CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VEDITOR AND AUTHORPursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, theEdinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described as a miniature plan or first sketch ofGood Words. Its circulation did not exceed five thousand, but ‘the blue magazine,’ as it was called, was no mean agent in the revival of the drooping Church. While yet minister of Dalkeith he was frequently seen about the office of the publishers, Messrs. Paton & Ritchie, in George Street, Edinburgh; but after his removal to Glasgow the editorial instructions were given in correspondence with the head printer, Mr. J. C. Erskine. That gentleman writes: ‘Usually he was behind time, and I had consequently to poke him up about the middle of each month. But we were always on the best of terms, and I always felt honoured as well as delighted in being associated with so lovable a man and having the privilege of his acquaintance.’ These are some of the letters, in whole or part:—(1) Erskine,—I have worn crape for two days for you, having made up my mind that you were out of print, or in Death’sIndexExpurgatorius. What has become of you? Well, the concern must pay,butthe proof-sheet must be corrected or the whole article cancelled, as IMUSTnot give the facts from a private letter inthatstyle. Delay the publication if you like, but put it right, or let the concern of P. & R. perish!(2) Erskine,—You know what it is to be done up in sheets, with a second volume in the Press. Have patience! Ibindmyself to be ready by the 20th, though at present I am a blank sheet.(3) [September 1851.] Excellent Erskine, Prince of Printers,—this is to intimate my intention of being in Edinburgh on Monday, and visiting your den about twelve, or so, when we shall complete all arrangements. I think I am in excellent time, and am backing slowly into the old rails, when you need rail no more! The matrimonial switch gives a wrong turn. The number may be easily discovered which marksyourmarriage,—it is full of blunders of the Press! a perfecttypeof your hallucination!—N. McL.(4) [Monday, 11a.m., September 23, 1851.] I shall never transgress more if the firm forgive me, and the demons do not seize me and hotpress me. As a married man, Erskine, you should know something of the difficulties married men have experienced, since the days of the Patriarch of Uz to those of Paton & Ritchie, from wives. I will send off more MS. by post in the afternoon, and I shall see you on Monday between one and two. Don’t throw vitriol on me. Keep the printers off!The next refers to the birth of his first child:(5) My first volume is out on Friday—bound in calf-skin, with cloth-guilton the back and front, and very small type—less than a 64mo. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, however, complain of the delivery by the trade as yet! I send you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, Erskine.(6) Master Erskine!—Youshould have duly informed the editor of theChristian Magazinethat you had no sermon, seeing that aparson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was under the impression that it was ‘all right’ until, coming up tonight from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you—1. A MS. sermon—I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Interpreter in the printing-office can; 2. A printed sermon for apatchin case you are too late. If you print the MS. you mustnotput in the name—just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is imperfect—very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make up by extracts from the printed sermon.‘O Erskine, Erskine!Had I but served my Parish as I have my Printer,It would not thus have left me in my misery!’The following reply was sent to an invitation to the editor to grace a social meeting of the workers in the printing-office of Messrs. Paton & Ritchie:—(7) [B.’s Refreshment Rooms, 10th January 1853.] My dear Messrs. P. & R.,—I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I cannot afford—so hard are my Publishers—to go in January. Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend’s Paste—he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to cool the poor demons!—Yours truly, Author of ‘A Plea for Temperance.’TheChristian Magazinegave way toGood Words, which was started in 1860. His assumption of the editorship proved to be the most important circumstancein Macleod’s career. Religious papers were the worst in existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theological malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age.Good Words, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were,Good Wordswas successful from the first, reaching in two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on the part of the awful good. The stories were positively secular! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous men he was to be crushed. And what could be said for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian parents should not allow their children to handle on the Lord’s day a magazine that made so much of pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Privateremonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by religious societies; theRecord, an English champion of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack; and the General Assembly of the Free Church was overtured to sit uponGood Words, which it did, much to the increase of our circulation. The editor held his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out ‘every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.’ Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope’s, in which the pious characters were all made odious, he paid an indemnity of £500. Art and morals alike may sneer, but Macleod’s compromise was well considered and justified in the result. The storm blew over, and another step was gained for religious freedom.Good Wordscarried the name of Norman Macleod over the English-speaking world, and had a vogue in the remotest Hebrides. Principal Tulloch once met in the mountains a man who, on learning the traveller’s name, said, ‘I know you fromGood Words.’ The numbers were so cherished that households generally had them bound, and to this day the early volumes are held precious in many a Scottish home. The sight of one of the old familiar pictures still sends a thrill through thousands, recalling the quiet Sabbaths of their childhood, dear old rooms, and faces they shall see no more.’Before he became the editor ofGood Words, Macleod had published little that was of interest outside religiouscircles.The Earnest Student, doubtless, has considerable merit as a biography, and is written with a tender grace; but it suffers from the inherent unfitness of the subject for extended treatment,—an uneventful life and a character wanting in colour. To say that it deserved a place beside theLife of M’Cheyne, to which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise. In the mass of his contributions toGood Wordsthere is, of course, much that need not be criticised. The sermons put one in mind of the student who, being asked why he was not going in for the ministry, answered, ‘I don’t want to spoil my style.’ His records of travel were eagerly read when they appeared, having a certain interest from the person of the adventurer, with humorous and graphic touches; but to give permanence of charm to the account of voyages and journeys requires all the arts of a Kinglake or a Stevenson.Enough remains to entitle Norman Macleod to a certain recognition in Scottish letters. Among the ‘Character Sketches’ there are some striking portraits—Mr. Joseph Walker, for instance, the highly respectable man, who never drank, never cheated, never lied, and yet ‘could do a very sneaking, mean thing.’ That is a subtle study, vigorously composed. As a writer of fiction it is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religiousaim, but that should be no offence in days when the most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for the height of human perfection and setting up as its reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero of his first attempt—The Old Lieutenant and his Son. Ned is to be a sailor and an exemplary Christian. Fall he does indeed, but not very far, and we know for sure that the author will set him up again at once, and higher than ever, on the plane of paragons. A sea-captain may be a good and pious man, but if, like Ned, he has chosen his profession at the cost of a mother’s tears, driven by the need of adventure—‘God help me save I take my partOf danger on the roaring sea:A devil rises in my heartFar worse than any death to me’—there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod’s usual method, however, is to take some unregeneratecharacter—a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express ecclesiastic—and reform him, not by religious admonition, but by living influences that seize upon the better feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the affections. Thus inBilly Buttonsthe captain and crew are humanised by the accident of having upon their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made another being by his wife’s cry over the little coffin:—’O Willie, forgi’e me, for it’s no’ ma pairt to speak, but I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just agree wi’ me that we’ll gi’e oor hearts noo and for ever to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o’ wee Davie’; Jock Hall, the outcast inThe Starling, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries,A man’s a man for a’ that, drives the lesson home, ‘And yearea man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement.The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaboratedecline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions ofGood Wordshe could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.The Old Lieutenant, begun inGood Wordsbefore he knew it was to be a story, and continued without sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, and loaded with extraneous matter; but the elder Fleming is like one of Thackeray’s men, and, of the domestics of the good old days when the social bond was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby? When Ned was about to leave home for his first voyage, ‘no one saw the tears which filled her large eyes, or heard her blowing her little nose half the night.’ After Ned’s marriage, his father, inviting the young couple to visit the old home, says simply, ‘I think that Babby will expect it.’ Babby has a tongue in her head, and is never so eloquent as when she rails at the new minister. Under the old one she had felt many a time ‘jist mad at hersel’ that she wasna a better woman.’ ‘But this chield Dalrymple that’s cam’ among us! Hech, sirs! what a round black crappit heid he has, like a bull-dog’s, and a body round and fat like a black pudding; and thecratur gangs struttin’ aboot wi’ his umbrella under his oxter, crawin’ like a midden cock, wha but him, keep us a’! an’ pittin’ his neb into every ane’s brose wi’ his impudence. And syne he rages and rampages in the poopit, wi’ the gowk’s spittle in his mouth, flytin’ on folk, and abusin’ them for a’ that’s bad, till my nerves rise, and I could jist cry oot, if it wasna for shame, “Haud yer tongue, ye spitefu’ cratur!” And again,—“Eh, I was glad ye werena married by Dalrymple! He routs in the poopit like a bull, and when the body’s crackin’ wi’ ye, he cheeps, cheeps like a chirted puddock.” “A what?” asked Kate. “A squeezed tade!” replied Babby; “d’ye no’ ken yer ain lang’age? And as for his sermons, they’re jist like a dog’s tail, the langer the sma’er.”’ If Ned is partly made to order, the crew are real old salts. Their conversation finally recalls Flint’s buccaneers, as when one (a milder Israel Hands) remarks, ‘But what, suppose I makes up my mind, do you see, to go ahead, and says, as it were, says I, I’ll not pray, nor read the Bible, nor give up my grog, nor anything else, nor be a saint, but a sinner, and sail when I like, and where I like, and be my own captain—eh?’Macleod’s best effort in fiction isThe Starling. Art demands some abatement of the happy close; there is didactic and explanatory matter that might well be spared; and the episode of the quack is an astounding excrescence. But it is a fine and touching story, andshows that the author possessed the distinctive power of a novelist. The starling was the pet of a little boy called Charlie. It could say, ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ and ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and whistle a few bars of the song, ‘Wha’ll be king but Charlie?’ To feed the bird and hear it speak and sing was the bairn’s delight. He was the only child of his parents, a pious and happy couple, the wife young, the husband a retired sergeant of the army, back at his old trade of shoemaker. The boy died, and there was the bird still repeating its remarks and tunes, and daily becoming dearer to the bereaved parents for Charlie’s sake. One Sunday morning, the starling being dowie, the sergeant hung out its cage at the door, for the sun was shining and the air sweet. Immediately the bird began to pour forth its budget; and a crowd of children gathered about the cage, and the street rang with their delight. Suddenly appeared the minister! at sight of whom the children fled, tumbling over one another and screaming in their fright, so that windows were thrown up, and mothers came flying into the rout, and there was a terrible ado. The Rev. Daniel Porteous, who was on his way to church, was scandalised at such a desecration of the Lord’s day. But what was his horror when he found that the prime offender was the sergeant, one of his elders? To the good couple, who looked up to Mr. Porteous with awe, and whose standing in the congregation was their greatest honour, the minister’s angerwas no light matter; the wife was in distraction, the husband grave and puzzled. The clerical decree was that the starling should be destroyed. This the sergeant, with all deference, refused, whereupon the minister went away, uttering vague threats. But as the poor wife seemed to think it their duty to obey, her husband said, ‘If you, that kens as weel as me a’ the bird has been to us, but speak the word, the deed will be allowed by me.’ And he took down the cage, consenting that the other should put an end to the bird. ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ exclaimed the starling. The wife thought that the killing should be the man’s work, but you see that she is beginning to waver, and when her husband lays his hand on the bird, saying, ‘Bid fareweel to your mistress, Charlie,’ she sprang forward with a cry, and prevented the deed. The sergeant was suspended from the eldership for contumacy, and shunned in the village like a leper. But it all comes right in the end. The motive of the tale would seem to verge on the ludicrous; a single false or strained note, and the whole thing were ruined; yet—call it literary skill or the unconscious art of perfect sympathy—the treatment is such that there is no improbability, and for the starling—as one might have felt when Marie Antoinette was in the cart, if it were a question whether some force might not come dashing up a back street to the rescue, so the reader feels when the fate of the bird is trembling in the balance. The minister with his scorn of the feelings andworship of church principles; his sister, who is like himself, only adding malice; the hypocritical elder who confesses, ‘There’s nane perfect, nane—the fac’ is, I’m no’ perfect masel’’; above all, the ne’er-do-weel, Jock Hall,—are depicted to the life.That Macleod’s fiction has particular merits none will deny, though the critic, making the most of the defects, might say that his stories fail as wholes. His best achievement is perhapsThe Reminiscences of a Highland Parish. This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the saying inThe Old Lieutenantabout the Highlands:—’In all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions which ghostlike float around its ancient keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness most affecting to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance and song.’ The earlier chapters, describing his grandfather’s patriarchal home and the open-air education of the boys and girls of the manse, form a complete and charming piece—the idyll of Fiunary. There are exciting adventures on the misty hill and in the furious Sound.What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark: his hand clutching the tiller—never speaking a word, and displeased if any other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land;while black sudden squalls, rushing down from the glens, struck the foaming billows in fury and smote the boat, threatening with a sharp scream to tear the tiny sail in tatters, break the mast, or blow out of the water the small dark speck that carried the manse treasures. There was one moment of peculiar difficulty and concentrated danger when the hand of a master was needed to save them. The boat has entered the worst part of the tideway. How ugly it looks! Three seas higher than the rest are coming; and you can see the squall blowing their white crests into smoke.[6]In a few minutes they will be down upon theRow. ‘Look out, Ruari!’ whispers the minister. ‘Stand by the sheets!’ cries Rory to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ‘Ready!’ is their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking; falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it; and these three seas appear now to rise like huge pyramids of green water, dashing their foam up into the sky. The first may be encountered and overcome, for the boat has good way upon her; but the others will rapidly follow up the thundering charge and shock, and a single false movement of the helm by a hair’s breadth will bring down a cataract like Niagara, that would shake a frigate, and sink theRowinto the depths like a stone. The boat meets the first wave, and rises dry over it. ‘Slack out the main-sheet, quick, and hold hard: there—steady!’ commands Rory, in a low, firm voice, and the huge back of the second wave is seen breaking to leeward. ‘Haul in, boys, and belay!’ Quick as lightning the little craft, having again gathered way, is up in the teeth of the wind and soon is spinning over the third topper, not a drop of water having come over the lee gunwale. ‘Nobly done, Rory!’ exclaims the minister, as he looks back to the fierce tideway which they have passed.But what one least forgets is the figure of the aged pastor taking farewell of his flock. Blind he was, andlost his bearings in the pulpit, till the beadle, old Rory, who had accompanied him from Skye fifty years before, went up and turned him round so as to face the congregation.And then stood up that venerable man, a Saul in height among the people, with his pure white hair falling back from his ample forehead over his shoulders. Few and loving and earnest were the words he spoke, amidst the silence of a passionately devoted people, which was broken only by their low sobs when he told them that they should see his face no more.All Morven is in the book,—scenery from the heather to the waves, life from the manse to the shieling, mixed with strange old legends and romantic tales.Was Norman Macleod a poet? Pre-eminently so, said Principal Shairp, relying on Wordsworth’s paradox. But that is a broken reed. Expression is the final cause of poetry,the form’s the thing. Now, from Macleod’s habit of misquoting the finest lines it would seem that his love for poetry was not a poet’s love. Still in his verse he could stumble on such rhythm as this—‘Ah, where is he now, in what mansion,In what star of the infinite sky?’and in the conclusion of a piece about a grey-headed father seeing his children dance, there is a gleam of real poetry—‘But he hears a far-off musicGuiding all the stately spheres,In his father-heart it echoes,So he claps his hands and cheers.’The hymn ‘Courage, brothers,’ has a telling ring, though only of rhetoric; and in a song that had the honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his cleverest achievement in rhyme is ‘Captain Frazer’s Nose,’ which we are told was written during violent pain.Oh, if ye’re at Dumbarton fair,Gang to the castle when ye’re there,And see a sicht baith rich and rare—The nose o’ Captain Frazer.Unless ye’re blin’ or unco glee’t,A mile awa’ ye’re sure to see’t,And nearer han’ a man gauns wi’tThat owns the nose o’ Frazer.It’s great in length, it’s great in girth,It’s great in grief, it’s great in mirth,Tho’ grown wi’ years, ‘twas great at birth—It’s greater far than Frazer!I’ve heard volcanoes loudly roarin’,And Niagara’s waters pourin’;But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin’Frae the nose o’ Captain Frazer!To wauken sleepin’ congregations,Or rouse to battle sleepin’ nations,Gae wa’ wi’ preachin’s and orations,And try the nose o’ Frazer!Gif French invaders try to lan’Upon our glorious British stran’,Fear nocht if ships are no’ at han’,But trust the nose o’ Frazer.Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roarAe Hielan’ sneeze! then never moreThey’ll daur the nose o’ Frazer.If that great Nose is ever deid,To bury it ye dinna need,Nae coffin made o’ wood or leed,Could hand the nose o’ Frazer.But let it stan’ itsel’ alane,Erect, like some big Druid stane,That a’ the warl’ may see its bane,‘In memory o’ Frazer!’CHAPTER VIBALMORALIf the cry for vital being—‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,More life, and fuller, that I want’—ever came from Norman Macleod, it was answered only too well; like a certain prayer for rain, which was interrupted by a ridiculous flood. Not only were his activities immense and various, but there was always an expenditure of corresponding emotion; nay, and what in the life of most men would have been simply an event was in his a crisis, what was a fleeting image with others was with him an indelible impression.He was summoned to the unique ordeal of ministering to the newly-widowed Queen.About twenty years before, during a visit to the West of Scotland, Her Majesty had for the first time attended a presbyterian service, on which occasion the preacher was Norman Macleod, the high priest of the Highlands and minister of St. Columba’s. His son first appeared at Balmoral in 1854. The invitation of the minister ofCrathie he had refused (having in hand a special service at the Barony), but was informed that it had been sent at the instance of Her Majesty. He preached without any notes a sermon never fully written out, which he had delivered fifteen times. The Queen wrote in her Journal: ‘We went to kirk as usual at twelve o’clock. The service was performed by the Rev. Norman M’Leod of Glasgow, son of Dr. M’Leod, and anything finer I never heard. The sermon, entirely extempore, was quite admirable: so simple, and yet so eloquent, and so beautifully argued and put. The text was from the account of the coming of Nicodemus to Christ by night, St. John, chapter iii. Mr. M’Leod showed in the sermon how wealltried to pleaseself, and live forthat, and in so doing found no rest. Christ had come not only to die for us, but to show us how we were to live. The second prayer was very touching: his allusions to us were so simple, saying after his mention of us, “Bless their children.” It gave me a lump in my throat, as also when he prayed for “the dying, the wounded, the widow, and the orphans.” Every one came back delighted: and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings! The servants and the Highlanders—all—were equally delighted.’In the evening he was sitting on a block of granite within the grounds, when he was aroused by a voice asking whether he was the clergyman who had preached that day, and found himself in the presence of the Queenand the Prince Consort. This was his first meeting with Her Majesty, and it was only for a moment.On the next occasion, two years later, he dined with the royal family, and afterwards had some conversation with the Queen; referring to which he says, ‘I never spoke my mind more frankly to anyone who was a stranger and not on an equal footing.’ This he did, because he perceived that Her Majesty was anxious to go to the root and reality of things, and abhorred all shams. His sermons had a peculiar fascination for the Queen. Of the recorded estimates of Macleod’s preaching, that of Victoria, if the warmest, is not the least discerning, and will be a telling memorial when the sermons are forgotten.The Prince Consort died at the close of the year 1861. In the May following, the Queen came to Balmoral. She sent for Norman Macleod. What a moment! How was he to deal with stricken Majesty—‘Her over all whose realms to their last isleThe shadow of a loss drew like eclipse,Darkening the world’?It was purely as a minister of religion that he had the honour of his sovereign’s command. The truth of God, as he believed it, the same message which a hundred times he had spoken to bereaved wives in the lowliest homes, that, and nothing other, would he carry to the royal widow, whom he should regard only as ‘an immortal being, a sister in humanity.’ Their first meeting was at divine service,and if the occasion was a trying one to the preacher, it was evidently exciting to the Queen. ‘Hurried to be ready,’ so runs the royal Journal, ‘for the service which Dr. Macleod was kindly going to perform. And a little before ten, I went down with Lenchen and Affie (Alice being still in bed unwell) to the dining-room, in which I had not yet been.... And never was service more beautifully, touchingly, simply, and tenderly performed.... The sermon, entirely extempore, was admirable, all upon affliction, God’s love, our Saviour’s sufferings, which God would not spare Him, the blessedness of suffering in bringing us nearer to our eternal home, where we should all be together, and where our dear ones were gone on before us.... The children and I were much affected on coming upstairs.’ After dinner he was summoned to the Queen’s room, and there, after some conversation about the Prince, he told about an old woman in the Barony who had lost her husband and several of her children, and who, on being asked how she had been able to bear her many sorrows, replied, ‘Whenhewas ta’en it made sic a hole in my heart that a’ other sorrows gang lichtly through.’ When Macleod recalled this period, he would express the whole burden of it in the solemn murmur, ‘That May.’ He has written: ‘God enabled me to speak in public and private to the Queen in such a way as seemed to me to be the truth, the truth in God’s sight—that which I believed she needed, though I felt it would be very trying to herspirit to receive it. And what fills me with deepest thanksgiving is that she has received it, and written to me such a kind, tender letter of thanks, which shall be treasured in my heart while I live.’In the spring of the following year he was for several days a guest at Windsor. ‘I walked,’ he says, ‘with Lady Augusta to the mausoleum to meet the Queen. She had the key and opened it herself, undoing the bolts; and alone we entered, and stood in solemn silence beside Marochetti’s beautiful statue of the Prince.’With the royal family he was both a social favourite and a trusted counsellor. To Prince Alfred, who seemed to be particularly attached to him, he once gave this advice,—that ‘if he did God’s will, good and able men would rally round him; otherwise flatterers would truckle to him and ruin him, while caring only for themselves.’ Both sons and daughters, when residing on the Continent, had flying visits from this chaplain. One Monday he left Glasgow for Windsor; thence, on royal errands, he proceeded to Bonn and Darmstadt; he was back at Windsor on the Friday: and on the Sunday following, it may be added, he preached three times in the Barony Church.The Prince of Wales (with whom he sometimes stayed at Abergeldie) once put in a plea for short sermons. Said the Doctor, ‘I am a Thomas à Becket and resent the interference of the State’; and sureenough, at the first opportunity, he preached for three-quarters of an hour, only so well that His Royal Highness wished it had been longer. To show how much he was thought of at Court, it may be mentioned that one day he was at Inverness to meet the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the next (which was a Saturday) at Balmoral, and for half of the following week with Prince Alfred at Holyrood. But here is the crowning instance: ‘The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her,Tam o’ ShanterandA man’s a man for a’ that, her favourite.’Her Majesty never forgot what Dr. Macleod had been to her in the time of her desolation, but extended her confidence, nor failed to take an interest in his personal cares. Some of the truest and most touching words ever written of Norman Macleod are from the pen of Queen Victoria.CHAPTER VII1860-1866TRAVELS—BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTSNo minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; butthe best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this inGood Words, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher ofGood Words, AlexanderStrahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has notrace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,—there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the DeadSea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again! For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,—the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generationof parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not in doctrine, liberal,—a man singularly forgotten. He took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the Highlands the word went,—’There’s life in the Auld Kirk yet.’Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were toMacaulay ‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks; but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business, there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he wouldgive, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert Lee was admirable—always just to the intellect, a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected to the Confession of Faithbecause, by the advance of thought and knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated; he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true, wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral estate summed up in the wordScotch, a significant word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist.I don’t pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church—that enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion—I mean Satan himself.’ Owing to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would not prayextempore, is like a bad novel—no dignity in the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion thanto imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has anything to do with Episcopacy.’Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements; but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very little freedom,’ he sighs.Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, areaccustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men—men who rose at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’ Wemust not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse themselves in any way,—all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment, whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ.The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of his argument, is powerful in its way, but it fails to show that the Lord’s day is a scriptural institution; the question as to what is lawful or unlawful being left to ‘the common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of Christians.’There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. Macleod awoke one morning and found himself infamous. Anathemas were hurled from almost every pulpit. Every newspaper and many magazines took up the question. Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. There were innumerable squibs,—the cleverest in proseThe Trial of Dr. Norman Macleod for the Murder of Moses’ Law, by David Macrae, in verse the lines by Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has brought to light, beginning—Have you heard of valiant Norman,Norman of the ample vest—How he fought the Ten CommandmentsIn the Synod of the West?Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’ he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With the common folk it was probably the wordDecaloguethat did all the mischief. What it was theydid not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer—his old friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow—he wrote—My dear Erskine,—Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all aselltogether! We are sold to Donkeys, and forthemwe write, and so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat! Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or that I am a devil—like yourself.Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic) called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language, the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’ This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests onno authority of Scripture at all, but the said observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered probable that the valiantNorman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the Church.This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. In the General Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that the Confession was ‘the truth of the living God,’ but Tulloch had said, ‘With the spirit of the seventeenth century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.’ A few months later he published an address onThe Study of the Confession of Faith, which is a remarkable piece, every word weighed, and every word in its place. He begins by brushing aside, as utterly worthless, all such knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the letter, asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession ‘must be studied both philosophically and historically.’ The manifesto of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities which that party had gathered in the course of a struggle for ascendancy, insomuch that a historical student, well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell, by the internal evidence alone, the decade in which the documentwas put together, and the men who had the chief hand in the work. Further, many of the ideas used in the Confession to explain the mysteries of Christianity were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain theological school, which was peculiarly under the influences and the prejudices of the period. To claim infallibility for such an instrument is the worst kind of Popery—’that Popery which degrades the Christian reason while it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.’Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse—‘Brother, up to the breachFor Christ’s freedom and truth;Let us act as we teach,With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth.Heed not their cannon-balls,Ask not who stands or falls;Grasp the swordOf the Lord,And Forward!’

