CHAPTER III

CHAPTER III1843-1851AFTER THE BATTLE—DALKEITH—EMBASSIES—EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE—DEATH OF JOHN MACINTOSH.That he should have chosen Dalkeith when he had the chance of going to Edinburgh has been remarked as strange. ‘I prefer,’ he said in explanation, ‘a country parish to a town, because the fever and excitement and the kind of work on Sabbath days and week days in Edinburgh would do me much harm bodily and spiritually.’ This is not enough, and indeed, though he did not state them, he confessed that he had other reasons. As the citadel of a glorying dissent, Edinburgh would scarcely be inviting to a man of his temperament. And it is clear that his mind had been stirred to its depths by the secession. At Dalkeith he would have leisure for reading and reflection, and yet be close to the headquarters of the Church.Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc that had been made by the Disruption, than the ministerof Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings as to the side which he had taken in the great controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the Establishment might have been in the end more irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained within. He veered between angry lamentation over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, and aversion from the faults of the new zealots—’vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. At the same time he perceived only too well what was good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in full sympathy with them in their devotion to the evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. He saw the seceders popular and victorious,—theirs allthe energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,—her ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more to their stipends than their work. Among other instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’ On the question of policy it is probable that he changed his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How was the National Church to be revived? The aristocracy had but one thing in view—the landed interest; Peelwas a trimmer; there was nothing in mere numbers. What was wanted was aninner workin the hearts of clergy and people. ‘If we were right in our souls,’ he wrote, ‘out of this root would spring the tree and fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living water.’ Two vows he took, one that he would devote himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among all who loved Christ.At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with the help of his congregation, which he developed into a society of Christian workers. He went about preaching in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got hung round with placards of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary, the minister showed that money would be better spent in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his days among his ‘brothers and sisters.’ There is a little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions of his tales. ‘On coming home this evening, I saw a number of boys following and speaking to, and apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close bythe wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild birds. I asked the boys who he was. “Eh! he’s a wee boy gaun’ aboot beggin’, wi’out faither or mither.”’ The minister took him to the manse, and consigned him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By and by ‘the door was opened, and in marched my poor boy, paraded in by Jessie,—a beautiful boy, clean as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful clean shirt, his hair combed and divided; and Jessie gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips; he looked round him in bewilderment. “There he is,” said Jessie; “I am sure ye’re in anither warld the night, my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore?” “No.” “What will ye dae noo?” “I dinna ken.” “Will ye gang awa’ and beg the night?” “If ye like.” “No,” said I, “be off to your bed and sleep.”’He was led to ponder the social as well as the religious problem presented by life in the slums. In the events of the year of revolution he took a keen interest. ‘The Chartists are put down,’ he remarked scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by no means end with the victory of the special constable. ‘Snug the joiner,’ he observed, ‘is a man as other men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered, which in rags shivers in the cold, while the “special” goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair,saying, “The scoundrels are put down.” We demand from them patience while starving—do we meet their demands for bread? Special! what hast thou done for thy brother? Ay—don’t stare at me or at thy baton—thy brother, I say! Hast thou ever troubled thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast about giving him a broken head?’ He rejected the remedies of the politicians—reform of taxation, high wages, the suffrage,—holding that the only cure lay ‘in the personal and regular communion of the better with the worse—man with man—until each Christian, like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be saved.’ Such was the spirit in which he toiled among the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod.He was no sooner settled in Dalkeith than he began to take part in the reparation of the ecclesiastical agencies that had been ruined by the Disruption. Of these the chief was in his eyes the India Mission. In 1844 he went, as one of a deputation, to the north of Scotland, in order to organise societies for the furtherance of female education in Hindostan. This was the first of a long series of religious embassies which compassed the round earth. Thirty associations were formed, but he returned from the tour lamenting the general apathy.The year following he was charged, along with his unclethe minister of Morven, and another, with a more distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the Secession had been felt; shrieks ofVeto, Cæsar, Headship, mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods. The deputies were for British North America; their business was to preach, and to explain the action of the constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of Morven? And such an expedition would peculiarly suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign countries, and having an object that excited his religious enthusiasm.On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool in June) he found in one of the berths a dying man, and conversed with him about the state of his soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of hissincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship reached its destination, the passengers drank the health of the deputies with three times three.At Washington he had an interview with the President, Mr. Polk,—’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought, ‘shall I now see the strange sight—a brother-man for sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’ Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its most mitigated form, and yet the impression made upon him ‘byseeinginstead of hearing was overwhelmingly bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime—withouttheir consent—slaves for life—slaves from childhood;—it was enough.’ During the American war he declared that the British sympathy for the South was to him an inscrutable mystery.In the States he was not slow to pick up hints for his future work from Sunday School Unions and Mission Boards; but that the customs of a foreign country are not to be inferred from a surface glance, he learned by an incident which he never forgot. He had mounted the box of a coach, and was surprised to find the driver seated at his left hand. ‘Just as I had noted the great fact that “all drivers in America sit on the left side of the box,” I thought I would ask what was gained by this. “Why, I guess,” replied Jonathan, “I can’t help it;I’m left-handed.”’In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he was busy taking in the primeval forest—the tufted heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the chop-chop-chop of the pioneer’s axe in the weird silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be anEnglishman, and would quiz them about their savage language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same as in the old land. ‘This angry spirit of Churchism,’ he says, ‘which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland, thunders at the door of every shanty in the backwoods.’ For himself, in explaining the Church question, he avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who (unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings confessed that he could not find fault with one expression. Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed, in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment. At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country; on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service in the open air. ‘The tent,’ writes Norman, ‘was on a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld the most touching and magnificent sight. There were (in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about four thousand people here assembled! John had finished a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head bare at the head of the white communion table, and wasabout to exhort the communicants. There was on either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I entered the tent and looked around; I have seen grand and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or clime—as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the communicants, every head bent down to the white board, and watched the expressions of the weather-beaten, true Highland countenances around me, and remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness—as these and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came from the Lord’s Table, can you wonder that I hid my face, and “lifted up my voice and wept”? Oh that my father had been with us! what a welcome he would have received!’ At various spots he met men from Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod found a woman who, the moment he entered her house, burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife’ssister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the exiles! In one place two old elders put their arms about Norman’s neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new sources of emotion; it was more that at the age of thirty-three he could say: ‘I have had peeps into real Canadian life: I have seen the true Indians in their encampment; I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men with their canoes and the North-westers on their way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I have been shaken to atoms over “corduroy” roads, and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to defend my poor and calumniated Church from many aspersions.’During this visit there came to him rumours of a movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Conference, held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever spent on earth. ‘What a prayer was that of Octavius Winslow’s! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the tears pour down my cheeks.’ There was developed in him a new love for his ministerial brethren. ‘I felt like aman who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and he had never seen them before.’ The Alliance was formed in August at the Freemasons’ Hall, London, in an assembly composed of a thousand representative Christians from America and the Colonies, and from almost every country in Europe. The project sprang from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference, a general conference once every lustrum in some European capital, reports from branches on events touching religious liberty: such were the methods by which these good men proposed to bring about the golden year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth, that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at least we are told. There was doubtless at first a powerful tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president, ‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not been presented to the eyes of God or man.... And is there not another class of eyes which may be said to be upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of yourmeeting much of their interests may be suspended. But, brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason to think that no such gathering as this would take place, and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10); we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are directed towards us.’ A few days later he told the Conference that he had been in the committee-room, and ‘he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when he said that the world’s interests and the interests of humanity were trembling in the balance.’ At a point in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects, ‘The respected speaker here paused, evidently overcome by his feelings.’ The orator ‘hoped brethren would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other subject but that which concerned religion and its great interests: but from his childhood he never could refrain from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed he was a perfect child.’ Did Norman cry,Hear, hear? On the contrary, he also would begreetin’. The time came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach. Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being amember of the business committee, a frequent chairman of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony; and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans, all united by the bond of a common religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another good thing he owed to the Alliance—the privilege of visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr. Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain progressive movements which had been reported from these countries. By the year 1847 he had seen the working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen his attachment to the Church of Scotland.How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental susceptibility. He came under the influence of his heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and holy man; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed ‘thou true man, poet of the backwoods.’ He was getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling, not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had becomeof the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tübingen, dying. After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge. There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists, and had assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He calls him his ‘dearest Norman,’ his ‘beloved Norman,’ whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss; speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest hours of his life, much mental development, and not a few faithful and well-timed warnings—a friend the thought of whom brightened his future. ‘Think of you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.’ When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for Tübingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty-four hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was two o’clock in the morning when he arrived in the town. He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid’s door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs. Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that he had received his relatives on their arrival with a strange coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst notenter his room without an invitation. Pondering this mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions, was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere the final victory of Christ was achieved? He sent a note into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his friend would see him. The answer was, ‘Come now.’ The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black hair with an ‘intense and painful lustre.’ With loving gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible voice said, ‘I am holding communion with God,’ and they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world, mentioned an hour at which he would be glad to have another meeting. So he was brought back completely to his old self. He had been mentally disturbed by his mother’s arrival, because, thinking that he might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he would sit of an evening ‘with closed eyes, and head drooping on his breast,’ listening in silence to old Scottish tunes—’Wandering Willie,’ ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest,’ ‘The Land o’ the Leal’; and, again, with an air of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of soon meeting Chalmers. ‘My spirit,’ wrote Norman, ‘felt no less than awed before him.’ The companionstook farewell of each other on the 11th of March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was dead.In July Macleod was inducted to the Barony Church, Glasgow. A month later he was married to Catherine Ann Macintosh, the sister of his friend.CHAPTER IV1851-1860THE BARONY PARISH—MACLEOD AS PASTOR—AS PREACHER—HIS SYMPATHY—POSITION IN THE CITY.The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father—was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasmwent far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears.Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.The spirit of Macleod’s ministry is partly to be traced to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early master in the neighbouring parish of St. John’s musthave been in his mind. These two pastors were equal in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisation of the masses, equal in their capacity for work. But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the people like a statesman, and had his principles and plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual, and thought most of a moral change. Of the social question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy. Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart; which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers, however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony.Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park, Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration,with something even of romance, when he heard the first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. ‘People talk,’ he wrote, ‘of early morning in the country, with bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day—the type of a new era. I feel these are awake with me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on—to fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work, and fulfil my grand and glorious end.’ And he thought, with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability, many working men shunned the churches, and looked askance at ‘the lads in black.’ Ah! if they only knew, thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour. He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But how was he to reach the masses scattered through his enormous cure? In his hands the Barony congregation became what every muster of converts was in the days of the apostles,—a society for Christian work. Worship, meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacraments, is a mediæval invention. Norman Macleod held that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good actions. Indeed, for æsthetic and ceremonial (since there must be forms) he had too little care. Of theBarony Church a certain noble lord remarked, ‘I have seen one uglier’; and once Macleod had to admonish the congregation in these terms: ‘Scripture commands us to sing, notgrunt; but if you are so constituted that it is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is best to be silent.’ But here were people who met to engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good advice. ‘A Christian congregation,’ he says, ‘is a body of Christians who are associated not merely to receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public worship, but also “to consider one another and to provoke to love and good works,” and as a society to do good to all as they have opportunity.... The society of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations or congregations like an army acting through its different regiments, is the grand social system which Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’Having made himself personally acquainted with his congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, educational, and social needs of the parish should be met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary network. By means of meetings, for which given agents were responsible, the minister came in contact with his parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerousSunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he furnished both pastors and congregations. In the first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually raised from the congregation, which was one of the poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-buildings for thousands of children; with evening classes for adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at their A B C. He started congregational savings banks, and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment-rooms attractive with books and amusements; in which things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer.The best organisation would have been of little avail but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by his personal influence, which was at once paternal and commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass, no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptinessof churches; and the foolishness of preaching is obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have no creed at all. There would be no outcry against preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found themselves as it were in a different world, so changed was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself was in the pulpit—bearded, bronzed, and dilated to agiant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, and here and there you might see some flagging of attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience bound as with a spell; his utterance waxed rapid and passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in building the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold. Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of Macleod’s that ‘it was all true and very moving’—thene plus ultraof praise—and that he did not know ‘the manin the Church of England who could have preached such a sermon.’ ‘The greatest and most convincing preacher I ever heard,’ is the confession of Sir Arthur Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching was ‘the perfection of art without art,’ ‘he spoke as a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower order,’ his effectiveness was due to ‘truth and honesty, guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed in manly speech face to face.’ His power in the pulpit seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass into the church. It was no uncommon thing for gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce; and they must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had himself rigged out in ‘the cast-off working dress of a coach-builder—a dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.’ ‘I stood,’ he says, ‘waiting among the crowd of poor men and women that were shivering at the gate, biding the time. Many of these women were very old and very frail.... Poor souls! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and his sayings. I conversed with several working men who had attended all the series from the first, three or four years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotchwho attended. He said, “All nations go and hear the Doctor.” ... “A’body likes the Doctor,” said another. One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said “he kent great lots o’ folk that’s been blessed by the Doctor, baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that wrought wi’ me, o’ the name o’ Boyd, and he came ae nicht out o’ curiosity, and he was convertit afore he raise from his seat, and he’s a staunch Protestant to this day, every bit o’ him, though his father and mother, and a’ his folks, are sair against him for’t.”’ None of the cushions or books were removed from the seats, and the witness says that the decorum was as good as at the regular service. ‘In reference to the mother and grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand stand for character, which made the poor man next to me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor’s remarks on the subject been delivered from a platform, they would have elicited thunders of applause.’ If one realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons, commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses. ‘Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to understand, the misery which his loss has created in the paternal home! He is bringing down the grey hairs of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him, and loved him ere he could know of the existence and unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest dayor night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.’Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats: of a horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat, he says, ‘I wish he could have known how much I pitied him’; and of the camel, ‘The expression of his soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek submission and patient endurance ever since travelling began in these deserts. The poor “djemel” bends his neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be redressed by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftesbury.’ In the scene of man’s life his spirit eagerly responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be, never recovering from the surprises of existence. So, with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both human and religious, he sometimes found himself in strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight,surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence with the working folk was that he felt no difference from their social position, but spoke to them on the ground of common humanity, without affected familiarity or priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience was that the lower and the upper classes were very much alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.[1]The preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ‘O sickness, pain, and death! what republican levellers are these of us all!’[2]There is a zeal for the people, a worship of humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory. The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of the suffering race. Macleod’s sympathy was for the individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’sexperience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner had excused himself to his wife as follows: ‘Dinna be ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief from the parish, and I didna like to beg; but I kent if I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow and orphans.’ Always, when Macleod told that story, he went into an ecstasy, shouting, ‘That man was a hero!’Considering the moral and material plight of the masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At Dalkeith he had writtenA Plea for Temperance, in which, while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating the working classes from the charge of drunkenness.The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying grace!For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general development of Christian life. He was not apt to quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like the mother of ‘wee Davie,’ in ‘actsout ofParliament,’ Yet he could exclaim, ‘O selfish pride! O society, thou tyrant!’ and when his foot was on his native heath he was a regular Radical.‘You don’t mean to say that you would turn away those people?’ asked Kate with astonishment.‘What people do you mean?’ inquired M’Dougall.‘I mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan—your small tenants there!’‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, whereI have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.‘Because in the colonies they can always better their condition by industry.’‘But why not help them to better their condition at home? why not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour?’‘Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and after all it would not pay,’ replied M’Dougall....‘But surely, surely,’ she continued, ‘money is not the chief end of man.... I can’t argue’ (Kate goes on), ‘but my whole soul tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god Money is an idolatry that must perish; that the only way for a man truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M’Donald, I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the people.’‘Might I ask your text, fair preacher?’ inquired M’Dougall, with an admiring smile.‘Why,’ said Kate, ‘the text is the only thing about it I am certain would be good; and the one I would choose rings in my ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their very selves.’‘But the text, the text, my lady?’‘My text would be,’ said Kate, ‘“Is not a man better than a sheep?”’[3]The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting the lines—‘From the dim shieling on the misty islandMountains divide us, and a world of seas,But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no indictment of the social structure; there was nothing for it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of the boarding-out system; but it was for those whom legal relief might not reach that his heart bled. ‘There is many a desolate cry of pain,’ he wrote, ‘smothered within the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon.’ To aid the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest objects that could engage the attention of good men;—one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, from New York to Elberfelt; but vain was his dream of building a bridge between east and west by charity,—the wary remorse and discount of the Vandals.The working men of Glasgow more than once testified in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and gold they had none, they said, but they would retain for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, ‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it was the same. Free Church people and people of all Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me; cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets, asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time asurreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His name was oftener heard in common talk than that of any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’ Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom he did not know. Thinking that they might be new adherents, he went to the house, which was up three flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it would never dae to riskNorman.’[4]There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5]‘As for sadness and gloom,’ hesays somewhere, ‘in acceptingallthings from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see—— drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were neverwritten, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. ‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, andvice versâ: some avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod not only attended to all departments of a minister’s work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it implied service to the Church or the community. Early in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiasticalbarriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the repeal of the theological tests for university professors. But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen that his name rose in the religious world. He preached every year for the London Missionary Society, and when he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission Reports there was always a crowd.

