My Schools and Schoolmasters Part 18

It was favourably noticed, too, by Mr. Gladstone, in his elaborate work on Church Principles; and was, in short, both in the extent of its circulation, and the circles into which it found its way, a very successful pamphlet.

So filled was my mind with our ecclesiastical controversy, that, while yet unacquainted with the fate of my first _brochure_, I was busily engaged with a second. A remarkable case of intrusion had occurred in the district rather more than twenty years before; and after closing my week's labours in the bank, I set out for the house of a friend in a neighbouring parish on a Sat.u.r.day evening, that I might attend the deserted church on the following Sabbath, and glean from actual observation the materials of a truthful description, which would, I trusted, tell in the controversy. And as the case was one of those in which truth proves stronger than fiction, what I had to describe was really very curious; and my description received an extensive circulation. I insert the pa.s.sage entire, as properly a part of my story.

"There were a.s.sociations of a peculiarly high character connected with this northern parish. For more than a thousand years it had formed part of the patrimony of a truly n.o.ble family, celebrated by Philip Doddridge for its great moral worth, and by Sir Walter Scott for its high military genius; and through whose influence the light of the Reformation had been introduced into this remote corner, at a period when the neighbouring districts were enveloped in the original darkness. In a later age it had been honoured by the fines and proscriptions of Charles II.; and its minister--one of those men of G.o.d whose names still live in the memory of the country, and whose biography occupies no small s.p.a.ce in the recorded history of her 'worthies'--had rendered himself so obnoxious to the tyranny and irreligion of the time, that he was ejected from his charge more than a year before any of the other non-conforming clergymen of the Church.[17] I approached the parish from the east. The day was warm and pleasant; the scenery through which I pa.s.sed, some of the finest in Scotland. The mountains rose on the right, in huge t.i.tanic ma.s.ses, that seemed to soften their purple and blue in the clear suns.h.i.+ne, to the delicate tone of the deep sky beyond; and I could see the yet unwasted snows of winter glittering, in little detached ma.s.ses, along their summits. The hills of the middle region were feathered with wood; a forest of mingled oaks and larches, which still blended the tender softness of spring with the full foliage of summer, swept down to the path; the wide undulating plain below was laid out into fields, mottled with cottages, and waving with the yet unshot corn; and a n.o.ble arm of the sea winded along the lower edge for nearly twenty miles, losing itself to the west among blue hills and jutting headlands, and opening in the east to the main ocean, through a magnificent gateway of rock. But the little groups which I encountered at every turning of the path, as they journeyed, with all the sober, well-marked decency of a Scottish Sabbath morning, towards the church of a neighbouring parish, interested me more than even the scenery. The clan which inhabited this part of the country had borne a well-marked character in Scottish story. Buchanan had described it as one of the most fearless and warlike in the north. It served under the Bruce at Bannockburn. It was the first to rise in arms to protect Queen Mary, on her visit to Inverness, from the intended violence of Huntly. It fought the battles of Protestantism in Germany, under Gustavus Adolphus. It covered the retreat of the English at Fontenoy; and presented an unbroken front to the enemy, after all the other troops had quitted the field. And it was the descendants of those very men who were now pa.s.sing me on the road. The rugged, robust form, half bone, half muscle--the springy firmness of the tread--the grave, manly countenance--all gave indication that the original characteristics survived in their full strength; and it was a strength that inspired confidence, not fear. There were grey-haired, patriarchal-looking men among the groups, whose very air seemed impressed by a sense of the duties of the day; nor was there aught that did not agree with the object of the journey, in the appearance of even the youngest and least thoughtful.

