesiastical right to legislate on the temporalities according to the principle of Mr. Hay of Whiterig, would provoke the determined opposition of Mr. Makgill Crichton of Rankeillour. The organ that took part with the Evangelical and Sabbath Alliances in the spirit of Dr. Candlish of St. George’s, would have to defend its position against Mr. King of St. Stephen’s of the Barony; and the organ that espoused the sentiments held on tests by Mr. Wood of Elie, would find itself in hostile antagonism with those entertained on the same subject by Mr. Gibson of Kingston. And such are only a few of the questions, and these of an ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical character, regarding which a diversity of views, sentiments, and opinions in the Free Church renders it impossible that it can be adequately represented by any one organ, even should that organ be of a purely ecclesiastical character. But a newspaper isnotof a purely ecclesiastical character; and there are subjects on which it may represent a vast majority of the people of a Church, without in the least degree representing the Church itself, simply because they are subjects on which a Church, as such, can hold no opinions whatever.243
It is, for instance, not for a Church to say in what degree she trusts the Whigs or suspects the Tories––or whether her suspicion be great and her trust small––or whether she deem it more desirable that Edinburgh should be represented by Mr. Cowan, than mis-represented by Mr. Macaulay. These, and all cognate matters, are matters on which the Church, as such, has no voice, and regarding which she can therefore have no organ; and yet these are matters with which a newspaper is necessitated to deal. It would be other than a newspaper if it did not. On these questions, however, which lie so palpably beyond the ecclesiastical pale, though the Church can have no organ, zealous Churchmen may; and there can be no doubt whatever that they are questions on which zealous Free Churchmenarevery thoroughly divided––so thoroughly, that any single newspaper could represent, in reference to them, only one class. The late Mr. John Hamilton, for instance––a good and honest man, who, in his character as a Free Churchman, determinedly opposed the return of Mr. Macaulay––was wholly at issue regarding some of these points with the Honourable Mr. Fox Maule, who in 1846 mounted the hustings to say that the ‘gratitude and honour of the Free Church’ was involved in Mr. Macaulay’s return. And so the organ that represented the one, could not fail to misrepresent the other. Now, we are aware that on this, and on a few other occasions, theWitnessmust have given very considerable dissatisfaction in the political department to certain members of the Free Church. It was not at all their organ on these occasions; nay, at the very outset of its career, it had solemnly pledged itselfnotto be their organ.
The following passage was written by its present Editor, ere the first appearance of his paper, and formed a part of its prospectus:––‘TheWitness,’ he said, ‘will not espouse the cause of any of the political parties which now agitate and244divide the country.’ ‘Public measures, however, will be weighed as they present themselves in an impartial spirit, with care proportioned to their importance, and with reference not to the party with which they may chance to originate, but to the principles which they shall be found to involve.’ Such was the pledge given by the Editor of theWitness; and he now challenges his readers to say whether he has not honestly redeemed it. Man is naturally a tool-making animal; and when he becomes a politician by profession, his ingenuity in this special walk of constructiveness is, we find, always greatly sharpened by the exigencies of his vocation.
He makes tools of bishops, tools of sacraments, tools of Confessions of Faith, and tools of Churches and church livings.
We had just seen, previous to thedébutof theWitness, the Church of Scotland converted by Conservatism into a sort of mining tool, half lever, half pickaxe, which it plied hard, with an eye to the prostration and ejection of its political opponents the Whigs, then in office; and not much pleased to see the Church which we loved and respected so transmuted and so wielded, we solemnly determined that, so far at least as our modicum of influence extended, no tool-making politician, whatever his position, should again convert it unchallenged into an ignoble party utensil. With God’s help, we have remained true to our determination; and so assured are we of being supported in this matter by the sound-hearted Presbyterian people of the Free Church, that we have no fear whatever, should either the assertors among us of the unimpeachable consistency of the Conservatives, or of the immaculate honesty of the Whigs, start against us an opposition vehicle to-morrow, that in less than a twelvemonth we would run it fairly off the road, and have some little amusement with it to boot, so long as the contest continued. TheWitness245is not, and, as we have shown, cannot be, the organ of the Free Church; but it is something greatly better: it is the trusted representative––against Whig, Tory, Radical, and Chartist––against Erastian encroachment and clerical domination––of the Free Church people. There lies its strength,––a strength which its political Free Church opponents are welcome to test when they please.
We must again express our regret that the article on the Duke of Buccleuch, which has proved the occasion of so much remark, spoken and written, should have ever appeared in our columns; and this, not, as the agent of the Duke asserts, because it has beenexposed, but because of the unhappy unsolidity of its facts, and because of that diversion of the public attention which it has effected from cases such as those of Canobie and Wanlockhead, and from such a death-bed as that of the Rev. Mr. Innes. Our readers are already in possession of our explanation, and have seen it fully borne out by the incidental statement of Mr. Parker. We would crave leave to remind them that theWitnessis now in the ninth year of its existence; and that during that time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel; he sailed in the Free Church yacht theBetsey, and worshipped among the islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these occasions, nor yet from denouncing the persecution that had thrust out some of the best men and best subjects of the country, to worship unsheltered amid bleak and desert wastes, or on the bare sea-shore.