CHAPTER III1843-1851AFTER THE BATTLE—DALKEITH—EMBASSIES—EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE—DEATH OF JOHN MACINTOSH.That he should have chosen Dalkeith when he had the chance of going to Edinburgh has been remarked as strange. ‘I prefer,’ he said in explanation, ‘a country parish to a town, because the fever and excitement and the kind of work on Sabbath days and week days in Edinburgh would do me much harm bodily and spiritually.’ This is not enough, and indeed, though he did not state them, he confessed that he had other reasons. As the citadel of a glorying dissent, Edinburgh would scarcely be inviting to a man of his temperament. And it is clear that his mind had been stirred to its depths by the secession. At Dalkeith he would have leisure for reading and reflection, and yet be close to the headquarters of the Church.Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc that had been made by the Disruption, than the ministerof Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings as to the side which he had taken in the great controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the Establishment might have been in the end more irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained within. He veered between angry lamentation over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, and aversion from the faults of the new zealots—’vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. At the same time he perceived only too well what was good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in full sympathy with them in their devotion to the evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. He saw the seceders popular and victorious,—theirs allthe energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,—her ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more to their stipends than their work. Among other instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’ On the question of policy it is probable that he changed his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How was the National Church to be revived? The aristocracy had but one thing in view—the landed interest; Peelwas a trimmer; there was nothing in mere numbers. What was wanted was aninner workin the hearts of clergy and people. ‘If we were right in our souls,’ he wrote, ‘out of this root would spring the tree and fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living water.’ Two vows he took, one that he would devote himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among all who loved Christ.At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with the help of his congregation, which he developed into a society of Christian workers. He went about preaching in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got hung round with placards of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary, the minister showed that money would be better spent in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his days among his ‘brothers and sisters.’ There is a little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions of his tales. ‘On coming home this evening, I saw a number of boys following and speaking to, and apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close bythe wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild birds. I asked the boys who he was. “Eh! he’s a wee boy gaun’ aboot beggin’, wi’out faither or mither.”’ The minister took him to the manse, and consigned him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By and by ‘the door was opened, and in marched my poor boy, paraded in by Jessie,—a beautiful boy, clean as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful clean shirt, his hair combed and divided; and Jessie gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips; he looked round him in bewilderment. “There he is,” said Jessie; “I am sure ye’re in anither warld the night, my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore?” “No.” “What will ye dae noo?” “I dinna ken.” “Will ye gang awa’ and beg the night?” “If ye like.” “No,” said I, “be off to your bed and sleep.”’He was led to ponder the social as well as the religious problem presented by life in the slums. In the events of the year of revolution he took a keen interest. ‘The Chartists are put down,’ he remarked scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by no means end with the victory of the special constable. ‘Snug the joiner,’ he observed, ‘is a man as other men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered, which in rags shivers in the cold, while the “special” goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair,saying, “The scoundrels are put down.” We demand from them patience while starving—do we meet their demands for bread? Special! what hast thou done for thy brother? Ay—don’t stare at me or at thy baton—thy brother, I say! Hast thou ever troubled thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast about giving him a broken head?’ He rejected the remedies of the politicians—reform of taxation, high wages, the suffrage,—holding that the only cure lay ‘in the personal and regular communion of the better with the worse—man with man—until each Christian, like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be saved.’ Such was the spirit in which he toiled among the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod.He was no sooner settled in Dalkeith than he began to take part in the reparation of the ecclesiastical agencies that had been ruined by the Disruption. Of these the chief was in his eyes the India Mission. In 1844 he went, as one of a deputation, to the north of Scotland, in order to organise societies for the furtherance of female education in Hindostan. This was the first of a long series of religious embassies which compassed the round earth. Thirty associations were formed, but he returned from the tour lamenting the general apathy.The year following he was charged, along with his unclethe minister of Morven, and another, with a more distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the Secession had been felt; shrieks ofVeto, Cæsar, Headship, mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods. The deputies were for British North America; their business was to preach, and to explain the action of the constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of Morven? And such an expedition would peculiarly suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign countries, and having an object that excited his religious enthusiasm.On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool in June) he found in one of the berths a dying man, and conversed with him about the state of his soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of hissincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship reached its destination, the passengers drank the health of the deputies with three times three.At Washington he had an interview with the President, Mr. Polk,—’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought, ‘shall I now see the strange sight—a brother-man for sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’ Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its most mitigated form, and yet the impression made upon him ‘byseeinginstead of hearing was overwhelmingly bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime—withouttheir consent—slaves for life—slaves from childhood;—it was enough.’ During the American war he declared that the British sympathy for the South was to him an inscrutable mystery.In the States he was not slow to pick up hints for his future work from Sunday School Unions and Mission Boards; but that the customs of a foreign country are not to be inferred from a surface glance, he learned by an incident which he never forgot. He had mounted the box of a coach, and was surprised to find the driver seated at his left hand. ‘Just as I had noted the great fact that “all drivers in America sit on the left side of the box,” I thought I would ask what was gained by this. “Why, I guess,” replied Jonathan, “I can’t help it;I’m left-handed.”’In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he was busy taking in the primeval forest—the tufted heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the chop-chop-chop of the pioneer’s axe in the weird silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be anEnglishman, and would quiz them about their savage language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same as in the old land. ‘This angry spirit of Churchism,’ he says, ‘which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland, thunders at the door of every shanty in the backwoods.’ For himself, in explaining the Church question, he avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who (unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings confessed that he could not find fault with one expression. Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed, in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment. At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country; on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service in the open air. ‘The tent,’ writes Norman, ‘was on a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld the most touching and magnificent sight. There were (in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about four thousand people here assembled! John had finished a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head bare at the head of the white communion table, and wasabout to exhort the communicants. There was on either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I entered the tent and looked around; I have seen grand and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or clime—as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the communicants, every head bent down to the white board, and watched the expressions of the weather-beaten, true Highland countenances around me, and remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness—as these and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came from the Lord’s Table, can you wonder that I hid my face, and “lifted up my voice and wept”? Oh that my father had been with us! what a welcome he would have received!’ At various spots he met men from Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod found a woman who, the moment he entered her house, burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife’ssister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the exiles! In one place two old elders put their arms about Norman’s neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new sources of emotion; it was more that at the age of thirty-three he could say: ‘I have had peeps into real Canadian life: I have seen the true Indians in their encampment; I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men with their canoes and the North-westers on their way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I have been shaken to atoms over “corduroy” roads, and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to defend my poor and calumniated Church from many aspersions.’During this visit there came to him rumours of a movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Conference, held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever spent on earth. ‘What a prayer was that of Octavius Winslow’s! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the tears pour down my cheeks.’ There was developed in him a new love for his ministerial brethren. ‘I felt like aman who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and he had never seen them before.’ The Alliance was formed in August at the Freemasons’ Hall, London, in an assembly composed of a thousand representative Christians from America and the Colonies, and from almost every country in Europe. The project sprang from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference, a general conference once every lustrum in some European capital, reports from branches on events touching religious liberty: such were the methods by which these good men proposed to bring about the golden year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth, that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at least we are told. There was doubtless at first a powerful tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president, ‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not been presented to the eyes of God or man.... And is there not another class of eyes which may be said to be upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of yourmeeting much of their interests may be suspended. But, brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason to think that no such gathering as this would take place, and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10); we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are directed towards us.’ A few days later he told the Conference that he had been in the committee-room, and ‘he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when he said that the world’s interests and the interests of humanity were trembling in the balance.’ At a point in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects, ‘The respected speaker here paused, evidently overcome by his feelings.’ The orator ‘hoped brethren would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other subject but that which concerned religion and its great interests: but from his childhood he never could refrain from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed he was a perfect child.’ Did Norman cry,Hear, hear? On the contrary, he also would begreetin’. The time came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach. Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being amember of the business committee, a frequent chairman of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony; and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans, all united by the bond of a common religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another good thing he owed to the Alliance—the privilege of visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr. Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain progressive movements which had been reported from these countries. By the year 1847 he had seen the working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen his attachment to the Church of Scotland.How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental susceptibility. He came under the influence of his heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and holy man; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed ‘thou true man, poet of the backwoods.’ He was getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling, not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had becomeof the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tübingen, dying. After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge. There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists, and had assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He calls him his ‘dearest Norman,’ his ‘beloved Norman,’ whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss; speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest hours of his life, much mental development, and not a few faithful and well-timed warnings—a friend the thought of whom brightened his future. ‘Think of you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.’ When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for Tübingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty-four hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was two o’clock in the morning when he arrived in the town. He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid’s door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs. Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that he had received his relatives on their arrival with a strange coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst notenter his room without an invitation. Pondering this mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions, was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere the final victory of Christ was achieved? He sent a note into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his friend would see him. The answer was, ‘Come now.’ The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black hair with an ‘intense and painful lustre.’ With loving gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible voice said, ‘I am holding communion with God,’ and they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world, mentioned an hour at which he would be glad to have another meeting. So he was brought back completely to his old self. He had been mentally disturbed by his mother’s arrival, because, thinking that he might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he would sit of an evening ‘with closed eyes, and head drooping on his breast,’ listening in silence to old Scottish tunes—’Wandering Willie,’ ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest,’ ‘The Land o’ the Leal’; and, again, with an air of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of soon meeting Chalmers. ‘My spirit,’ wrote Norman, ‘felt no less than awed before him.’ The companionstook farewell of each other on the 11th of March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was dead.In July Macleod was inducted to the Barony Church, Glasgow. A month later he was married to Catherine Ann Macintosh, the sister of his friend.