"As I proceeded, I came up with a few people who were travelling in a contrary direction. A Secession meeting-house has lately sprung up in the parish, and these formed part of the congregation. A path, nearly obscured by gra.s.s and weeds, leads from the main road to the parish church. It was with difficulty I could trace it, and there were none to direct me, for I was now walking alone. The parish burying-ground, thickly sprinkled with graves and tombstones, surrounds the church. It is a quiet, solitary spot, of great beauty, lying beside the sea-sh.o.r.e; and as service had not yet commenced, I whiled away half an hour in sauntering among the stones, and deciphering the inscriptions. I could trace in the rude monuments of this retired little spot, a brief but interesting history of the district. The older tablets, grey and s.h.a.ggy with the mosses and lichens of three centuries, bear, in their uncouth semblances of the unwieldy battle-axe and double-handed sword of ancient warfare, the meet and appropriate symbols of the earlier time. But the more modern testify to the introduction of a humanizing influence. They speak of a life after death, in the "holy texts" described by the poet; or certify, in a quiet humility of style which almost vouches for their truth, that the sleepers below were "honest men, of blameless character, and who feared G.o.d." There is one tombstone, however, more remarkable than all the others. It lies beside the church-door, and testifies, in an antique inscription, that it covers the remains of the "GREAT.MAN.OF.G.o.d.AND.FAITHFUL.MINISTER.OF JESUS.CHRIST.," who had endured persecution for the truth in the dark days of Charles and his brother. He had outlived the tyranny of the Stuarts; and, though worn by years and sufferings, had returned to his parish on the Revolution, to end his course as it had begun. He saw, ere his death, the law of patronage abolished, and the popular right virtually secured; and, fearing lest his people might be led to abuse the important privilege conferred upon them, and calculating aright on the abiding influence of his own character among them, he gave charge on his deathbed to dig his grave in the threshold of the church, that they might regard him as a sentinel placed at the door, and that his tombstone might speak to them as they pa.s.sed out and in. The inscription, which, after the lapse of nearly a century and a half, is still perfectly legible, concludes with the following remarkable words:--"THIS.STONE.SHALL.BEAR.WITNESS.

AGAINST.THE.PARIs.h.i.+ONERS.OF.KILTEARN.IF.THEY.BRING.ANE.UNG.o.dLY.

MINISTER.IN.HERE." Could the imagination of a poet have originated a more striking conception in connexion with a church deserted by all its better people, and whose minister fattens on his hire, useless and contented?

"I entered the church, for the clergyman had just gone in. There were from eight to ten persons scattered over the pews below, and seven in the galleries above; and these, as there were no more '_Peter Clarks_' or '_Michael Tods_'[18] in the parish, composed the entire congregation. I wrapped myself up in my plaid, and sat down; and the service went on in the usual course; but it sounded in my ears like a miserable mockery. The precentor sung almost alone; and ere the clergyman had reached the middle of his discourse, which he read in an unimpa.s.sioned, monotonous tone, nearly one-half his skeleton congregation had fallen asleep; and the drowsy, listless expression of the others showed that, for every good purpose, they might have been asleep too. And Sabbath after Sabbath has this unfortunate man gone the same tiresome round, and with exactly the same effects, for the last twenty-three years;--at no time regarded by the better clergymen of the district as really their brother;--on no occasion recognised by the parish as virtually its minister;--with a dreary vacancy and a few indifferent hearts inside his church, and the stone of the Covenanter at the door. Against whom does the inscription testify?

for the people have escaped. Against the patron, the intruder, and the law of Bolingbroke--the Dr. Robertsons of the last age, and the Dr. Cooks of the present. It is well to learn from this hapless parish the exact sense in which, in a different state of matters, the Rev. Mr. Young would have been const.i.tuted minister of Auchterarder. It is well, too, to learn, that there may be vacancies in the Church where no blank appears in the Almanac."

On my return home from this journey, early on the following Monday, I found a letter from Edinburgh awaiting me, requesting me to meet there with the leading Non-Intrusionists. And so after describing, in the given extract, the scene which I had just witnessed, and completing my second pamphlet, I set out for Edinburgh, and saw for the first time men with whose names I had been familiar during the course of the Voluntary and Non-Intrusion controversies. And entering into their plans, though with no little shrinking of heart, lest I should be found unequal to the demands of a twice-a-week paper, that would have to stand, in Ishmael's position, against almost the whole newspaper press of the kingdom, I agreed to undertake the editors.h.i.+p of their projected newspaper, the _Witness_. Save for the intense interest with which I regarded the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I believed, by the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have induced me to take a step so fraught, as I thought at the time, with peril and discomfort. For full twenty years I had never been engaged in a quarrel on my own account: all my quarrels, either directly or indirectly, were ecclesiastical ones;--I had fought for my minister, or for my brother paris.h.i.+oners: and fain now would I have lived at peace with all men; but the editors.h.i.+p of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a portion of its duties, war with all the world. I held, besides--not aware how very much the spur of necessity quickens production--that its twice-a-week demands would fully occupy all my time, and that I would have to resign, in consequence, my favourite pursuit--geology. I had once hoped, too--though of late years the hope had been becoming faint--to leave some little mark behind me in the literature of my country; but the last remains of the expectation had now to be resigned. The newspaper editor writes in sand when the flood is coming in. If he but succeed in influencing opinion for the present, he must be content to be forgotten in the future. But believing the cause to be a good one, I prepared for a life of strife, toil, and comparative obscurity. In counting the cost, I very considerably exaggerated it; but I trust I may say that, in all honesty, and with no sinister aim, or prospect of worldly advantage, I _did_ count it, and fairly undertook to make the full sacrifice which the cause demanded.