And yet, of all the many facts which he thus communicated on his own authority, because resting on his own observation, not one of them has ever yet been disproved; nay,246scarce one of them has ever yet been so much as challenged.
Of course, in reference to the statements which he has had to make on the testimony of others, his position was necessarily different; and a very delicate matter he has sometimes found it to be, to deal with these statements. A desire, on the one hand, to expose to the wholesome breathings of public opinion whatever was really oppressive and unjust; a fear, on the other, lest he should compromise the general cause, or injure the character of his paper, by giving publicity to what either might not be true, or could not be proven to be true,––have often led him to retain communications beside him for weeks and months, until some circumstance occurred that enabled him to determine regarding their real character and value. And such––with more, however, than the ordinary misgivings, and with an unfavourable opinion frankly and decidedly expressed––was the course which he took with the communicated article on the Duke of Buccleuch.
That the testing circumstance whichdidoccur in the course of the long period during which it was thus heldin retentiswas not communicated to him, or to any other official connected with theWitness, he much regrets, but could not possibly help.
In the discussion on the Sites Bill of Wednesday last, the Honourable Fox Maule is made to say, that ‘theWitnesscontained many articles which had been condemned by the Church.’
Now this must be surely a misreport, as nothing could be more grossly incorrect than such a statement. The voice of the Free Church––that by which she condemns or approves––can be emitted through but her deliberative courts, and recorded in but the decisions of her solemn Assemblies. On the merits or demerits of theWitness, through these her only legitimate organs, she has not247yet spoken; and Mr. Maule is, we are sure, by far too intelligent a Churchman to mistake the voice of a mere political coterie, irritated mayhap by the loss of an election, for the solemn deliverance of a Church of Christ. With respect to his reported statement, to the effect that theWitness‘contained many articles which had done great harm to the Free Church,’ the report may, we think, be quite correct. TheWitnesscontained a good many articles on the special occasion when the Free Churchmen of Edinburgh conspired––‘ungratefully and dishonourably,’ as Mr. Maule must have deemed it––to eject a Whig Minister, and to place in his seat, as their representative, a shrewd citizen and honest man.
And these lucubrations accomplished, we daresay, their modicum of harm. With regard, however, to the articles of theWitnessin general, we think we can confidently appeal in their behalf to such of our readers as perused them, not as they were garbled, misquoted, interpolated, and mis-represented by unscrupulous enemies, but as they were first given to the public from the pen of the Editor. Among these readers we reckon men of all classes, from the peer to the peasant––Conservative landowners, magistrates, merchants, ministers of the gospel. Dr. Chalmers was a reader of theWitnessfrom its first commencement to his death; and he, perusing its editorial articles as they were originally written––not as they were garbled or interpolated in other prints––saw in them very little to blame.
Not but that some of our sentences look sufficiently formidable in extracts when twisted from their original meaning; and this, just as the Decalogue itself might be instanced as a code of licentiousness, violence, and immorality, were it to be exhibited in garbled quotations, divested of all thenots. In theEdinburgh Advertiserof yesterday, for instance, we find the following passage:––‘It [The Witness] has menaced our nobles with the horrors of248the French Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly task, and when the “bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled on button-holes in the streets of Paris.” It has reminded them of the time when a “grey discrowned head sounded hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall;” insinuating that, if they persisted in opposing the claims of the Free Church, a like fate might overtake the reigning dynasty of our time.’
When, asks the reader, did these most atrocious threats appear in theWitness?
They never, we reply, appeared in theWitnessas threats at all. The one passage, almost in the language of Chateaubriand, was employed in an article in which we justified the sentence pronounced on the atheist Patterson. The other formed part of a purely historic reference––in an article on Puseyism, written ere the Free Church had any existence––to the Canterburianism of the times of Charles I., and the fate of that unhappy monarch. We thought not of threatening the aristocracy when quoting the one passage, nor yet of foreboding evil to the existing dynasty when writing the other. On exactly the same principle on which these passages have been instanced to our disadvantage, the description of theHoloptychius Nobilissimus, which appeared a few years ago in theWitness, might be paraded as a personal attack on Sir James Graham; and the remarks on the construction of thePterichthys, as a gross libel on the Duke of Buccleuch. It is, we hold, not a little to the credit of theWitness, that, in order to blacken its character, means should be resorted to of a character so disreputable and dishonest. From truth and fair statement it has all to hope, and nothing to fear.
June 14, 1848.
249BAILLIE’S LETTERS AND JOURNALS.