CHAPTER VEDITOR AND AUTHORPursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, theEdinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described as a miniature plan or first sketch ofGood Words. Its circulation did not exceed five thousand, but ‘the blue magazine,’ as it was called, was no mean agent in the revival of the drooping Church. While yet minister of Dalkeith he was frequently seen about the office of the publishers, Messrs. Paton & Ritchie, in George Street, Edinburgh; but after his removal to Glasgow the editorial instructions were given in correspondence with the head printer, Mr. J. C. Erskine. That gentleman writes: ‘Usually he was behind time, and I had consequently to poke him up about the middle of each month. But we were always on the best of terms, and I always felt honoured as well as delighted in being associated with so lovable a man and having the privilege of his acquaintance.’ These are some of the letters, in whole or part:—(1) Erskine,—I have worn crape for two days for you, having made up my mind that you were out of print, or in Death’sIndexExpurgatorius. What has become of you? Well, the concern must pay,butthe proof-sheet must be corrected or the whole article cancelled, as IMUSTnot give the facts from a private letter inthatstyle. Delay the publication if you like, but put it right, or let the concern of P. & R. perish!(2) Erskine,—You know what it is to be done up in sheets, with a second volume in the Press. Have patience! Ibindmyself to be ready by the 20th, though at present I am a blank sheet.(3) [September 1851.] Excellent Erskine, Prince of Printers,—this is to intimate my intention of being in Edinburgh on Monday, and visiting your den about twelve, or so, when we shall complete all arrangements. I think I am in excellent time, and am backing slowly into the old rails, when you need rail no more! The matrimonial switch gives a wrong turn. The number may be easily discovered which marksyourmarriage,—it is full of blunders of the Press! a perfecttypeof your hallucination!—N. McL.(4) [Monday, 11a.m., September 23, 1851.] I shall never transgress more if the firm forgive me, and the demons do not seize me and hotpress me. As a married man, Erskine, you should know something of the difficulties married men have experienced, since the days of the Patriarch of Uz to those of Paton & Ritchie, from wives. I will send off more MS. by post in the afternoon, and I shall see you on Monday between one and two. Don’t throw vitriol on me. Keep the printers off!The next refers to the birth of his first child:(5) My first volume is out on Friday—bound in calf-skin, with cloth-guilton the back and front, and very small type—less than a 64mo. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, however, complain of the delivery by the trade as yet! I send you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, Erskine.(6) Master Erskine!—Youshould have duly informed the editor of theChristian Magazinethat you had no sermon, seeing that aparson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was under the impression that it was ‘all right’ until, coming up tonight from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you—1. A MS. sermon—I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Interpreter in the printing-office can; 2. A printed sermon for apatchin case you are too late. If you print the MS. you mustnotput in the name—just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is imperfect—very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make up by extracts from the printed sermon.‘O Erskine, Erskine!Had I but served my Parish as I have my Printer,It would not thus have left me in my misery!’The following reply was sent to an invitation to the editor to grace a social meeting of the workers in the printing-office of Messrs. Paton & Ritchie:—(7) [B.’s Refreshment Rooms, 10th January 1853.] My dear Messrs. P. & R.,—I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I cannot afford—so hard are my Publishers—to go in January. Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend’s Paste—he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to cool the poor demons!—Yours truly, Author of ‘A Plea for Temperance.’TheChristian Magazinegave way toGood Words, which was started in 1860. His assumption of the editorship proved to be the most important circumstancein Macleod’s career. Religious papers were the worst in existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theological malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age.Good Words, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were,Good Wordswas successful from the first, reaching in two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on the part of the awful good. The stories were positively secular! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous men he was to be crushed. And what could be said for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian parents should not allow their children to handle on the Lord’s day a magazine that made so much of pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Privateremonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by religious societies; theRecord, an English champion of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack; and the General Assembly of the Free Church was overtured to sit uponGood Words, which it did, much to the increase of our circulation. The editor held his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out ‘every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.’ Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope’s, in which the pious characters were all made odious, he paid an indemnity of £500. Art and morals alike may sneer, but Macleod’s compromise was well considered and justified in the result. The storm blew over, and another step was gained for religious freedom.Good Wordscarried the name of Norman Macleod over the English-speaking world, and had a vogue in the remotest Hebrides. Principal Tulloch once met in the mountains a man who, on learning the traveller’s name, said, ‘I know you fromGood Words.’ The numbers were so cherished that households generally had them bound, and to this day the early volumes are held precious in many a Scottish home. The sight of one of the old familiar pictures still sends a thrill through thousands, recalling the quiet Sabbaths of their childhood, dear old rooms, and faces they shall see no more.’Before he became the editor ofGood Words, Macleod had published little that was of interest outside religiouscircles.The Earnest Student, doubtless, has considerable merit as a biography, and is written with a tender grace; but it suffers from the inherent unfitness of the subject for extended treatment,—an uneventful life and a character wanting in colour. To say that it deserved a place beside theLife of M’Cheyne, to which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise. In the mass of his contributions toGood Wordsthere is, of course, much that need not be criticised. The sermons put one in mind of the student who, being asked why he was not going in for the ministry, answered, ‘I don’t want to spoil my style.’ His records of travel were eagerly read when they appeared, having a certain interest from the person of the adventurer, with humorous and graphic touches; but to give permanence of charm to the account of voyages and journeys requires all the arts of a Kinglake or a Stevenson.Enough remains to entitle Norman Macleod to a certain recognition in Scottish letters. Among the ‘Character Sketches’ there are some striking portraits—Mr. Joseph Walker, for instance, the highly respectable man, who never drank, never cheated, never lied, and yet ‘could do a very sneaking, mean thing.’ That is a subtle study, vigorously composed. As a writer of fiction it is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religiousaim, but that should be no offence in days when the most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for the height of human perfection and setting up as its reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero of his first attempt—The Old Lieutenant and his Son. Ned is to be a sailor and an exemplary Christian. Fall he does indeed, but not very far, and we know for sure that the author will set him up again at once, and higher than ever, on the plane of paragons. A sea-captain may be a good and pious man, but if, like Ned, he has chosen his profession at the cost of a mother’s tears, driven by the need of adventure—‘God help me save I take my partOf danger on the roaring sea:A devil rises in my heartFar worse than any death to me’—there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod’s usual method, however, is to take some unregeneratecharacter—a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express ecclesiastic—and reform him, not by religious admonition, but by living influences that seize upon the better feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the affections. Thus inBilly Buttonsthe captain and crew are humanised by the accident of having upon their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made another being by his wife’s cry over the little coffin:—’O Willie, forgi’e me, for it’s no’ ma pairt to speak, but I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just agree wi’ me that we’ll gi’e oor hearts noo and for ever to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o’ wee Davie’; Jock Hall, the outcast inThe Starling, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries,A man’s a man for a’ that, drives the lesson home, ‘And yearea man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement.The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaboratedecline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions ofGood Wordshe could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.The Old Lieutenant, begun inGood Wordsbefore he knew it was to be a story, and continued without sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, and loaded with extraneous matter; but the elder Fleming is like one of Thackeray’s men, and, of the domestics of the good old days when the social bond was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby? When Ned was about to leave home for his first voyage, ‘no one saw the tears which filled her large eyes, or heard her blowing her little nose half the night.’ After Ned’s marriage, his father, inviting the young couple to visit the old home, says simply, ‘I think that Babby will expect it.’ Babby has a tongue in her head, and is never so eloquent as when she rails at the new minister. Under the old one she had felt many a time ‘jist mad at hersel’ that she wasna a better woman.’ ‘But this chield Dalrymple that’s cam’ among us! Hech, sirs! what a round black crappit heid he has, like a bull-dog’s, and a body round and fat like a black pudding; and thecratur gangs struttin’ aboot wi’ his umbrella under his oxter, crawin’ like a midden cock, wha but him, keep us a’! an’ pittin’ his neb into every ane’s brose wi’ his impudence. And syne he rages and rampages in the poopit, wi’ the gowk’s spittle in his mouth, flytin’ on folk, and abusin’ them for a’ that’s bad, till my nerves rise, and I could jist cry oot, if it wasna for shame, “Haud yer tongue, ye spitefu’ cratur!” And again,—“Eh, I was glad ye werena married by Dalrymple! He routs in the poopit like a bull, and when the body’s crackin’ wi’ ye, he cheeps, cheeps like a chirted puddock.” “A what?” asked Kate. “A squeezed tade!” replied Babby; “d’ye no’ ken yer ain lang’age? And as for his sermons, they’re jist like a dog’s tail, the langer the sma’er.”’ If Ned is partly made to order, the crew are real old salts. Their conversation finally recalls Flint’s buccaneers, as when one (a milder Israel Hands) remarks, ‘But what, suppose I makes up my mind, do you see, to go ahead, and says, as it were, says I, I’ll not pray, nor read the Bible, nor give up my grog, nor anything else, nor be a saint, but a sinner, and sail when I like, and where I like, and be my own captain—eh?’Macleod’s best effort in fiction isThe Starling. Art demands some abatement of the happy close; there is didactic and explanatory matter that might well be spared; and the episode of the quack is an astounding excrescence. But it is a fine and touching story, andshows that the author possessed the distinctive power of a novelist. The starling was the pet of a little boy called Charlie. It could say, ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ and ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and whistle a few bars of the song, ‘Wha’ll be king but Charlie?’ To feed the bird and hear it speak and sing was the bairn’s delight. He was the only child of his parents, a pious and happy couple, the wife young, the husband a retired sergeant of the army, back at his old trade of shoemaker. The boy died, and there was the bird still repeating its remarks and tunes, and daily becoming dearer to the bereaved parents for Charlie’s sake. One Sunday morning, the starling being dowie, the sergeant hung out its cage at the door, for the sun was shining and the air sweet. Immediately the bird began to pour forth its budget; and a crowd of children gathered about the cage, and the street rang with their delight. Suddenly appeared the minister! at sight of whom the children fled, tumbling over one another and screaming in their fright, so that windows were thrown up, and mothers came flying into the rout, and there was a terrible ado. The Rev. Daniel Porteous, who was on his way to church, was scandalised at such a desecration of the Lord’s day. But what was his horror when he found that the prime offender was the sergeant, one of his elders? To the good couple, who looked up to Mr. Porteous with awe, and whose standing in the congregation was their greatest honour, the minister’s angerwas no light matter; the wife was in distraction, the husband grave and puzzled. The clerical decree was that the starling should be destroyed. This the sergeant, with all deference, refused, whereupon the minister went away, uttering vague threats. But as the poor wife seemed to think it their duty to obey, her husband said, ‘If you, that kens as weel as me a’ the bird has been to us, but speak the word, the deed will be allowed by me.’ And he took down the cage, consenting that the other should put an end to the bird. ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ exclaimed the starling. The wife thought that the killing should be the man’s work, but you see that she is beginning to waver, and when her husband lays his hand on the bird, saying, ‘Bid fareweel to your mistress, Charlie,’ she sprang forward with a cry, and prevented the deed. The sergeant was suspended from the eldership for contumacy, and shunned in the village like a leper. But it all comes right in the end. The motive of the tale would seem to verge on the ludicrous; a single false or strained note, and the whole thing were ruined; yet—call it literary skill or the unconscious art of perfect sympathy—the treatment is such that there is no improbability, and for the starling—as one might have felt when Marie Antoinette was in the cart, if it were a question whether some force might not come dashing up a back street to the rescue, so the reader feels when the fate of the bird is trembling in the balance. The minister with his scorn of the feelings andworship of church principles; his sister, who is like himself, only adding malice; the hypocritical elder who confesses, ‘There’s nane perfect, nane—the fac’ is, I’m no’ perfect masel’’; above all, the ne’er-do-weel, Jock Hall,—are depicted to the life.That Macleod’s fiction has particular merits none will deny, though the critic, making the most of the defects, might say that his stories fail as wholes. His best achievement is perhapsThe Reminiscences of a Highland Parish. This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the saying inThe Old Lieutenantabout the Highlands:—’In all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions which ghostlike float around its ancient keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness most affecting to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance and song.’ The earlier chapters, describing his grandfather’s patriarchal home and the open-air education of the boys and girls of the manse, form a complete and charming piece—the idyll of Fiunary. There are exciting adventures on the misty hill and in the furious Sound.What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark: his hand clutching the tiller—never speaking a word, and displeased if any other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land;while black sudden squalls, rushing down from the glens, struck the foaming billows in fury and smote the boat, threatening with a sharp scream to tear the tiny sail in tatters, break the mast, or blow out of the water the small dark speck that carried the manse treasures. There was one moment of peculiar difficulty and concentrated danger when the hand of a master was needed to save them. The boat has entered the worst part of the tideway. How ugly it looks! Three seas higher than the rest are coming; and you can see the squall blowing their white crests into smoke.[6]In a few minutes they will be down upon theRow. ‘Look out, Ruari!’ whispers the minister. ‘Stand by the sheets!’ cries Rory to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ‘Ready!’ is their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking; falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it; and these three seas appear now to rise like huge pyramids of green water, dashing their foam up into the sky. The first may be encountered and overcome, for the boat has good way upon her; but the others will rapidly follow up the thundering charge and shock, and a single false movement of the helm by a hair’s breadth will bring down a cataract like Niagara, that would shake a frigate, and sink theRowinto the depths like a stone. The boat meets the first wave, and rises dry over it. ‘Slack out the main-sheet, quick, and hold hard: there—steady!’ commands Rory, in a low, firm voice, and the huge back of the second wave is seen breaking to leeward. ‘Haul in, boys, and belay!’ Quick as lightning the little craft, having again gathered way, is up in the teeth of the wind and soon is spinning over the third topper, not a drop of water having come over the lee gunwale. ‘Nobly done, Rory!’ exclaims the minister, as he looks back to the fierce tideway which they have passed.But what one least forgets is the figure of the aged pastor taking farewell of his flock. Blind he was, andlost his bearings in the pulpit, till the beadle, old Rory, who had accompanied him from Skye fifty years before, went up and turned him round so as to face the congregation.And then stood up that venerable man, a Saul in height among the people, with his pure white hair falling back from his ample forehead over his shoulders. Few and loving and earnest were the words he spoke, amidst the silence of a passionately devoted people, which was broken only by their low sobs when he told them that they should see his face no more.All Morven is in the book,—scenery from the heather to the waves, life from the manse to the shieling, mixed with strange old legends and romantic tales.Was Norman Macleod a poet? Pre-eminently so, said Principal Shairp, relying on Wordsworth’s paradox. But that is a broken reed. Expression is the final cause of poetry,the form’s the thing. Now, from Macleod’s habit of misquoting the finest lines it would seem that his love for poetry was not a poet’s love. Still in his verse he could stumble on such rhythm as this—‘Ah, where is he now, in what mansion,In what star of the infinite sky?’and in the conclusion of a piece about a grey-headed father seeing his children dance, there is a gleam of real poetry—‘But he hears a far-off musicGuiding all the stately spheres,In his father-heart it echoes,So he claps his hands and cheers.’The hymn ‘Courage, brothers,’ has a telling ring, though only of rhetoric; and in a song that had the honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his cleverest achievement in rhyme is ‘Captain Frazer’s Nose,’ which we are told was written during violent pain.Oh, if ye’re at Dumbarton fair,Gang to the castle when ye’re there,And see a sicht baith rich and rare—The nose o’ Captain Frazer.Unless ye’re blin’ or unco glee’t,A mile awa’ ye’re sure to see’t,And nearer han’ a man gauns wi’tThat owns the nose o’ Frazer.It’s great in length, it’s great in girth,It’s great in grief, it’s great in mirth,Tho’ grown wi’ years, ‘twas great at birth—It’s greater far than Frazer!I’ve heard volcanoes loudly roarin’,And Niagara’s waters pourin’;But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin’Frae the nose o’ Captain Frazer!To wauken sleepin’ congregations,Or rouse to battle sleepin’ nations,Gae wa’ wi’ preachin’s and orations,And try the nose o’ Frazer!Gif French invaders try to lan’Upon our glorious British stran’,Fear nocht if ships are no’ at han’,But trust the nose o’ Frazer.Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roarAe Hielan’ sneeze! then never moreThey’ll daur the nose o’ Frazer.If that great Nose is ever deid,To bury it ye dinna need,Nae coffin made o’ wood or leed,Could hand the nose o’ Frazer.But let it stan’ itsel’ alane,Erect, like some big Druid stane,That a’ the warl’ may see its bane,‘In memory o’ Frazer!’