It was arranged that our new paper should start with the new twelvemonth (1840); and I meanwhile returned to Cromarty, to fulfil my engagements with the bank till the close of its financial year, which in the Commercial Bank offices takes place at the end of autumn. Shortly after my return, Dr. Chalmers visited the place on the last of his Church Extension journeys; and I heard, for the first time, that most impressive of modern orators address a public meeting, and had a curious ill.u.s.tration of the power which his "_deep mouth_" could communicate to pa.s.sages little suited, one might suppose, to call forth the vehemency of his eloquence. In ill.u.s.trating one of his points, he quoted from my "Memoir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in description of a kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigour and force. The extraordinary impressiveness which he communicated to the pa.s.sage served to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be represented by their written speeches. Admirable as the published sermons and addresses of Dr. Chalmers are, they impart no adequate idea of that wonderful power and impressiveness in which he excelled all other British preachers.[19]

I had been introduced to the Doctor in Edinburgh a few weeks before; but on this occasion I saw rather more of him. He examined with curious interest my collection of geological specimens, which already contained not a few valuable fossils that could be seen nowhere else; and I had the pleasure of spending the greater part of a day in visiting in his company, by boat, some of the more striking scenes of the Cromarty Sutors. I had long looked up to Chalmers as, on the whole, the man of largest mind which the Church of Scotland had ever produced;--not more intense or practical than Knox, but broader of faculty; nor yet fitted by nature or accomplishment to make himself a more enduring name in literature than Robertson, but greatly n.o.bler in sentiment, and of a larger grasp of general intellect. With any of our other Scottish ministers it might be invidious to compare him; seeing that some of the ablest of them are, like Henderson, little more than mere historic portraits drawn by their contemporaries, but whose true intellectual measure cannot, from the lack of the necessary materials on which to form a judgment, be now taken anew; and that many of the others employed fine faculties in work, literary and ministerial, which, though important in its consequences, was scarce less ephemeral in its character than even the labours of the newspaper editor. The mind of Chalmers was emphatically a many-sided one. Few men ever came into friendly contact with him, who did not find in it, if they had really anything good in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited themselves; and I had been long struck by that union which his intellect exhibited of a comprehensive philosophy with a true poetic faculty, very exquisite in quality, though dissociated from what Wordsworth terms the "accomplishment of verse." I had not a little pleasure in contemplating him on this occasion as the _poet_ Chalmers.