This is at once the handsomest and one of the best editions of the curious and very interesting class of works to which it belongs, that has yet been given to the public. It is scarce possible to appreciate too highly the tact, judgment, and research displayed by the editor; and rarely indeed, so far as externals are concerned, has the typography of Scotland appeared to better advantage. It is a book decked out for the drawing-room in a suit of the newest pattern,––a tall, modish, well-built book, that has to be fairly set a-talking ere we discover from its tongue and style that it is a production not of our own times, but of the times of Charles and the Commonwealth. The good, simple minister of Kilwinning would fail to recognise himself in its fair open pages, that more than rival those of his oldElzevirs. For his old-fashioned suit of home-spun grey, we find him sporting here a modern dress-coat of Saxony broadcloth, and a pair of unexceptionable cashmere trousers; and it is not until we step forward and address the worthy man, and he turns upon us his broad, honest face, that we see the grizzled moustache and peaked beard, and discover that his fears are still actively engaged regarding the prelatic leanings of CharlesII., ‘now at Breda;’ though perchance not quite without hope that the counsel of the ‘wise and godly youth’ James Sharpe may have the effect of setting all right again in the royal mind. We250address what we take, from the garb, to be a contemporary, and find that we have stumbled on one of the seven sleepers.
We deem it no slight advantage to the reading public of the present day, that it should have works of this character made so easy of access. It is only a very few years since the student of Scottish ecclesiastical history could not have acquainted himself with the materials on which the historian can alone build, without passing through a course of study at least as prolonged as an ordinary college course, and much more laborious. Let us suppose that he lived in some of the provinces. He would have, in the first place, to come and reside in Edinburgh, and get introduced, at no slight expense of trouble, mayhap, to the brown, half-defaced manuscripts of our public libraries. He would require next to study the old hand, with all its baffling contractions. If he succeeded in mastering the difficulties of Melville’sDiaryafter a quarter of a year’s hard conning, he might well consider himself a lucky man. Row’sHistorywould occupy him during at least another quarter; Baillie’sLetters and Journalswould prove work enough for two quarters more. If he succeeded in getting access to the papers of Woodrow, he would find little less than a twelvemonth’s hard labour before him; Calderwood’s largeHistorywould furnish employment for at least half that time; and if curious to peruse it in its best and fullest form, he would find it necessary to quit Edinburgh for London, to pore there over the large manuscript copy stored up in the British Museum. As he proceeded in his course, he would be continually puzzled by references, allusions, initials; he would have to consult register offices, records of baptisms and deaths, session books, old and scarce works, hardly less difficult to be procured than even the manuscripts themselves; and if he at length escaped the fate of the luckless antiquary, who produced the famous251history of the village of Wheatfield, he might deem himself more than ordinarily fortunate. ‘When I first engaged in this work,’ said the poor man, ‘I had eyes of my own; but now I cannot see even with the assistance of art: I have gone from spectacles of the first sight to spectacles of the third; the Chevalier Taylor gives my eyes over, and my optician writes me word he can grind no higher for me.’ It will soon be no such Herculean task to penetrate to the foundations of our national ecclesiastical history. From publications such as those of the Woodrow Club, and of theLetters and Journals, the student will be able to acquire in a few weeks what would have otherwise cost him the painful labour of years. Nor can we point out a more instructive course of reading. In running over our modern histories, however able, we almost always find our point of view fixed down by the historian to the point occupied by himself. We cannot take up another on our own behalf, unless we differ from him altogether, nor select for ourselves the various subjects which we are to survey. We are in leading-strings for the time: the vigour of our author’s thinking militates against the exercise of our own; his philosophy enters our minds in a too perfect form, and lies inert there, just as the condensed extract of some nourishing food often fails to nourish at all, because it gives no employment to the digestive faculty. A survey of the historian’s materials has often, on the contrary, the effect of setting the mind free. We see the events of the times which he describes in their own light, and simply as events,––we select and arrange for ourselves,––they call up novel traits of character,––they lead us to draw on our experience of men,––they confirm principles,––they suggest reflections.
Some of our readers will perhaps remember that we noticed at considerable length the two first volumes of this beautiful edition of Baillie rather more than a twelvemonth252ago. The third and concluding volume has but lately appeared. It embraces a singularly important period,––extending from shortly before the rise of the unhappy and ultimately fatal quarrel between the Resolutioners and Protesters, till the re-establishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration, when the curtain closes suddenly over the poor chronicler, evidently sinking into the grave at the time, the victim of a broken heart. He sees a stormy night settling dark over the Church,––Presbytery pulled down, the bishops set up, persecution already commenced; and, longing to be released from his troubles, he affectingly assures his correspondent, in the last of his many letters, that ‘it was the matter of his daily grief that had brought his bodily trouble upon him,’ and that it would be ‘a favour to him to be gone.’ From a very learned, concise, and well-written Life, the production of the accomplished editor, which serves as a clue to guide the reader through the mazes of the correspondence, we learn that he died three months after.