EDITOR AND AUTHOR

Pursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, theEdinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described as a miniature plan or first sketch ofGood Words. Its circulation did not exceed five thousand, but ‘the blue magazine,’ as it was called, was no mean agent in the revival of the drooping Church. While yet minister of Dalkeith he was frequently seen about the office of the publishers, Messrs. Paton & Ritchie, in George Street, Edinburgh; but after his removal to Glasgow the editorial instructions were given in correspondence with the head printer, Mr. J. C. Erskine. That gentleman writes: ‘Usually he was behind time, and I had consequently to poke him up about the middle of each month. But we were always on the best of terms, and I always felt honoured as well as delighted in being associated with so lovable a man and having the privilege of his acquaintance.’ These are some of the letters, in whole or part:—

(1) Erskine,—I have worn crape for two days for you, having made up my mind that you were out of print, or in Death’sIndexExpurgatorius. What has become of you? Well, the concern must pay,butthe proof-sheet must be corrected or the whole article cancelled, as IMUSTnot give the facts from a private letter inthatstyle. Delay the publication if you like, but put it right, or let the concern of P. & R. perish!(2) Erskine,—You know what it is to be done up in sheets, with a second volume in the Press. Have patience! Ibindmyself to be ready by the 20th, though at present I am a blank sheet.(3) [September 1851.] Excellent Erskine, Prince of Printers,—this is to intimate my intention of being in Edinburgh on Monday, and visiting your den about twelve, or so, when we shall complete all arrangements. I think I am in excellent time, and am backing slowly into the old rails, when you need rail no more! The matrimonial switch gives a wrong turn. The number may be easily discovered which marksyourmarriage,—it is full of blunders of the Press! a perfecttypeof your hallucination!—N. McL.(4) [Monday, 11a.m., September 23, 1851.] I shall never transgress more if the firm forgive me, and the demons do not seize me and hotpress me. As a married man, Erskine, you should know something of the difficulties married men have experienced, since the days of the Patriarch of Uz to those of Paton & Ritchie, from wives. I will send off more MS. by post in the afternoon, and I shall see you on Monday between one and two. Don’t throw vitriol on me. Keep the printers off!

(1) Erskine,—I have worn crape for two days for you, having made up my mind that you were out of print, or in Death’sIndexExpurgatorius. What has become of you? Well, the concern must pay,butthe proof-sheet must be corrected or the whole article cancelled, as IMUSTnot give the facts from a private letter inthatstyle. Delay the publication if you like, but put it right, or let the concern of P. & R. perish!

(2) Erskine,—You know what it is to be done up in sheets, with a second volume in the Press. Have patience! Ibindmyself to be ready by the 20th, though at present I am a blank sheet.

(3) [September 1851.] Excellent Erskine, Prince of Printers,—this is to intimate my intention of being in Edinburgh on Monday, and visiting your den about twelve, or so, when we shall complete all arrangements. I think I am in excellent time, and am backing slowly into the old rails, when you need rail no more! The matrimonial switch gives a wrong turn. The number may be easily discovered which marksyourmarriage,—it is full of blunders of the Press! a perfecttypeof your hallucination!—N. McL.

(4) [Monday, 11a.m., September 23, 1851.] I shall never transgress more if the firm forgive me, and the demons do not seize me and hotpress me. As a married man, Erskine, you should know something of the difficulties married men have experienced, since the days of the Patriarch of Uz to those of Paton & Ritchie, from wives. I will send off more MS. by post in the afternoon, and I shall see you on Monday between one and two. Don’t throw vitriol on me. Keep the printers off!

The next refers to the birth of his first child:

(5) My first volume is out on Friday—bound in calf-skin, with cloth-guilton the back and front, and very small type—less than a 64mo. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, however, complain of the delivery by the trade as yet! I send you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, Erskine.(6) Master Erskine!—Youshould have duly informed the editor of theChristian Magazinethat you had no sermon, seeing that aparson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was under the impression that it was ‘all right’ until, coming up tonight from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you—1. A MS. sermon—I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Interpreter in the printing-office can; 2. A printed sermon for apatchin case you are too late. If you print the MS. you mustnotput in the name—just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is imperfect—very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make up by extracts from the printed sermon.

(5) My first volume is out on Friday—bound in calf-skin, with cloth-guilton the back and front, and very small type—less than a 64mo. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, however, complain of the delivery by the trade as yet! I send you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, Erskine.

(6) Master Erskine!—Youshould have duly informed the editor of theChristian Magazinethat you had no sermon, seeing that aparson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was under the impression that it was ‘all right’ until, coming up tonight from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you—1. A MS. sermon—I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Interpreter in the printing-office can; 2. A printed sermon for apatchin case you are too late. If you print the MS. you mustnotput in the name—just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is imperfect—very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make up by extracts from the printed sermon.

‘O Erskine, Erskine!

Had I but served my Parish as I have my Printer,It would not thus have left me in my misery!’

The following reply was sent to an invitation to the editor to grace a social meeting of the workers in the printing-office of Messrs. Paton & Ritchie:—

(7) [B.’s Refreshment Rooms, 10th January 1853.] My dear Messrs. P. & R.,—I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I cannot afford—so hard are my Publishers—to go in January. Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend’s Paste—he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to cool the poor demons!—Yours truly, Author of ‘A Plea for Temperance.’

TheChristian Magazinegave way toGood Words, which was started in 1860. His assumption of the editorship proved to be the most important circumstancein Macleod’s career. Religious papers were the worst in existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theological malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age.Good Words, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were,Good Wordswas successful from the first, reaching in two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on the part of the awful good. The stories were positively secular! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous men he was to be crushed. And what could be said for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian parents should not allow their children to handle on the Lord’s day a magazine that made so much of pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Privateremonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by religious societies; theRecord, an English champion of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack; and the General Assembly of the Free Church was overtured to sit uponGood Words, which it did, much to the increase of our circulation. The editor held his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out ‘every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.’ Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope’s, in which the pious characters were all made odious, he paid an indemnity of £500. Art and morals alike may sneer, but Macleod’s compromise was well considered and justified in the result. The storm blew over, and another step was gained for religious freedom.Good Wordscarried the name of Norman Macleod over the English-speaking world, and had a vogue in the remotest Hebrides. Principal Tulloch once met in the mountains a man who, on learning the traveller’s name, said, ‘I know you fromGood Words.’ The numbers were so cherished that households generally had them bound, and to this day the early volumes are held precious in many a Scottish home. The sight of one of the old familiar pictures still sends a thrill through thousands, recalling the quiet Sabbaths of their childhood, dear old rooms, and faces they shall see no more.’

Before he became the editor ofGood Words, Macleod had published little that was of interest outside religiouscircles.The Earnest Student, doubtless, has considerable merit as a biography, and is written with a tender grace; but it suffers from the inherent unfitness of the subject for extended treatment,—an uneventful life and a character wanting in colour. To say that it deserved a place beside theLife of M’Cheyne, to which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise. In the mass of his contributions toGood Wordsthere is, of course, much that need not be criticised. The sermons put one in mind of the student who, being asked why he was not going in for the ministry, answered, ‘I don’t want to spoil my style.’ His records of travel were eagerly read when they appeared, having a certain interest from the person of the adventurer, with humorous and graphic touches; but to give permanence of charm to the account of voyages and journeys requires all the arts of a Kinglake or a Stevenson.