The day was calm and clear; but there was a considerable swell rolling in from the German Ocean, on which our little vessel rose and fell, and which sent the surf high against the rocks. The suns.h.i.+ne played amid the broken crags a-top, and amid the foliage of an overhanging wood; or caught, half-way down, some projecting tuft of ivy; but the faces of the steeper precipices were brown in the shade; and where the wave roared in deep caves beneath, all was dark and chill. There were several members of the party who attempted engaging the Doctor in conversation; but he was in no conversational mood. It would seem as if the words addressed to his ear failed at first to catch his attention, and that, with a painful courtesy, he had to gather up their meaning from the remaining echoes, and to reply to them doubtfully and monosyllabically, at the least possible expense of mind. His face wore, meanwhile, an air of dreamy enjoyment. He was busy, evidently, among the crags and bosky hollows, and would have enjoyed himself more had he been alone. In the middle of one n.o.ble precipice, that reared its tall pine-crested brow more than a hundred yards overhead, there was a bush-covered shelf of considerable size, but wholly inaccessible; for the rock dropped sheer into it from above, and then sank perpendicularly from its outer edge to the beach below; and the insulated shelf, in its green unapproachable solitude, had evidently caught his eye. _It_ was the scene, I said--taking the direction of his eye as the antecedent for the _it_,--it was the scene, says tradition, of a sad tragedy during the times of the persecution of Charles. A renegade chaplain, rather weak than wicked, threw himself, in a state of wild despair, over the precipice above; and his body, intercepted in its fall by that shelf, lay unburied among the bushes for years after, until it had bleached into a dry and whitened skeleton. Even as late as the last age, the shelf continued to retain the name of the "Chaplain's Lair." I found that my communication, chiming in with his train of cogitation at the time, caught both his ear and mind; and his reply, though brief, was expressive of the gratification which its s.n.a.t.c.h of incident had conveyed. As our skiff sped on a few oar-lengths more, we disturbed a flock of sea-gulls, that had been sporting in the suns.h.i.+ne over a shoal of sillocks; and a few of them winged their way to a jutting crag that rose immediately beside the shelf. I saw Chalmers' eye gleam as it followed them. "Would you not like, Sir," he said, addressing himself to my minister, who sat beside him--"Would you not like to be a sea-gull? I think _I_ would. Sea-gulls are free of the three elements--earth, air, and water. These birds were sailing but half a minute since without boat, at once angling and dining, and now they are already rusticating in the Chaplain's Lair. I think I could enjoy being a sea-gull." I saw the Doctor once afterwards in a similar mood. When on a visit to him in Burnt-island, in the following year, I marked, on approaching the sh.o.r.e by boat, a solitary figure stationed on the sward-crested trap-rock which juts into the sea immediately below the town; and after the time spent in landing and walking round to the spot, there was the solitary figure still, standing motionless as when first seen. It was Chalmers--the same expression of dreamy enjoyment impressed on his features as I had witnessed in the little skiff, and with his eyes turned on the sea and the opposite land. It was a lovely morning. A faint breeze had just begun to wrinkle in detached belts and patches the mirror-like blackness of the previous calm, in which the broad Firth had lain sleeping since day-break; and the sunlight danced on the new-raised wavelets; while a thin long wreath of blue mist, which seemed coiling its tail like a snake round the distant Inchkeith, was slowly raising the folds of its dragon-like neck and head from off the Scottish capital, dim in the distance, and unveiling fortalice, and tower, and spire, and the n.o.ble curtain of blue hills behind. And there was Chalmers, evidently enjoying the exquisiteness of the scene, as only by the true poet scenery can be enjoyed. Those striking metaphors which so abound in his writings, and which so often, without apparent effort, lay the material world before the reader, show how thoroughly he must have drunk in the beauties of nature; the images retained in his mind became, like words to the ordinary man, the signs by which he thought, and, as such, formed an important element in the power of his thinking. I have seen his Astronomical Discourses disparagingly dealt with by a slim and meagre critic, as if they had been but the chapters of a mere treatise on astronomy--a thing which, of course, any ordinary man could write--mayhap even the critic himself. The Astronomical Discourses, on the other hand, no one could have written save Chalmers. Nominally a series of sermons, they in reality represent, and in the present century form perhaps the only worthy representatives of, that school of philosophic poetry to which, in ancient literature, the work of Lucretius belonged, and of which, in the literature of our own country, the "Seasons" of Thomson, and Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination,"

furnish adequate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating critic who would deal with the "Seasons" as if they formed merely the journal of a naturalist, or by the poem of Akenside as if it were simply a metaphysical treatise.

The autumn of this year brought me an unexpected but very welcome visitor, in my old Marcus' Cave friend Finlay; and when I visited all my former haunts, to take leave of them ere I quitted the place for the scene of my future labours, I had him to accompany me. Though for many years a planter in Jamaica, his affections were still warm, and his literary tastes unchanged. He was a writer, as of old, of sweet simple verses, and as sedulous a reader as ever; and, had time permitted, we found we could have kindled fires together in the caves, as we had done more than twenty years before, and have ranged the sh.o.r.es for sh.e.l.l-fish and crabs. He had had, however, in pa.s.sing through life, his full share of its cares and sorrows. A young lady to whom he had been engaged in early youth had perished at sea, and he had remained single for her sake. He had to struggle, too, in his business relations, with the embarra.s.sments incident to a sinking colony; and though a West Indian climate was beginning to tell on his const.i.tution, his circ.u.mstances though tolerably easy, were not such as to permit his permanent residence in Scotland. He returned in the following year to Jamaica; and I saw, some time after, in a Kingston paper, an intimation of his election to the Colonial House of Representatives, and the outline of a well-toned sensible address to his const.i.tuents, in which he urged that the sole hope of the colony lay in the education and mental elevation of its negro population to the standard of the people at home. I have been informed that the latter part of his life was, like that of many of the Jamaica planters in their altered circ.u.mstances, pretty much a struggle; and his health at length breaking down, in a climate little favourable to Europeans, he died about three years ago--with the exception of my friend of the Doocot Cave, now Free Church minister of Nigg, the last of my Marcus' Cave companions. Their remains lie scattered over half the globe.