Where there is so much that is interesting, one finds it difficult to select. The light in which the infamous Sharpe is presented in this volume is at least curious. Prelacy, careful of the reputation of her archbishops, makes a great deal indeed of the bloody death of the man, but says as little as possible regarding his life and character. The sentimental Jacobitism of the present day––an imaginative principle that feeds on novels, and admires the persecutors because Claverhouse was brave and had an elegant upper lip––goes a little further, and speaks of him as the venerable Archbishop. When the famous picture of his assassination was exhibiting in Edinburgh, some ten or twelve years ago, he rose with the class almost to the dignity of a martyr: there were young ladies that could scarce look at the piece without using their handkerchiefs; the victim was old, greyhaired, reverend, an archbishop, and eminently253saintly, as a matter of course, whatever the barbarous fanatics might say; and all that his figure seemed to want in order to make it complete, was just a halo of yellow ochre round the head. In Baillie’sLetterswe see him exhibited, though all unwittingly on the part of the writer, in his true character, and find that the yellow ochre would be considerably out of place. Rarely, indeed, does nature, all lost and fallen as it is, produce so consummate a scoundrel. Treachery seems to have existed as so uncontrollable an instinct in the man, that, like the appropriating faculty of the thief, who amused himself by picking the pocket of the clergyman who conducted him to the scaffold, it seems to have been incapable of lying still. He appears never to have had a friend who did not learn to detest and denounce him: his Presbyterian friends, whom he deceived and betrayed, did so in the first instance; his Episcopalian friends, whom he at least strove to deceive and betray, did so in the second. We are assured by Burnet, that even Charles, a monarch certainly not over-nice in the moral sense, declared James Sharpe to be one of the worst of men. His life was a continuous lie; and he has left more proofs of the fact in the form of letters under his own hand, than perhaps any other bad man that ever lived.
In Baillie he makes his first appearance as the Presbyterian minister of Crail, and as one of the honest chronicler’s greatest favourites. The unhappy disputes between the Resolutioners and Protesters were running high at the time. Baillie was a Resolutioner, Sharpe a zealous Resolutioner too; and Baillie, naturally unsuspicious, and biassed in his behalf by that spirit of party which can darken the judgment of even the most discerning, seems to have regarded him as peculiarly the hope of the Church. He was indisputably one of its most dexterous negotiators; and no man of the age made a higher profession of religion. Burnet, who knew him well in his after character as Archbishop of254St. Andrews, tells us that never, save on one solitary occasion, did he hear him make the slightest allusion to religion. But in his letters to Baillie, almost every paragraph closes with the aspirations of a well-simulated devotion. They seem as if strewed over with the fragments of broken doxologies. The old man was, as we have said, thoroughly deceived. He assures his continental correspondent, Spang, that ‘the great instrument of God to cross the evil designs of the Protesters, was thatvery worthy, pious, wise, and diligent young man, Mr. James Sharpe.’ In some of his after epistles we learn that he remembered him in his prayers, no doubt very sincerely, as, under God, one of the mainstays of the Church. What first strikes the reader in the character of Sharpe, as here exhibited, is his exclusively diplomatic cast of talent. Baillie himself was a controversialist: he wrote books to influence opinion, and delivered argumentative speeches. He was a man of business too: he drew up remonstrances, petitions, protests, and carried on the war of his party above-board. All his better friends and correspondents, such as Douglas and Dickson, were persons of a resembling cast. But Sharpe’s vocation lay in dealing with men in closets and window recesses: he could do nothing until he had procured the private ear of the individual on whom he wished to act. Is he desirous to influence the decisions of the Supreme Civil Court in behalf of his party? He straightway ingratiates himself with President Broghill, and the court becomes more favourable in consequence. Is he wishful to propitiate the English Government? He goes up to London, gets closeted with its more influential members. It was this peculiar talent that pointed him out to the Church as so fit a person to treat with Charles at Breda.