Enough remains to entitle Norman Macleod to a certain recognition in Scottish letters. Among the ‘Character Sketches’ there are some striking portraits—Mr. Joseph Walker, for instance, the highly respectable man, who never drank, never cheated, never lied, and yet ‘could do a very sneaking, mean thing.’ That is a subtle study, vigorously composed. As a writer of fiction it is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religiousaim, but that should be no offence in days when the most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for the height of human perfection and setting up as its reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero of his first attempt—The Old Lieutenant and his Son. Ned is to be a sailor and an exemplary Christian. Fall he does indeed, but not very far, and we know for sure that the author will set him up again at once, and higher than ever, on the plane of paragons. A sea-captain may be a good and pious man, but if, like Ned, he has chosen his profession at the cost of a mother’s tears, driven by the need of adventure—

‘God help me save I take my partOf danger on the roaring sea:

A devil rises in my heartFar worse than any death to me’—

there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod’s usual method, however, is to take some unregeneratecharacter—a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express ecclesiastic—and reform him, not by religious admonition, but by living influences that seize upon the better feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the affections. Thus inBilly Buttonsthe captain and crew are humanised by the accident of having upon their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made another being by his wife’s cry over the little coffin:—’O Willie, forgi’e me, for it’s no’ ma pairt to speak, but I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just agree wi’ me that we’ll gi’e oor hearts noo and for ever to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o’ wee Davie’; Jock Hall, the outcast inThe Starling, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries,A man’s a man for a’ that, drives the lesson home, ‘And yearea man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement.

The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaboratedecline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions ofGood Wordshe could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.

The Old Lieutenant, begun inGood Wordsbefore he knew it was to be a story, and continued without sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, and loaded with extraneous matter; but the elder Fleming is like one of Thackeray’s men, and, of the domestics of the good old days when the social bond was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby? When Ned was about to leave home for his first voyage, ‘no one saw the tears which filled her large eyes, or heard her blowing her little nose half the night.’ After Ned’s marriage, his father, inviting the young couple to visit the old home, says simply, ‘I think that Babby will expect it.’ Babby has a tongue in her head, and is never so eloquent as when she rails at the new minister. Under the old one she had felt many a time ‘jist mad at hersel’ that she wasna a better woman.’ ‘But this chield Dalrymple that’s cam’ among us! Hech, sirs! what a round black crappit heid he has, like a bull-dog’s, and a body round and fat like a black pudding; and thecratur gangs struttin’ aboot wi’ his umbrella under his oxter, crawin’ like a midden cock, wha but him, keep us a’! an’ pittin’ his neb into every ane’s brose wi’ his impudence. And syne he rages and rampages in the poopit, wi’ the gowk’s spittle in his mouth, flytin’ on folk, and abusin’ them for a’ that’s bad, till my nerves rise, and I could jist cry oot, if it wasna for shame, “Haud yer tongue, ye spitefu’ cratur!” And again,—“Eh, I was glad ye werena married by Dalrymple! He routs in the poopit like a bull, and when the body’s crackin’ wi’ ye, he cheeps, cheeps like a chirted puddock.” “A what?” asked Kate. “A squeezed tade!” replied Babby; “d’ye no’ ken yer ain lang’age? And as for his sermons, they’re jist like a dog’s tail, the langer the sma’er.”’ If Ned is partly made to order, the crew are real old salts. Their conversation finally recalls Flint’s buccaneers, as when one (a milder Israel Hands) remarks, ‘But what, suppose I makes up my mind, do you see, to go ahead, and says, as it were, says I, I’ll not pray, nor read the Bible, nor give up my grog, nor anything else, nor be a saint, but a sinner, and sail when I like, and where I like, and be my own captain—eh?’

Macleod’s best effort in fiction isThe Starling. Art demands some abatement of the happy close; there is didactic and explanatory matter that might well be spared; and the episode of the quack is an astounding excrescence. But it is a fine and touching story, andshows that the author possessed the distinctive power of a novelist. The starling was the pet of a little boy called Charlie. It could say, ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ and ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and whistle a few bars of the song, ‘Wha’ll be king but Charlie?’ To feed the bird and hear it speak and sing was the bairn’s delight. He was the only child of his parents, a pious and happy couple, the wife young, the husband a retired sergeant of the army, back at his old trade of shoemaker. The boy died, and there was the bird still repeating its remarks and tunes, and daily becoming dearer to the bereaved parents for Charlie’s sake. One Sunday morning, the starling being dowie, the sergeant hung out its cage at the door, for the sun was shining and the air sweet. Immediately the bird began to pour forth its budget; and a crowd of children gathered about the cage, and the street rang with their delight. Suddenly appeared the minister! at sight of whom the children fled, tumbling over one another and screaming in their fright, so that windows were thrown up, and mothers came flying into the rout, and there was a terrible ado. The Rev. Daniel Porteous, who was on his way to church, was scandalised at such a desecration of the Lord’s day. But what was his horror when he found that the prime offender was the sergeant, one of his elders? To the good couple, who looked up to Mr. Porteous with awe, and whose standing in the congregation was their greatest honour, the minister’s angerwas no light matter; the wife was in distraction, the husband grave and puzzled. The clerical decree was that the starling should be destroyed. This the sergeant, with all deference, refused, whereupon the minister went away, uttering vague threats. But as the poor wife seemed to think it their duty to obey, her husband said, ‘If you, that kens as weel as me a’ the bird has been to us, but speak the word, the deed will be allowed by me.’ And he took down the cage, consenting that the other should put an end to the bird. ‘I’m Charlie’s bairn,’ exclaimed the starling. The wife thought that the killing should be the man’s work, but you see that she is beginning to waver, and when her husband lays his hand on the bird, saying, ‘Bid fareweel to your mistress, Charlie,’ she sprang forward with a cry, and prevented the deed. The sergeant was suspended from the eldership for contumacy, and shunned in the village like a leper. But it all comes right in the end. The motive of the tale would seem to verge on the ludicrous; a single false or strained note, and the whole thing were ruined; yet—call it literary skill or the unconscious art of perfect sympathy—the treatment is such that there is no improbability, and for the starling—as one might have felt when Marie Antoinette was in the cart, if it were a question whether some force might not come dashing up a back street to the rescue, so the reader feels when the fate of the bird is trembling in the balance. The minister with his scorn of the feelings andworship of church principles; his sister, who is like himself, only adding malice; the hypocritical elder who confesses, ‘There’s nane perfect, nane—the fac’ is, I’m no’ perfect masel’’; above all, the ne’er-do-weel, Jock Hall,—are depicted to the life.

That Macleod’s fiction has particular merits none will deny, though the critic, making the most of the defects, might say that his stories fail as wholes. His best achievement is perhapsThe Reminiscences of a Highland Parish. This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the saying inThe Old Lieutenantabout the Highlands:—’In all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions which ghostlike float around its ancient keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness most affecting to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance and song.’ The earlier chapters, describing his grandfather’s patriarchal home and the open-air education of the boys and girls of the manse, form a complete and charming piece—the idyll of Fiunary. There are exciting adventures on the misty hill and in the furious Sound.

What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark: his hand clutching the tiller—never speaking a word, and displeased if any other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land;while black sudden squalls, rushing down from the glens, struck the foaming billows in fury and smote the boat, threatening with a sharp scream to tear the tiny sail in tatters, break the mast, or blow out of the water the small dark speck that carried the manse treasures. There was one moment of peculiar difficulty and concentrated danger when the hand of a master was needed to save them. The boat has entered the worst part of the tideway. How ugly it looks! Three seas higher than the rest are coming; and you can see the squall blowing their white crests into smoke.[6]In a few minutes they will be down upon theRow. ‘Look out, Ruari!’ whispers the minister. ‘Stand by the sheets!’ cries Rory to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ‘Ready!’ is their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking; falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it; and these three seas appear now to rise like huge pyramids of green water, dashing their foam up into the sky. The first may be encountered and overcome, for the boat has good way upon her; but the others will rapidly follow up the thundering charge and shock, and a single false movement of the helm by a hair’s breadth will bring down a cataract like Niagara, that would shake a frigate, and sink theRowinto the depths like a stone. The boat meets the first wave, and rises dry over it. ‘Slack out the main-sheet, quick, and hold hard: there—steady!’ commands Rory, in a low, firm voice, and the huge back of the second wave is seen breaking to leeward. ‘Haul in, boys, and belay!’ Quick as lightning the little craft, having again gathered way, is up in the teeth of the wind and soon is spinning over the third topper, not a drop of water having come over the lee gunwale. ‘Nobly done, Rory!’ exclaims the minister, as he looks back to the fierce tideway which they have passed.

But what one least forgets is the figure of the aged pastor taking farewell of his flock. Blind he was, andlost his bearings in the pulpit, till the beadle, old Rory, who had accompanied him from Skye fifty years before, went up and turned him round so as to face the congregation.

And then stood up that venerable man, a Saul in height among the people, with his pure white hair falling back from his ample forehead over his shoulders. Few and loving and earnest were the words he spoke, amidst the silence of a passionately devoted people, which was broken only by their low sobs when he told them that they should see his face no more.

All Morven is in the book,—scenery from the heather to the waves, life from the manse to the shieling, mixed with strange old legends and romantic tales.

Was Norman Macleod a poet? Pre-eminently so, said Principal Shairp, relying on Wordsworth’s paradox. But that is a broken reed. Expression is the final cause of poetry,the form’s the thing. Now, from Macleod’s habit of misquoting the finest lines it would seem that his love for poetry was not a poet’s love. Still in his verse he could stumble on such rhythm as this—

‘Ah, where is he now, in what mansion,In what star of the infinite sky?’

and in the conclusion of a piece about a grey-headed father seeing his children dance, there is a gleam of real poetry—

‘But he hears a far-off musicGuiding all the stately spheres,

In his father-heart it echoes,So he claps his hands and cheers.’