1843-1851

AFTER THE BATTLE—DALKEITH—EMBASSIES—EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE—DEATH OF JOHN MACINTOSH.

That he should have chosen Dalkeith when he had the chance of going to Edinburgh has been remarked as strange. ‘I prefer,’ he said in explanation, ‘a country parish to a town, because the fever and excitement and the kind of work on Sabbath days and week days in Edinburgh would do me much harm bodily and spiritually.’ This is not enough, and indeed, though he did not state them, he confessed that he had other reasons. As the citadel of a glorying dissent, Edinburgh would scarcely be inviting to a man of his temperament. And it is clear that his mind had been stirred to its depths by the secession. At Dalkeith he would have leisure for reading and reflection, and yet be close to the headquarters of the Church.

Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc that had been made by the Disruption, than the ministerof Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings as to the side which he had taken in the great controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the Establishment might have been in the end more irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained within. He veered between angry lamentation over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, and aversion from the faults of the new zealots—’vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. At the same time he perceived only too well what was good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in full sympathy with them in their devotion to the evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. He saw the seceders popular and victorious,—theirs allthe energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,—her ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more to their stipends than their work. Among other instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’ On the question of policy it is probable that he changed his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How was the National Church to be revived? The aristocracy had but one thing in view—the landed interest; Peelwas a trimmer; there was nothing in mere numbers. What was wanted was aninner workin the hearts of clergy and people. ‘If we were right in our souls,’ he wrote, ‘out of this root would spring the tree and fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living water.’ Two vows he took, one that he would devote himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among all who loved Christ.

At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with the help of his congregation, which he developed into a society of Christian workers. He went about preaching in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got hung round with placards of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary, the minister showed that money would be better spent in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his days among his ‘brothers and sisters.’ There is a little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions of his tales. ‘On coming home this evening, I saw a number of boys following and speaking to, and apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close bythe wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild birds. I asked the boys who he was. “Eh! he’s a wee boy gaun’ aboot beggin’, wi’out faither or mither.”’ The minister took him to the manse, and consigned him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By and by ‘the door was opened, and in marched my poor boy, paraded in by Jessie,—a beautiful boy, clean as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful clean shirt, his hair combed and divided; and Jessie gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips; he looked round him in bewilderment. “There he is,” said Jessie; “I am sure ye’re in anither warld the night, my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore?” “No.” “What will ye dae noo?” “I dinna ken.” “Will ye gang awa’ and beg the night?” “If ye like.” “No,” said I, “be off to your bed and sleep.”’

He was led to ponder the social as well as the religious problem presented by life in the slums. In the events of the year of revolution he took a keen interest. ‘The Chartists are put down,’ he remarked scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by no means end with the victory of the special constable. ‘Snug the joiner,’ he observed, ‘is a man as other men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered, which in rags shivers in the cold, while the “special” goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair,saying, “The scoundrels are put down.” We demand from them patience while starving—do we meet their demands for bread? Special! what hast thou done for thy brother? Ay—don’t stare at me or at thy baton—thy brother, I say! Hast thou ever troubled thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast about giving him a broken head?’ He rejected the remedies of the politicians—reform of taxation, high wages, the suffrage,—holding that the only cure lay ‘in the personal and regular communion of the better with the worse—man with man—until each Christian, like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be saved.’ Such was the spirit in which he toiled among the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod.

He was no sooner settled in Dalkeith than he began to take part in the reparation of the ecclesiastical agencies that had been ruined by the Disruption. Of these the chief was in his eyes the India Mission. In 1844 he went, as one of a deputation, to the north of Scotland, in order to organise societies for the furtherance of female education in Hindostan. This was the first of a long series of religious embassies which compassed the round earth. Thirty associations were formed, but he returned from the tour lamenting the general apathy.

The year following he was charged, along with his unclethe minister of Morven, and another, with a more distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the Secession had been felt; shrieks ofVeto, Cæsar, Headship, mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods. The deputies were for British North America; their business was to preach, and to explain the action of the constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of Morven? And such an expedition would peculiarly suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign countries, and having an object that excited his religious enthusiasm.

On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool in June) he found in one of the berths a dying man, and conversed with him about the state of his soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of hissincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship reached its destination, the passengers drank the health of the deputies with three times three.

At Washington he had an interview with the President, Mr. Polk,—’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought, ‘shall I now see the strange sight—a brother-man for sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’ Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its most mitigated form, and yet the impression made upon him ‘byseeinginstead of hearing was overwhelmingly bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime—withouttheir consent—slaves for life—slaves from childhood;—it was enough.’ During the American war he declared that the British sympathy for the South was to him an inscrutable mystery.

In the States he was not slow to pick up hints for his future work from Sunday School Unions and Mission Boards; but that the customs of a foreign country are not to be inferred from a surface glance, he learned by an incident which he never forgot. He had mounted the box of a coach, and was surprised to find the driver seated at his left hand. ‘Just as I had noted the great fact that “all drivers in America sit on the left side of the box,” I thought I would ask what was gained by this. “Why, I guess,” replied Jonathan, “I can’t help it;I’m left-handed.”’

In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he was busy taking in the primeval forest—the tufted heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the chop-chop-chop of the pioneer’s axe in the weird silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be anEnglishman, and would quiz them about their savage language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same as in the old land. ‘This angry spirit of Churchism,’ he says, ‘which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland, thunders at the door of every shanty in the backwoods.’ For himself, in explaining the Church question, he avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who (unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings confessed that he could not find fault with one expression. Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed, in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment. At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country; on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service in the open air. ‘The tent,’ writes Norman, ‘was on a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld the most touching and magnificent sight. There were (in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about four thousand people here assembled! John had finished a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head bare at the head of the white communion table, and wasabout to exhort the communicants. There was on either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I entered the tent and looked around; I have seen grand and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or clime—as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the communicants, every head bent down to the white board, and watched the expressions of the weather-beaten, true Highland countenances around me, and remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness—as these and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came from the Lord’s Table, can you wonder that I hid my face, and “lifted up my voice and wept”? Oh that my father had been with us! what a welcome he would have received!’ At various spots he met men from Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod found a woman who, the moment he entered her house, burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife’ssister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the exiles! In one place two old elders put their arms about Norman’s neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new sources of emotion; it was more that at the age of thirty-three he could say: ‘I have had peeps into real Canadian life: I have seen the true Indians in their encampment; I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men with their canoes and the North-westers on their way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I have been shaken to atoms over “corduroy” roads, and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to defend my poor and calumniated Church from many aspersions.’