And it is when employed in this mission that we begin truly to see the man, and to discover the sort of ability on which the success of his closetings depended. We find255Baillie holding, in his simplicity, that in order to draw the heart of the King from Episcopacy, nothing more could be necessary than just fairly to submit to him some sound controversial work, arranged on the plan of the good man’s ownLadensium; and urging on Sharpe, that a few able divines should be employed in getting up a compilation for the express purpose. Sharpe writes in return, in a style sufficiently quiet, that His Majesty, in his very first address, ‘has been pleased to ask very graciously about Robert Baillie,’ a person for whom he has a particular kindness, and whom, if favours were dealing, he would be sure not to forget. He adds, further, that however matters might turn out in England, the Presbyterian Establishment of Scotland was in no danger of violation; and lest his Scotch friends should fall into the error of thinking too much about other men’s business, he gives fervent expression to the hope ‘that the Lord would give them to prize their own mercies, and know their own duties.’ Even a twelvemonth after, when on the eve of setting out for London to be created a bishop, he writes his old friend, that whatever ‘occasion of jealousies and false surmises his journey might give,’ of one thing he might be assured, ‘it was not in order to a change in the Church,’ as he ‘would convince his dear friend Mr. Baillie, through the Lord’s help, when the Lord would return him.’ He has an under-plot of treachery carrying on at the same time, that affects his ‘dear friend’ personally. In one of his letters to the unsuspecting chronicler, he assures him that he was ‘doing his best, by the Lord’s help,’ to get him appointed Principal of the University of Glasgow. In one of his letters to Lauderdale, after stating that the office, ‘in the opinion of many,’ would require a man ‘of more acrimony and weight’ than ‘honest Baillie,’ he urges that the presentation should be sent him, with a blank space, in which the name of the presentee might be afterwards inserted.256
Baillie, naturally slow to suspect, does not come fully to understand the character of the man until a very few months before his death. He then complains bitterly to his continental correspondent, amid the ruin of the Church, and from the gloom of his sick-chamber, that Sharpe was the traitor who, ‘piece by piece, had so cunningly trepanned them, that the cause had been suffered to sink without even a struggle.’ The apostate had gained his object, however, and become ‘His Grace the Lord Primate.’ There were great rejoicings. ‘The new bishops were magnificklie received;’ they were feasted by the Lord Commissioner’s lady on one night, by the Chancellor on another; and in especial, ‘the Archbishop had bought a new coach at London, at the sides whereof two lakqueys in purple did run.’
The vanity of Sharpe is well brought out on another occasion by Burnet. The main object of one of his journeys to London, undertaken a little more than a twelvemonth after the death of Baillie, was to urge on the King that, as Primate of Scotland, he should of right take precedence of the Scottish Lord Chancellor, and to crave His Majesty’s letter to that effect. In this trait, as in several others, he seems to have resembled Robespierre. His cruelty to his old friends the Presbyterians is well illustrated by the fact that he could make the comparative leniency of Lauderdale, apostate and persecutor as Lauderdale was, the subject of an accusation against him to Charles. But there is no lack of still directer instances in the biographies of the worthies whom his malice pursued. His meanness, too, seems to have been equal to his malice and pride. When Lauderdale on one occasion turned fiercely upon him, and threatened to impeach him forleasing-making, he ‘straightway fell a-trembling and weeping,’ and, to avoid the danger, submitted to appear in the royal presence; and there, in the coarsest terms, to confess257himself a liar. It is a bishop who tells the story, and it is only one of a series. Truly the Primate of all Scotland was fortunate in the death he died. ‘The dismal end of this unhappy man,’ says Burnet, ‘struck all people with horror, and softened his enemies into some tenderness; so that his memory was treated with decency by those who had very little respect for him during his life.’
In almost every page in this instructive volume the reader picks up pieces of curious information, or finds matters suggestive of interesting thought. There start up ever and anon valuable hints that germinate and bear fruit in the mind. We would instance, by way of illustration, a hint which occurs in a letter to Lauderdale, written shortly after the Restoration, and which, though apparently slight, leads legitimately into a not unimportant train of thinking. Scotchmen are much in the habit of referring to the political maxim that the king can do no wrong, as a fundamental principle of the constitution, which concerns them as directly as it does their neighbours the English. Dr. Chalmers alluded to it no later than last week, in his admirable speech in the Commission. The old maxim, that the king could do no wrong, he said, had now, it would seem, descended from the throne to the level of courts co-ordinate with the Church. Would it not be a somewhat curious matter to find that this doctrine is one which has in reality not entered Scotland at all? It stands in England, a guardian in front of the throne, transferring every blow which would otherwise fall on the sovereign himself, to the sovereign’s ministers: it is ministers, not sovereigns, who are responsible to the people of England. But it would at least seem, that with regard to the people of Scotland the responsibility extends further. At least the English doctrine was regarded asexclusivelyan English one in the days of Baillie, nearly half a century prior to the Union, and more than a whole century ahead of those times in which258the influence of that event began to have the effect of mixing up in men’s minds matters peculiar to England with matters common to Britain. We find Baillie, in his letter written immediately after the passing of the Act Recissory, pronouncing the doctrine that the ‘king can do no fault,’ as in his judgment ‘good and wise,’ but referring to it at the same time as a doctrine, not of the Scottish Constitution, but of the ‘State of England.’