The hymn ‘Courage, brothers,’ has a telling ring, though only of rhetoric; and in a song that had the honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his cleverest achievement in rhyme is ‘Captain Frazer’s Nose,’ which we are told was written during violent pain.

Oh, if ye’re at Dumbarton fair,Gang to the castle when ye’re there,And see a sicht baith rich and rare—

The nose o’ Captain Frazer.

Unless ye’re blin’ or unco glee’t,A mile awa’ ye’re sure to see’t,And nearer han’ a man gauns wi’t

That owns the nose o’ Frazer.

It’s great in length, it’s great in girth,It’s great in grief, it’s great in mirth,Tho’ grown wi’ years, ‘twas great at birth—

It’s greater far than Frazer!

I’ve heard volcanoes loudly roarin’,And Niagara’s waters pourin’;But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin’

Frae the nose o’ Captain Frazer!

To wauken sleepin’ congregations,Or rouse to battle sleepin’ nations,Gae wa’ wi’ preachin’s and orations,

And try the nose o’ Frazer!

Gif French invaders try to lan’Upon our glorious British stran’,Fear nocht if ships are no’ at han’,

But trust the nose o’ Frazer.

Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roarAe Hielan’ sneeze! then never more

They’ll daur the nose o’ Frazer.

If that great Nose is ever deid,To bury it ye dinna need,Nae coffin made o’ wood or leed,

Could hand the nose o’ Frazer.

But let it stan’ itsel’ alane,Erect, like some big Druid stane,That a’ the warl’ may see its bane,

‘In memory o’ Frazer!’

CHAPTER VIBALMORALIf the cry for vital being—‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,More life, and fuller, that I want’—ever came from Norman Macleod, it was answered only too well; like a certain prayer for rain, which was interrupted by a ridiculous flood. Not only were his activities immense and various, but there was always an expenditure of corresponding emotion; nay, and what in the life of most men would have been simply an event was in his a crisis, what was a fleeting image with others was with him an indelible impression.He was summoned to the unique ordeal of ministering to the newly-widowed Queen.About twenty years before, during a visit to the West of Scotland, Her Majesty had for the first time attended a presbyterian service, on which occasion the preacher was Norman Macleod, the high priest of the Highlands and minister of St. Columba’s. His son first appeared at Balmoral in 1854. The invitation of the minister ofCrathie he had refused (having in hand a special service at the Barony), but was informed that it had been sent at the instance of Her Majesty. He preached without any notes a sermon never fully written out, which he had delivered fifteen times. The Queen wrote in her Journal: ‘We went to kirk as usual at twelve o’clock. The service was performed by the Rev. Norman M’Leod of Glasgow, son of Dr. M’Leod, and anything finer I never heard. The sermon, entirely extempore, was quite admirable: so simple, and yet so eloquent, and so beautifully argued and put. The text was from the account of the coming of Nicodemus to Christ by night, St. John, chapter iii. Mr. M’Leod showed in the sermon how wealltried to pleaseself, and live forthat, and in so doing found no rest. Christ had come not only to die for us, but to show us how we were to live. The second prayer was very touching: his allusions to us were so simple, saying after his mention of us, “Bless their children.” It gave me a lump in my throat, as also when he prayed for “the dying, the wounded, the widow, and the orphans.” Every one came back delighted: and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings! The servants and the Highlanders—all—were equally delighted.’In the evening he was sitting on a block of granite within the grounds, when he was aroused by a voice asking whether he was the clergyman who had preached that day, and found himself in the presence of the Queenand the Prince Consort. This was his first meeting with Her Majesty, and it was only for a moment.On the next occasion, two years later, he dined with the royal family, and afterwards had some conversation with the Queen; referring to which he says, ‘I never spoke my mind more frankly to anyone who was a stranger and not on an equal footing.’ This he did, because he perceived that Her Majesty was anxious to go to the root and reality of things, and abhorred all shams. His sermons had a peculiar fascination for the Queen. Of the recorded estimates of Macleod’s preaching, that of Victoria, if the warmest, is not the least discerning, and will be a telling memorial when the sermons are forgotten.The Prince Consort died at the close of the year 1861. In the May following, the Queen came to Balmoral. She sent for Norman Macleod. What a moment! How was he to deal with stricken Majesty—‘Her over all whose realms to their last isleThe shadow of a loss drew like eclipse,Darkening the world’?It was purely as a minister of religion that he had the honour of his sovereign’s command. The truth of God, as he believed it, the same message which a hundred times he had spoken to bereaved wives in the lowliest homes, that, and nothing other, would he carry to the royal widow, whom he should regard only as ‘an immortal being, a sister in humanity.’ Their first meeting was at divine service,and if the occasion was a trying one to the preacher, it was evidently exciting to the Queen. ‘Hurried to be ready,’ so runs the royal Journal, ‘for the service which Dr. Macleod was kindly going to perform. And a little before ten, I went down with Lenchen and Affie (Alice being still in bed unwell) to the dining-room, in which I had not yet been.... And never was service more beautifully, touchingly, simply, and tenderly performed.... The sermon, entirely extempore, was admirable, all upon affliction, God’s love, our Saviour’s sufferings, which God would not spare Him, the blessedness of suffering in bringing us nearer to our eternal home, where we should all be together, and where our dear ones were gone on before us.... The children and I were much affected on coming upstairs.’ After dinner he was summoned to the Queen’s room, and there, after some conversation about the Prince, he told about an old woman in the Barony who had lost her husband and several of her children, and who, on being asked how she had been able to bear her many sorrows, replied, ‘Whenhewas ta’en it made sic a hole in my heart that a’ other sorrows gang lichtly through.’ When Macleod recalled this period, he would express the whole burden of it in the solemn murmur, ‘That May.’ He has written: ‘God enabled me to speak in public and private to the Queen in such a way as seemed to me to be the truth, the truth in God’s sight—that which I believed she needed, though I felt it would be very trying to herspirit to receive it. And what fills me with deepest thanksgiving is that she has received it, and written to me such a kind, tender letter of thanks, which shall be treasured in my heart while I live.’In the spring of the following year he was for several days a guest at Windsor. ‘I walked,’ he says, ‘with Lady Augusta to the mausoleum to meet the Queen. She had the key and opened it herself, undoing the bolts; and alone we entered, and stood in solemn silence beside Marochetti’s beautiful statue of the Prince.’With the royal family he was both a social favourite and a trusted counsellor. To Prince Alfred, who seemed to be particularly attached to him, he once gave this advice,—that ‘if he did God’s will, good and able men would rally round him; otherwise flatterers would truckle to him and ruin him, while caring only for themselves.’ Both sons and daughters, when residing on the Continent, had flying visits from this chaplain. One Monday he left Glasgow for Windsor; thence, on royal errands, he proceeded to Bonn and Darmstadt; he was back at Windsor on the Friday: and on the Sunday following, it may be added, he preached three times in the Barony Church.The Prince of Wales (with whom he sometimes stayed at Abergeldie) once put in a plea for short sermons. Said the Doctor, ‘I am a Thomas à Becket and resent the interference of the State’; and sureenough, at the first opportunity, he preached for three-quarters of an hour, only so well that His Royal Highness wished it had been longer. To show how much he was thought of at Court, it may be mentioned that one day he was at Inverness to meet the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the next (which was a Saturday) at Balmoral, and for half of the following week with Prince Alfred at Holyrood. But here is the crowning instance: ‘The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her,Tam o’ ShanterandA man’s a man for a’ that, her favourite.’Her Majesty never forgot what Dr. Macleod had been to her in the time of her desolation, but extended her confidence, nor failed to take an interest in his personal cares. Some of the truest and most touching words ever written of Norman Macleod are from the pen of Queen Victoria.

BALMORAL

If the cry for vital being—

‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,More life, and fuller, that I want’—

ever came from Norman Macleod, it was answered only too well; like a certain prayer for rain, which was interrupted by a ridiculous flood. Not only were his activities immense and various, but there was always an expenditure of corresponding emotion; nay, and what in the life of most men would have been simply an event was in his a crisis, what was a fleeting image with others was with him an indelible impression.

He was summoned to the unique ordeal of ministering to the newly-widowed Queen.

About twenty years before, during a visit to the West of Scotland, Her Majesty had for the first time attended a presbyterian service, on which occasion the preacher was Norman Macleod, the high priest of the Highlands and minister of St. Columba’s. His son first appeared at Balmoral in 1854. The invitation of the minister ofCrathie he had refused (having in hand a special service at the Barony), but was informed that it had been sent at the instance of Her Majesty. He preached without any notes a sermon never fully written out, which he had delivered fifteen times. The Queen wrote in her Journal: ‘We went to kirk as usual at twelve o’clock. The service was performed by the Rev. Norman M’Leod of Glasgow, son of Dr. M’Leod, and anything finer I never heard. The sermon, entirely extempore, was quite admirable: so simple, and yet so eloquent, and so beautifully argued and put. The text was from the account of the coming of Nicodemus to Christ by night, St. John, chapter iii. Mr. M’Leod showed in the sermon how wealltried to pleaseself, and live forthat, and in so doing found no rest. Christ had come not only to die for us, but to show us how we were to live. The second prayer was very touching: his allusions to us were so simple, saying after his mention of us, “Bless their children.” It gave me a lump in my throat, as also when he prayed for “the dying, the wounded, the widow, and the orphans.” Every one came back delighted: and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings! The servants and the Highlanders—all—were equally delighted.’

In the evening he was sitting on a block of granite within the grounds, when he was aroused by a voice asking whether he was the clergyman who had preached that day, and found himself in the presence of the Queenand the Prince Consort. This was his first meeting with Her Majesty, and it was only for a moment.

On the next occasion, two years later, he dined with the royal family, and afterwards had some conversation with the Queen; referring to which he says, ‘I never spoke my mind more frankly to anyone who was a stranger and not on an equal footing.’ This he did, because he perceived that Her Majesty was anxious to go to the root and reality of things, and abhorred all shams. His sermons had a peculiar fascination for the Queen. Of the recorded estimates of Macleod’s preaching, that of Victoria, if the warmest, is not the least discerning, and will be a telling memorial when the sermons are forgotten.