During this visit there came to him rumours of a movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Conference, held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever spent on earth. ‘What a prayer was that of Octavius Winslow’s! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the tears pour down my cheeks.’ There was developed in him a new love for his ministerial brethren. ‘I felt like aman who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and he had never seen them before.’ The Alliance was formed in August at the Freemasons’ Hall, London, in an assembly composed of a thousand representative Christians from America and the Colonies, and from almost every country in Europe. The project sprang from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference, a general conference once every lustrum in some European capital, reports from branches on events touching religious liberty: such were the methods by which these good men proposed to bring about the golden year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth, that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at least we are told. There was doubtless at first a powerful tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president, ‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not been presented to the eyes of God or man.... And is there not another class of eyes which may be said to be upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of yourmeeting much of their interests may be suspended. But, brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason to think that no such gathering as this would take place, and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10); we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are directed towards us.’ A few days later he told the Conference that he had been in the committee-room, and ‘he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when he said that the world’s interests and the interests of humanity were trembling in the balance.’ At a point in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects, ‘The respected speaker here paused, evidently overcome by his feelings.’ The orator ‘hoped brethren would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other subject but that which concerned religion and its great interests: but from his childhood he never could refrain from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed he was a perfect child.’ Did Norman cry,Hear, hear? On the contrary, he also would begreetin’. The time came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach. Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being amember of the business committee, a frequent chairman of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony; and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans, all united by the bond of a common religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another good thing he owed to the Alliance—the privilege of visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr. Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain progressive movements which had been reported from these countries. By the year 1847 he had seen the working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen his attachment to the Church of Scotland.

How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental susceptibility. He came under the influence of his heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and holy man; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed ‘thou true man, poet of the backwoods.’ He was getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling, not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had becomeof the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tübingen, dying. After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge. There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists, and had assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He calls him his ‘dearest Norman,’ his ‘beloved Norman,’ whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss; speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest hours of his life, much mental development, and not a few faithful and well-timed warnings—a friend the thought of whom brightened his future. ‘Think of you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.’ When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for Tübingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty-four hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was two o’clock in the morning when he arrived in the town. He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid’s door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs. Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that he had received his relatives on their arrival with a strange coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst notenter his room without an invitation. Pondering this mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions, was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere the final victory of Christ was achieved? He sent a note into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his friend would see him. The answer was, ‘Come now.’ The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black hair with an ‘intense and painful lustre.’ With loving gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible voice said, ‘I am holding communion with God,’ and they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world, mentioned an hour at which he would be glad to have another meeting. So he was brought back completely to his old self. He had been mentally disturbed by his mother’s arrival, because, thinking that he might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he would sit of an evening ‘with closed eyes, and head drooping on his breast,’ listening in silence to old Scottish tunes—’Wandering Willie,’ ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest,’ ‘The Land o’ the Leal’; and, again, with an air of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of soon meeting Chalmers. ‘My spirit,’ wrote Norman, ‘felt no less than awed before him.’ The companionstook farewell of each other on the 11th of March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was dead.

In July Macleod was inducted to the Barony Church, Glasgow. A month later he was married to Catherine Ann Macintosh, the sister of his friend.