The circumstance is of importance chiefly from the light which it serves to cast on an interesting passage in Scottish history. The famous declaration of our Scotch Convention at the Revolution, that JamesVII.hadforfeitedthe throne, as contrasted with the singularly inadequate though virtually corresponding declaration of the English Convention, that JamesII.‘hadabdicatedthe government, and that the throne was thereby vacant,’ has been often remarked by the historians. Hume indirectly accounts for the employment of the stronger word, by prominently stating that the more zealous among the Scotch Royalists, regarding the assembly as illegal, had forborne to appear at elections, and that the antagonist party commanded a preponderating majority in consequence; whereas in England the Tories mustered strong, and had to be conciliated by the employment of softer language. Malcolm Laing, in noticing the fact, contents himself by simply contrasting the indignation on the part of the Scotch, which had been aroused by their recent sufferings, with the quieter temper of the English, who had been less tried by the pressure of actual persecution, and who were anxious to impart to Revolution at least the colour of legitimate succession. And Sir James Mackintosh, in hisVindiciæ Gallicæ, contents himself with simply remarking that the ‘absurd debates in the English Convention were better cut short by the Parliament of Scotland, when they used the correct and manly expression that JamesVII.had forfeited the throne.’ We are of opinion259that the very different styles of the two Conventions may be accounted for on the ground that, in the one kingdom, the monarch, according to the genius of the constitution, was regarded as incapable of committing wrong; whereas, in the other, he was no less constitutionally regarded as equally peccable with any of his subjects. A peccable monarch mayforfeithis throne; an impeccable one can onlyabdicateit. The argument must of course depend on the soundness of Baillie’s statement. Was the doctrine that the king can do no wrong a Scottish doctrine at the time of the Revolution, or was it not?
It was at least not a Scottish one in the days of Buchanan,––nor for a century after, as we may learn very conclusively, not from Buchanan himself, nor his followers––for the political doctrines of a school of writers may be much at variance with those of their country––but from the many Scottish controversialists on the antagonist side, who entered the lists against both the master and his disciples. Buchanan maintained, in his philosophical treatise,De Jure Regni apud Scotos, that there are conditions by which the King of Scotland is bound to his people, on the fulfilment of which the allegiance of the people depends, and that ‘it is lawful to depose, and even to punish tyrants.’ Knox, with the other worthies of the first Reformation, held exactly the same doctrine. TheLex Rexof Rutherford testifies significantly to the fact that among the worthies of the second Reformation it was not suffered to become obsolete. It takes a prominent place in writings of the later Covenanters, such as theHind let Loose; and at the Revolution it received the practical concurrence of the National Convention, and of the country generally. Now the doctrine, be it remembered, was an often disputed one. Buchanan’s little work was the very butt of controversy for considerably more than an hundred years. It was prohibited by Parliament, denounced260by monarchs, condemned to the flames by universities; great lawyers wrote treatises against it at home, and some of the most celebrated scholars of continental Europe took the field against it abroad. We learn from Dr. Irving, in hisClassical Biography, that it was assailed among our own countrymen by Blackwood, Winzet, Barclay, Sir Thomas Craig, Sir John Wemyss, Sir Lewis Stewart, Sir James Turner, and last, not least, among the writers who preceded the Revolution, by the meanly obsequious and bloody Sir George Mackenzie. And how did these Scotchmen meet with the grand doctrine which it embodied? The ‘old maxime of the state of England,’ had it extended to the sister kingdom, would have at once furnished the materials of reply. If constitutionally the King of Scotland could do no wrong, thenconstitutionallythe King of Scotland could not be deposed. But of an entirely different complexion was the argument of which the Scottish assailants of Buchanan availed themselves. It was an argument subversive to the English maxim. Admitting fully that the kingcoulddo wrong, they maintained merely that, for whatever wrong he did, he was responsible, not to his subjects, but to God only. Whatever the amount of wrong he committed, it was the duty of his subjects, they said, passively to submit to it. On came the Revolution. In England, in perfect agreement with the doctrine of the king’s impeccability––in perfect agreement, at least, so far as words were concerned––it was declared that James had abdicated the government, and that the throne was thereby vacant; and certainly it cannot be alleged by even the severest moralist, that in either abdicating a government or vacating a throne, there is the slightest shadow of moral evil involved. In Scotland the decision was different. The battle fought in the Convention was exactly that which had been previously fought between Buchanan and his antagonists. ‘Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, and Sir261George Mackenzie, asserted,’ says Malcolm Laing, ‘the doctrine of divine right, or maintained, with more plausibility, that every illegal measure of James’s government was vindicated by the declaration of the late Parliament, thathe was an absolute monarch, entitled to unreserved obedience,AND ACCOUNTABLE TO NONE; while Sir James Montgomery and Sir John Dalrymple, who conducted the debate on the other side, averred that the Parliament was neither competent to grant, nor the king to acquire,an absolute power, irreconcilable with theRECIPROCAL OBLIGATIONS DUE TO THE PEOPLE.’ The doctrines of Buchanan prevailed; and the estates declared that JamesVII.having, through ‘the advice of evil and wicked councillors, invaded the fundamental constitution of the kingdom, and altered it from a legal limited monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power,’ he had therebyforfaultedhis right to the crown.’ The terms of the declaration demonstrate that Baillie was quite in the right regarding the ‘old maxime, that the king can do no fault,’ as exclusively a ‘maxime of the State of England.’ By acting on the advice of ‘evil and wicked councillors,’ it was declared that a peccable king had forfeited the throne. The fact that there were councillors in the case did not so much even as extenuate the offence: it was the advisers of the King who then, as now, were accountable to the King’s English subjects for the advice they gave; it was the King in person who was accountable to his Scottish subjects for the advice he took. This principle, hitherto little adverted to, throws, as we have said, much light on the history of the Revolution in Scotland.