The Prince Consort died at the close of the year 1861. In the May following, the Queen came to Balmoral. She sent for Norman Macleod. What a moment! How was he to deal with stricken Majesty—

‘Her over all whose realms to their last isleThe shadow of a loss drew like eclipse,Darkening the world’?

It was purely as a minister of religion that he had the honour of his sovereign’s command. The truth of God, as he believed it, the same message which a hundred times he had spoken to bereaved wives in the lowliest homes, that, and nothing other, would he carry to the royal widow, whom he should regard only as ‘an immortal being, a sister in humanity.’ Their first meeting was at divine service,and if the occasion was a trying one to the preacher, it was evidently exciting to the Queen. ‘Hurried to be ready,’ so runs the royal Journal, ‘for the service which Dr. Macleod was kindly going to perform. And a little before ten, I went down with Lenchen and Affie (Alice being still in bed unwell) to the dining-room, in which I had not yet been.... And never was service more beautifully, touchingly, simply, and tenderly performed.... The sermon, entirely extempore, was admirable, all upon affliction, God’s love, our Saviour’s sufferings, which God would not spare Him, the blessedness of suffering in bringing us nearer to our eternal home, where we should all be together, and where our dear ones were gone on before us.... The children and I were much affected on coming upstairs.’ After dinner he was summoned to the Queen’s room, and there, after some conversation about the Prince, he told about an old woman in the Barony who had lost her husband and several of her children, and who, on being asked how she had been able to bear her many sorrows, replied, ‘Whenhewas ta’en it made sic a hole in my heart that a’ other sorrows gang lichtly through.’ When Macleod recalled this period, he would express the whole burden of it in the solemn murmur, ‘That May.’ He has written: ‘God enabled me to speak in public and private to the Queen in such a way as seemed to me to be the truth, the truth in God’s sight—that which I believed she needed, though I felt it would be very trying to herspirit to receive it. And what fills me with deepest thanksgiving is that she has received it, and written to me such a kind, tender letter of thanks, which shall be treasured in my heart while I live.’

In the spring of the following year he was for several days a guest at Windsor. ‘I walked,’ he says, ‘with Lady Augusta to the mausoleum to meet the Queen. She had the key and opened it herself, undoing the bolts; and alone we entered, and stood in solemn silence beside Marochetti’s beautiful statue of the Prince.’

With the royal family he was both a social favourite and a trusted counsellor. To Prince Alfred, who seemed to be particularly attached to him, he once gave this advice,—that ‘if he did God’s will, good and able men would rally round him; otherwise flatterers would truckle to him and ruin him, while caring only for themselves.’ Both sons and daughters, when residing on the Continent, had flying visits from this chaplain. One Monday he left Glasgow for Windsor; thence, on royal errands, he proceeded to Bonn and Darmstadt; he was back at Windsor on the Friday: and on the Sunday following, it may be added, he preached three times in the Barony Church.

The Prince of Wales (with whom he sometimes stayed at Abergeldie) once put in a plea for short sermons. Said the Doctor, ‘I am a Thomas à Becket and resent the interference of the State’; and sureenough, at the first opportunity, he preached for three-quarters of an hour, only so well that His Royal Highness wished it had been longer. To show how much he was thought of at Court, it may be mentioned that one day he was at Inverness to meet the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the next (which was a Saturday) at Balmoral, and for half of the following week with Prince Alfred at Holyrood. But here is the crowning instance: ‘The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her,Tam o’ ShanterandA man’s a man for a’ that, her favourite.’

Her Majesty never forgot what Dr. Macleod had been to her in the time of her desolation, but extended her confidence, nor failed to take an interest in his personal cares. Some of the truest and most touching words ever written of Norman Macleod are from the pen of Queen Victoria.

CHAPTER VII1860-1866TRAVELS—BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTSNo minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; butthe best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this inGood Words, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher ofGood Words, AlexanderStrahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has notrace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,—there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the DeadSea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again! For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,—the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generationof parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not in doctrine, liberal,—a man singularly forgotten. He took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the Highlands the word went,—’There’s life in the Auld Kirk yet.’Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were toMacaulay ‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks; but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business, there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he wouldgive, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert Lee was admirable—always just to the intellect, a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected to the Confession of Faithbecause, by the advance of thought and knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated; he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true, wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral estate summed up in the wordScotch, a significant word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist.I don’t pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church—that enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion—I mean Satan himself.’ Owing to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would not prayextempore, is like a bad novel—no dignity in the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion thanto imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has anything to do with Episcopacy.’Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements; but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very little freedom,’ he sighs.Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, areaccustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men—men who rose at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’ Wemust not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse themselves in any way,—all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment, whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ.The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of his argument, is powerful in its way, but it fails to show that the Lord’s day is a scriptural institution; the question as to what is lawful or unlawful being left to ‘the common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of Christians.’There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. Macleod awoke one morning and found himself infamous. Anathemas were hurled from almost every pulpit. Every newspaper and many magazines took up the question. Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. There were innumerable squibs,—the cleverest in proseThe Trial of Dr. Norman Macleod for the Murder of Moses’ Law, by David Macrae, in verse the lines by Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has brought to light, beginning—Have you heard of valiant Norman,Norman of the ample vest—How he fought the Ten CommandmentsIn the Synod of the West?Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’ he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With the common folk it was probably the wordDecaloguethat did all the mischief. What it was theydid not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer—his old friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow—he wrote—My dear Erskine,—Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all aselltogether! We are sold to Donkeys, and forthemwe write, and so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat! Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or that I am a devil—like yourself.Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic) called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language, the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’ This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests onno authority of Scripture at all, but the said observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered probable that the valiantNorman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the Church.This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. In the General Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that the Confession was ‘the truth of the living God,’ but Tulloch had said, ‘With the spirit of the seventeenth century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.’ A few months later he published an address onThe Study of the Confession of Faith, which is a remarkable piece, every word weighed, and every word in its place. He begins by brushing aside, as utterly worthless, all such knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the letter, asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession ‘must be studied both philosophically and historically.’ The manifesto of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities which that party had gathered in the course of a struggle for ascendancy, insomuch that a historical student, well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell, by the internal evidence alone, the decade in which the documentwas put together, and the men who had the chief hand in the work. Further, many of the ideas used in the Confession to explain the mysteries of Christianity were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain theological school, which was peculiarly under the influences and the prejudices of the period. To claim infallibility for such an instrument is the worst kind of Popery—’that Popery which degrades the Christian reason while it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.’Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse—‘Brother, up to the breachFor Christ’s freedom and truth;Let us act as we teach,With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth.Heed not their cannon-balls,Ask not who stands or falls;Grasp the swordOf the Lord,And Forward!’

1860-1866

TRAVELS—BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS

No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; butthe best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this inGood Words, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’

His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’

In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher ofGood Words, AlexanderStrahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has notrace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,—there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the DeadSea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.

In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.

By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again! For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,—the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generationof parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not in doctrine, liberal,—a man singularly forgotten. He took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the Highlands the word went,—’There’s life in the Auld Kirk yet.’

Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were toMacaulay ‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks; but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business, there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he wouldgive, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert Lee was admirable—always just to the intellect, a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected to the Confession of Faithbecause, by the advance of thought and knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated; he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true, wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral estate summed up in the wordScotch, a significant word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist.I don’t pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church—that enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion—I mean Satan himself.’ Owing to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would not prayextempore, is like a bad novel—no dignity in the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion thanto imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has anything to do with Episcopacy.’

Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements; but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very little freedom,’ he sighs.

Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, areaccustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men—men who rose at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’ Wemust not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse themselves in any way,—all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment, whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ.

The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of his argument, is powerful in its way, but it fails to show that the Lord’s day is a scriptural institution; the question as to what is lawful or unlawful being left to ‘the common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of Christians.’

There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. Macleod awoke one morning and found himself infamous. Anathemas were hurled from almost every pulpit. Every newspaper and many magazines took up the question. Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. There were innumerable squibs,—the cleverest in proseThe Trial of Dr. Norman Macleod for the Murder of Moses’ Law, by David Macrae, in verse the lines by Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has brought to light, beginning—

Have you heard of valiant Norman,Norman of the ample vest—

How he fought the Ten CommandmentsIn the Synod of the West?

Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’ he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With the common folk it was probably the wordDecaloguethat did all the mischief. What it was theydid not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer—his old friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow—he wrote—

My dear Erskine,—Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all aselltogether! We are sold to Donkeys, and forthemwe write, and so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat! Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or that I am a devil—like yourself.

Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic) called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language, the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’ This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests onno authority of Scripture at all, but the said observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered probable that the valiantNorman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the Church.

This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. In the General Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that the Confession was ‘the truth of the living God,’ but Tulloch had said, ‘With the spirit of the seventeenth century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.’ A few months later he published an address onThe Study of the Confession of Faith, which is a remarkable piece, every word weighed, and every word in its place. He begins by brushing aside, as utterly worthless, all such knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the letter, asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession ‘must be studied both philosophically and historically.’ The manifesto of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities which that party had gathered in the course of a struggle for ascendancy, insomuch that a historical student, well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell, by the internal evidence alone, the decade in which the documentwas put together, and the men who had the chief hand in the work. Further, many of the ideas used in the Confession to explain the mysteries of Christianity were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain theological school, which was peculiarly under the influences and the prejudices of the period. To claim infallibility for such an instrument is the worst kind of Popery—’that Popery which degrades the Christian reason while it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.’

Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse—

‘Brother, up to the breachFor Christ’s freedom and truth;Let us act as we teach,

With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth.

Heed not their cannon-balls,Ask not who stands or falls;

Grasp the swordOf the Lord,And Forward!’

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