CHAPTER IV1851-1860THE BARONY PARISH—MACLEOD AS PASTOR—AS PREACHER—HIS SYMPATHY—POSITION IN THE CITY.The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father—was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasmwent far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears.Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.The spirit of Macleod’s ministry is partly to be traced to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early master in the neighbouring parish of St. John’s musthave been in his mind. These two pastors were equal in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisation of the masses, equal in their capacity for work. But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the people like a statesman, and had his principles and plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual, and thought most of a moral change. Of the social question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy. Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart; which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers, however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony.Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park, Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration,with something even of romance, when he heard the first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. ‘People talk,’ he wrote, ‘of early morning in the country, with bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day—the type of a new era. I feel these are awake with me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on—to fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work, and fulfil my grand and glorious end.’ And he thought, with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability, many working men shunned the churches, and looked askance at ‘the lads in black.’ Ah! if they only knew, thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour. He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But how was he to reach the masses scattered through his enormous cure? In his hands the Barony congregation became what every muster of converts was in the days of the apostles,—a society for Christian work. Worship, meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacraments, is a mediæval invention. Norman Macleod held that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good actions. Indeed, for æsthetic and ceremonial (since there must be forms) he had too little care. Of theBarony Church a certain noble lord remarked, ‘I have seen one uglier’; and once Macleod had to admonish the congregation in these terms: ‘Scripture commands us to sing, notgrunt; but if you are so constituted that it is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is best to be silent.’ But here were people who met to engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good advice. ‘A Christian congregation,’ he says, ‘is a body of Christians who are associated not merely to receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public worship, but also “to consider one another and to provoke to love and good works,” and as a society to do good to all as they have opportunity.... The society of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations or congregations like an army acting through its different regiments, is the grand social system which Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’Having made himself personally acquainted with his congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, educational, and social needs of the parish should be met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary network. By means of meetings, for which given agents were responsible, the minister came in contact with his parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerousSunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he furnished both pastors and congregations. In the first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually raised from the congregation, which was one of the poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-buildings for thousands of children; with evening classes for adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at their A B C. He started congregational savings banks, and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment-rooms attractive with books and amusements; in which things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer.The best organisation would have been of little avail but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by his personal influence, which was at once paternal and commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass, no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptinessof churches; and the foolishness of preaching is obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have no creed at all. There would be no outcry against preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found themselves as it were in a different world, so changed was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself was in the pulpit—bearded, bronzed, and dilated to agiant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, and here and there you might see some flagging of attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience bound as with a spell; his utterance waxed rapid and passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in building the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold. Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of Macleod’s that ‘it was all true and very moving’—thene plus ultraof praise—and that he did not know ‘the manin the Church of England who could have preached such a sermon.’ ‘The greatest and most convincing preacher I ever heard,’ is the confession of Sir Arthur Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching was ‘the perfection of art without art,’ ‘he spoke as a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower order,’ his effectiveness was due to ‘truth and honesty, guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed in manly speech face to face.’ His power in the pulpit seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass into the church. It was no uncommon thing for gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce; and they must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had himself rigged out in ‘the cast-off working dress of a coach-builder—a dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.’ ‘I stood,’ he says, ‘waiting among the crowd of poor men and women that were shivering at the gate, biding the time. Many of these women were very old and very frail.... Poor souls! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and his sayings. I conversed with several working men who had attended all the series from the first, three or four years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotchwho attended. He said, “All nations go and hear the Doctor.” ... “A’body likes the Doctor,” said another. One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said “he kent great lots o’ folk that’s been blessed by the Doctor, baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that wrought wi’ me, o’ the name o’ Boyd, and he came ae nicht out o’ curiosity, and he was convertit afore he raise from his seat, and he’s a staunch Protestant to this day, every bit o’ him, though his father and mother, and a’ his folks, are sair against him for’t.”’ None of the cushions or books were removed from the seats, and the witness says that the decorum was as good as at the regular service. ‘In reference to the mother and grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand stand for character, which made the poor man next to me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor’s remarks on the subject been delivered from a platform, they would have elicited thunders of applause.’ If one realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons, commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses. ‘Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to understand, the misery which his loss has created in the paternal home! He is bringing down the grey hairs of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him, and loved him ere he could know of the existence and unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest dayor night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.’Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats: of a horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat, he says, ‘I wish he could have known how much I pitied him’; and of the camel, ‘The expression of his soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek submission and patient endurance ever since travelling began in these deserts. The poor “djemel” bends his neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be redressed by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftesbury.’ In the scene of man’s life his spirit eagerly responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be, never recovering from the surprises of existence. So, with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both human and religious, he sometimes found himself in strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight,surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence with the working folk was that he felt no difference from their social position, but spoke to them on the ground of common humanity, without affected familiarity or priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience was that the lower and the upper classes were very much alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.[1]The preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ‘O sickness, pain, and death! what republican levellers are these of us all!’[2]There is a zeal for the people, a worship of humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory. The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of the suffering race. Macleod’s sympathy was for the individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’sexperience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner had excused himself to his wife as follows: ‘Dinna be ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief from the parish, and I didna like to beg; but I kent if I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow and orphans.’ Always, when Macleod told that story, he went into an ecstasy, shouting, ‘That man was a hero!’Considering the moral and material plight of the masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At Dalkeith he had writtenA Plea for Temperance, in which, while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating the working classes from the charge of drunkenness.The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying grace!For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general development of Christian life. He was not apt to quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like the mother of ‘wee Davie,’ in ‘actsout ofParliament,’ Yet he could exclaim, ‘O selfish pride! O society, thou tyrant!’ and when his foot was on his native heath he was a regular Radical.‘You don’t mean to say that you would turn away those people?’ asked Kate with astonishment.‘What people do you mean?’ inquired M’Dougall.‘I mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan—your small tenants there!’‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, whereI have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.‘Because in the colonies they can always better their condition by industry.’‘But why not help them to better their condition at home? why not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour?’‘Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and after all it would not pay,’ replied M’Dougall....‘But surely, surely,’ she continued, ‘money is not the chief end of man.... I can’t argue’ (Kate goes on), ‘but my whole soul tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god Money is an idolatry that must perish; that the only way for a man truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M’Donald, I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the people.’‘Might I ask your text, fair preacher?’ inquired M’Dougall, with an admiring smile.‘Why,’ said Kate, ‘the text is the only thing about it I am certain would be good; and the one I would choose rings in my ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their very selves.’‘But the text, the text, my lady?’‘My text would be,’ said Kate, ‘“Is not a man better than a sheep?”’[3]The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting the lines—‘From the dim shieling on the misty islandMountains divide us, and a world of seas,But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no indictment of the social structure; there was nothing for it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of the boarding-out system; but it was for those whom legal relief might not reach that his heart bled. ‘There is many a desolate cry of pain,’ he wrote, ‘smothered within the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon.’ To aid the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest objects that could engage the attention of good men;—one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, from New York to Elberfelt; but vain was his dream of building a bridge between east and west by charity,—the wary remorse and discount of the Vandals.The working men of Glasgow more than once testified in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and gold they had none, they said, but they would retain for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, ‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it was the same. Free Church people and people of all Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me; cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets, asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time asurreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His name was oftener heard in common talk than that of any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’ Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom he did not know. Thinking that they might be new adherents, he went to the house, which was up three flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it would never dae to riskNorman.’[4]There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5]‘As for sadness and gloom,’ hesays somewhere, ‘in acceptingallthings from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see—— drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were neverwritten, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. ‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, andvice versâ: some avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod not only attended to all departments of a minister’s work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it implied service to the Church or the community. Early in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiasticalbarriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the repeal of the theological tests for university professors. But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen that his name rose in the religious world. He preached every year for the London Missionary Society, and when he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission Reports there was always a crowd.

1851-1860

THE BARONY PARISH—MACLEOD AS PASTOR—AS PREACHER—HIS SYMPATHY—POSITION IN THE CITY.

The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father—was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasmwent far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears.

Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.

The spirit of Macleod’s ministry is partly to be traced to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early master in the neighbouring parish of St. John’s musthave been in his mind. These two pastors were equal in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisation of the masses, equal in their capacity for work. But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the people like a statesman, and had his principles and plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual, and thought most of a moral change. Of the social question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy. Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart; which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers, however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony.

Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park, Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration,with something even of romance, when he heard the first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. ‘People talk,’ he wrote, ‘of early morning in the country, with bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day—the type of a new era. I feel these are awake with me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on—to fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work, and fulfil my grand and glorious end.’ And he thought, with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability, many working men shunned the churches, and looked askance at ‘the lads in black.’ Ah! if they only knew, thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour. He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But how was he to reach the masses scattered through his enormous cure? In his hands the Barony congregation became what every muster of converts was in the days of the apostles,—a society for Christian work. Worship, meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacraments, is a mediæval invention. Norman Macleod held that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good actions. Indeed, for æsthetic and ceremonial (since there must be forms) he had too little care. Of theBarony Church a certain noble lord remarked, ‘I have seen one uglier’; and once Macleod had to admonish the congregation in these terms: ‘Scripture commands us to sing, notgrunt; but if you are so constituted that it is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is best to be silent.’ But here were people who met to engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good advice. ‘A Christian congregation,’ he says, ‘is a body of Christians who are associated not merely to receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public worship, but also “to consider one another and to provoke to love and good works,” and as a society to do good to all as they have opportunity.... The society of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations or congregations like an army acting through its different regiments, is the grand social system which Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’

Having made himself personally acquainted with his congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, educational, and social needs of the parish should be met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary network. By means of meetings, for which given agents were responsible, the minister came in contact with his parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerousSunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he furnished both pastors and congregations. In the first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually raised from the congregation, which was one of the poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-buildings for thousands of children; with evening classes for adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at their A B C. He started congregational savings banks, and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment-rooms attractive with books and amusements; in which things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer.