262FIRST PRINCIPLES.
There is a passage in theLife of Sir Matthew Halewhich has struck us as not only interesting in itself, from the breadth and rectitude of judgment which it discloses, but also from the very direct bearing of the principle involved in it on some of the recent interdicts of the Supreme Civil Court. It serves to throw a kind of historic light, if we may so speak, on the judicial talent of our country in the present age as exhibited by the majority of our judges of the Court of Session––such a light as the ecclesiastical historian of a century hence will be disposed to survey it in, when coolly exercising his judgment on the present eventful struggle. One of not the least prominent nor least remarkable features of the Rebellion of 1745, says a shrewd chronicler of this curious portion of our history, was an utter destitution of military talent among the general officers of the British army. And the time is in all probability not very distant, in which the extreme lack of judicial genius betrayed by our courts of law in their present collision with the courts ecclesiastical, shall be regarded, in like manner, as one of the more striking characteristics of theRebellionof the present day.
Sir Matthew Hale, as most of our readers must be aware, was a devoted Royalist. He was rising in eminence as a barrister at the time the Civil Wars broke out, and during that troublesome period he was employed as counsel for almost all the more eminent men of the King’s party who were impeached by the Parliament. He was counsel for263the Earl of Strafford, for Archbishop Laud, for the Duke of Hamilton, for the Earl of Holland, and for Lords Capel and Craven; and in every instance he exhibited courage the most unshrinking and devoted, and abilities of the highest order. When threatened in open court on one occasion by the Attorney-General, he replied that the threat might be spared: he was pleading in defence of those laws which the Government had declared it would maintain and preserve, and no fear of personal consequences should deter him in such circumstances from doing his duty to his client. When Charles himself was brought to his trial, Sir Matthew came voluntarily forward, and offered to plead for him also; but as the King declined recognising the competency of his judges, the offer was of course rejected. We all know how Malesherbes fared for acting a similar part in France. The counsel of Louis XVI. closed his honourable career on the scaffold not long after his unfortunate master: his generous advocacy of the devoted monarch cost him his life. But Cromwell, that ‘least flagitious of all usurpers,’ according to even Clarendon’s estimate, was no Robespierre; and were we called on to illustrate by a single instance from the history of each the very opposite characters of the Puritan Republicans of England and the Atheistical Republican of France, we would just set off against one another the fate of Malesherbes and the treatment of Sir Matthew. Cromwell, unequalled in his ability of weighing the capabilities of men, had been carefully scanning the course of the courageous and honest barrister; and, convinced that so able a lawyer and so good and brave a man could scarce fail of making an excellent judge, he determined on raising him to the bench. At this stage, however, a difficulty interposed, not in the liberal and enlightened policy of the Protector, who had no objections whatever to a conscientious Royalist magistrate, but in the scruples of Sir264Matthew, who at first doubted the propriety of taking office under what he deemed a usurped power.
The process of argument by which he overcame the difficulty, simple as it may seem, is worthy of all heed. Its very simplicity may be regarded as demonstrating the soundness of the understanding that originated and then acted upon it as a firm first principle, especially when we take into account the exquisitely nice character of the conscience which it had to satisfy. It is absolutely necessary for the wellbeing of society, argued Sir Matthew, that justice be administered between man and man; and the necessity exists altogether independently of the great political events which affect the sources of power, by changing dynasties or revolutionizing governments. The claim of the supreme rulerde factomay be a bad one; he may owe his power to some act of great political injustice––to an iniquitous war––to an indefensible revolution––to a foul conspiracy; but the flaw in his title cannot be regarded as weakening in the least the claim of the people under him to the administration of justice among them as the ordinance of God. Therightof the honest man to be protected by the magistrate from the thief––the right of the peaceable man to be protected by the magistrate from the assassin––is not a conditional right, dependent on the title of the ruler: it is as clear and certain during those periods so common in history, when the supreme power is illegitimately vested, as during the happier periods of undisputed legitimacy. And to be a minister of God for the administration of justice, if the office be attainable without sin, is as certainly right at all times as the just exercise of the magistrate’s functions is right at all times. If it be right that society be protected by the magistrate, it is as unequivocally right in the magistrate to protect. But it is wrong to recognise as legitimate the supreme ruler of a country if his power be palpably usurped. English society,265under Cromwell, retains its right to have justice administered, wholly unaffected by the flaw in Cromwell’s title; but it would be wrong to recognise his title, contrary to one’s conviction, as void of any flaw. In short, to use the simple language of Burnet, Sir Matthew, ‘after mature deliberation, came to be of opinion, that as it was absolutely necessary to have justice and property kept up at all times, it was no sin to take a commission from usurpers, if there was declaration made of acknowledging their authority.’ Cromwell had breadth enough to demand no such declaration from Sir Matthew, and so the latter took his place on the bench. Nor is it necessary to say how he adorned it. In agreement with his political views, he declined taking any part in trials for offences against the State; but in cases of ordinary felonies, no one could act with more vigour and decision. During the trial of a Republican soldier, who had waylaid and murdered a Royalist, the colonel of the soldier came into court to arrest judgment, on the plea that his man had done only his duty, for that the person whom he had killed had been disobeying the Protector’s orders at the time; and to threaten the judge with the vengeance of the supreme authority, if he urged matters to an extremity against him. Sir Matthew listened coolly to his threats and his reasonings, and then, pronouncing sentence of death against the felon, agreeably to the finding of the jury, he ordered him out to instant execution, lest the course of justice should be interrupted by any interference on the part of Government. On another occasion, in which he had to preside in a trial in which the Protector was deeply concerned, he found that the jury had been returned, not by the sheriff or his lawful officer, but by order of the Protector himself. He immediately dismissed them, and, refusing to go on with the trial, broke up the court. Cromwell, says Burnet, was highly displeased with him on this occasion, and on his return from the circuit266in which it had occurred, told him in great anger that ‘he was not fit to be a judge.’ ‘Very true,’ replied Sir Matthew, whose ideas of the requirements of the office were of the most exalted character,––‘Very true;’ and so the matter dropped.
‘It is absolutely necessary,’ argued Sir Matthew, ‘to have justice kept up at all times,’ whatever flaws may exist in the title of the men in whom the supreme authority may chance to be vested. Never yet was there a simpler proposition; but there is sublimity in its breadth. It involves the true doctrine of subjection to the magistrate, as enforced by St. Paul. The New Testament furnishes us with no disquisitions on political justice: it does not say whether the title of Domitian to the supreme authority was a good title or no, or whether he should have been succeeded by Caligula, and Caligula by Claudius, or no; or whether or no the fact that Claudius was poisoned by the mother of Nero, derived to Nero any right to Claudius’s throne. We hear nothing of these matters. The magistracy described by St. Paul is the magistracy conceived of by Sir Matthew Hale ‘as necessary to be kept up at all times.’ An application of this simple principle to some of the more marked proceedings of our civil courts during the last two years will be found an admirable means of testing their degree of judicial wisdom. ‘It is absolutely necessary to have justice kept up at all times,’ and this not less necessary surely within than beyond the pale of the Church. It is necessary that a minister of the gospel ‘be blameless’––no drunkard, no swindler, no thief, no grossly obscene person; nor can any supposed flaw in the constitution of an ecclesiastical court disannul the necessity. A man may sit in that court in a judicial capacity whose competency to take his seat there may not have been determined by some civil court that challenges for itself an equivocal and disputed right to decide in the matter.267There may exist some supposed, or even some real, flaw in that supreme ecclesiastical authority of the country, through the exertion of which the Church is to be protected from the infection of vice and irreligion; but this flaw, real or supposed, furnishes no adequate cause why justice in the Church ‘should not be kept up.’ ‘Justice,’ said Sir Matthew, ‘must be kept up at all times,’ whatever the irregularities of title which may occur in the supreme authority. The great society of the Church has a right to justice, whether it be decided that the ministers ofquoad sacraparishes have what has been termed alegalright to sit in ecclesiastical courts or no. The devout and honest church member has a right to be protected from the blasphemous profanities of the wretched minister who is a thief or wretched swindler; the chaste and sober have a right to be protected from the ministrations of the drunken and the obscene wretch, whose preaching is but mockery, and his dispensations of the sacrament sacrilege. The Church has a right to purge itself of such ministers; and these sacred rights no supposed, even no real, flaw in the constitution of its courts ought to be permitted to affect. ‘Justice may be kept up at all times.’ We have said that the principle of Sir Matthew Hale serves to throw a kind of historic light on the judicial talent of our country in the present age, as represented by the majority of our Lords of Session. It enables us, in some sort, to anticipate regarding it the decision of posterity. The list of cases of protection afforded by the civil court will of itself form a curious climax in the page of some future historian. Swindling will come after drunkenness in the series, theft will follow after swindling, and the miserable catalogue will be summed up by an offence which we must not name. And it will be remarked that all these gross crimes were fenced round and protected in professed ministers of the gospel by the interference of the civil courts, just because a majority of the268judges were men so defective in judicial genius that they lost sight of the very first principles of their profession, and held that ‘justice isnotto be kept up at all times.’ But we leave our readers to follow up the subject. Some of the principles to which we have referred may serve to throw additional light on the remark of Lord Ivory, when recalling the interdict in the Southend case. ‘Even were the objection against the competency ofquoad sacraministers to be ultimately sustained,’ said his Lordship, ‘I am disposed to hold that the judicial acts and sentences of the General Assembly and its Commission,bona fidepronounced in the interim, should be given effect to notwithstanding.’