The best organisation would have been of little avail but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by his personal influence, which was at once paternal and commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass, no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptinessof churches; and the foolishness of preaching is obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have no creed at all. There would be no outcry against preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found themselves as it were in a different world, so changed was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself was in the pulpit—bearded, bronzed, and dilated to agiant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, and here and there you might see some flagging of attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience bound as with a spell; his utterance waxed rapid and passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in building the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold. Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of Macleod’s that ‘it was all true and very moving’—thene plus ultraof praise—and that he did not know ‘the manin the Church of England who could have preached such a sermon.’ ‘The greatest and most convincing preacher I ever heard,’ is the confession of Sir Arthur Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching was ‘the perfection of art without art,’ ‘he spoke as a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower order,’ his effectiveness was due to ‘truth and honesty, guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed in manly speech face to face.’ His power in the pulpit seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass into the church. It was no uncommon thing for gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce; and they must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had himself rigged out in ‘the cast-off working dress of a coach-builder—a dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.’ ‘I stood,’ he says, ‘waiting among the crowd of poor men and women that were shivering at the gate, biding the time. Many of these women were very old and very frail.... Poor souls! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and his sayings. I conversed with several working men who had attended all the series from the first, three or four years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotchwho attended. He said, “All nations go and hear the Doctor.” ... “A’body likes the Doctor,” said another. One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said “he kent great lots o’ folk that’s been blessed by the Doctor, baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that wrought wi’ me, o’ the name o’ Boyd, and he came ae nicht out o’ curiosity, and he was convertit afore he raise from his seat, and he’s a staunch Protestant to this day, every bit o’ him, though his father and mother, and a’ his folks, are sair against him for’t.”’ None of the cushions or books were removed from the seats, and the witness says that the decorum was as good as at the regular service. ‘In reference to the mother and grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand stand for character, which made the poor man next to me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor’s remarks on the subject been delivered from a platform, they would have elicited thunders of applause.’ If one realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons, commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses. ‘Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to understand, the misery which his loss has created in the paternal home! He is bringing down the grey hairs of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him, and loved him ere he could know of the existence and unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest dayor night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.’

Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats: of a horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat, he says, ‘I wish he could have known how much I pitied him’; and of the camel, ‘The expression of his soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek submission and patient endurance ever since travelling began in these deserts. The poor “djemel” bends his neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be redressed by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftesbury.’ In the scene of man’s life his spirit eagerly responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be, never recovering from the surprises of existence. So, with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both human and religious, he sometimes found himself in strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight,surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence with the working folk was that he felt no difference from their social position, but spoke to them on the ground of common humanity, without affected familiarity or priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience was that the lower and the upper classes were very much alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.[1]The preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ‘O sickness, pain, and death! what republican levellers are these of us all!’[2]There is a zeal for the people, a worship of humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory. The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of the suffering race. Macleod’s sympathy was for the individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’sexperience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner had excused himself to his wife as follows: ‘Dinna be ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief from the parish, and I didna like to beg; but I kent if I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow and orphans.’ Always, when Macleod told that story, he went into an ecstasy, shouting, ‘That man was a hero!’

Considering the moral and material plight of the masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At Dalkeith he had writtenA Plea for Temperance, in which, while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating the working classes from the charge of drunkenness.The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying grace!

For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general development of Christian life. He was not apt to quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like the mother of ‘wee Davie,’ in ‘actsout ofParliament,’ Yet he could exclaim, ‘O selfish pride! O society, thou tyrant!’ and when his foot was on his native heath he was a regular Radical.

‘You don’t mean to say that you would turn away those people?’ asked Kate with astonishment.‘What people do you mean?’ inquired M’Dougall.‘I mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan—your small tenants there!’‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, whereI have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.‘Because in the colonies they can always better their condition by industry.’‘But why not help them to better their condition at home? why not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour?’‘Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and after all it would not pay,’ replied M’Dougall....‘But surely, surely,’ she continued, ‘money is not the chief end of man.... I can’t argue’ (Kate goes on), ‘but my whole soul tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god Money is an idolatry that must perish; that the only way for a man truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M’Donald, I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the people.’‘Might I ask your text, fair preacher?’ inquired M’Dougall, with an admiring smile.‘Why,’ said Kate, ‘the text is the only thing about it I am certain would be good; and the one I would choose rings in my ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their very selves.’‘But the text, the text, my lady?’‘My text would be,’ said Kate, ‘“Is not a man better than a sheep?”’[3]

‘You don’t mean to say that you would turn away those people?’ asked Kate with astonishment.

‘What people do you mean?’ inquired M’Dougall.

‘I mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan—your small tenants there!’

‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’

‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’

‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, whereI have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’

‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.

‘Because in the colonies they can always better their condition by industry.’

‘But why not help them to better their condition at home? why not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour?’

‘Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and after all it would not pay,’ replied M’Dougall....

‘But surely, surely,’ she continued, ‘money is not the chief end of man.... I can’t argue’ (Kate goes on), ‘but my whole soul tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god Money is an idolatry that must perish; that the only way for a man truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M’Donald, I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the people.’

‘Might I ask your text, fair preacher?’ inquired M’Dougall, with an admiring smile.

‘Why,’ said Kate, ‘the text is the only thing about it I am certain would be good; and the one I would choose rings in my ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their very selves.’

‘But the text, the text, my lady?’

‘My text would be,’ said Kate, ‘“Is not a man better than a sheep?”’[3]

The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting the lines—

‘From the dim shieling on the misty islandMountains divide us, and a world of seas,

But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’

Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no indictment of the social structure; there was nothing for it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of the boarding-out system; but it was for those whom legal relief might not reach that his heart bled. ‘There is many a desolate cry of pain,’ he wrote, ‘smothered within the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon.’ To aid the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest objects that could engage the attention of good men;—one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, from New York to Elberfelt; but vain was his dream of building a bridge between east and west by charity,—the wary remorse and discount of the Vandals.

The working men of Glasgow more than once testified in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and gold they had none, they said, but they would retain for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, ‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it was the same. Free Church people and people of all Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me; cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets, asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time asurreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His name was oftener heard in common talk than that of any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’ Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom he did not know. Thinking that they might be new adherents, he went to the house, which was up three flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it would never dae to riskNorman.’[4]

There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5]‘As for sadness and gloom,’ hesays somewhere, ‘in acceptingallthings from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see—— drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were neverwritten, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?

‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. ‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, andvice versâ: some avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod not only attended to all departments of a minister’s work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it implied service to the Church or the community. Early in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiasticalbarriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the repeal of the theological tests for university professors. But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen that his name rose in the religious world. He preached every year for the London Missionary Society, and when he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission Reports there was always a crowd.

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