I closed my connexion with the bank at the termination of its financial year; gave a few weeks very sedulously to geology, during which I was fortunate enough to find specimens on which Aga.s.siz has founded two of his fossil species; got, at parting, an elegant breakfast-service of plate from a kind and numerous circle of friends, of all shades of politics and both sides of the Church; and was entertained at a public dinner, at which I attempted a speech, that got on but indifferently, though it looked quite well enough in my friend Mr. Carruthers' report, and which was, I suppose, in some sort apologized for by the fiddlers, who struck up at its close, "A man's a man for a' that." It was, I felt, not the least gratifying part of the entertainment, that old Uncle Sandy was present, and that his health was cordially drunk by the company in the recognised character of my best and earliest friend. And then, taking leave of my mother and uncle, of my respected minister, and my honoured superior in the bank, Mr. Ross, I set out for Edinburgh, and in a few days after was seated at the editorial desk--a point at which, for the present, the story of my education must terminate. I wrote for my paper during the first twelvemonth a series of geological chapters, which were fortunate enough to attract the notice of the geologists of the British a.s.sociation, a.s.sembled that year at Glasgow, and which, in the collected form, compose my little work on the Old Red Sandstone. The paper itself rose rapidly in circulation, till it ultimately attained to its place among what are known as our first-cla.s.s Scottish newspapers; and of its subscribers, perhaps a more considerable proportion of the whole are men who have received a university education, than can be reckoned by any other Scotch journal of the same number of readers. And during the course of the first three years, my employers doubled my salary. I am sensible, however, that these are but small achievements.

In looking back upon my youth, I see, methinks, a wild fruit tree, rich in leaf and blossom; and it is mortifying enough to mark how very few of the blossoms have set, and how diminutive and imperfectly formed the fruit is into which even the productive few have been developed. A right use of the opportunities of instruction afforded me in early youth would have made me a scholar ere my twenty-fifth year, and have saved to me at least ten of the best years of life--years which were spent in obscure and humble occupations. But while my story must serve to show the evils which result from truant carelessness in boyhood, and that what was sport to the young lad may a.s.sume the form of serious misfortune to the man, it may also serve to show, that much may be done by after diligence to retrieve an early error of this kind--that life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study--and that the man who keeps his eyes and his mind open will always find fitting, though, it may be, hard schoolmasters, to speed him on in his lifelong education.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Thomas Hog of Kiltearn. See "Scots Worthies" or the cheap-publication volumes of the Free Church for 1846.

[18] Peter Clark and Michael Tod were the only individuals who, in a population of three thousand souls, attached their signatures to the _call_ of the obnoxious presentee, Mr. Young, in the famous Auchterarder case.

[19] The following is the pa.s.sage which was honoured on this occasion by Chalmers, and which told, in his hands, with all the effect of the most powerful acting:--"Saunders Macivor, the mate of the 'Elizabeth,' was a grave and somewhat hard-favoured man, powerful in bone and muscle, even after he had considerably turned his sixtieth year, and much respected for his inflexible integrity and the depth of his religious feelings.

Both the mate and his devout wife were especial favourites with Mr.

Porteous of Kilmuir--a minister of the same cla.s.s as the Pedens, Renwicks, and Cargils of a former age; and on one occasion when the sacrament was dispensed in his parish, and Saunders was absent on one of his Continental voyages, Mrs. Macivor was an inmate of the manse. A tremendous storm burst out in the night-time, and the poor woman lay awake, listening in utter terror to the fearful roarings of the wind, as it howled in the chimneys, and shook the cas.e.m.e.nts and the doors. At length, when she could lie still no longer, she arose, and crept along the pa.s.sage to the door of the minister's chamber. 'O, Mr. Porteous,'

she said, 'Mr. Porteous, do ye no hear that?--and poor Saunders on his way back frae Holland! O, rise, rise, and ask the strong help o' your Master!' The minister accordingly rose, and entered his closet. The 'Elizabeth' at this critical moment was driving onwards through spray and darkness, along the northern sh.o.r.es of the Moray Firth. The fearful skerries of Shandwick, where so many gallant vessels have perished, were close at hand; and the increasing roll of the sea showed the gradual shallowing of the water Macivor and his old townsman, Robert Hossack, stood together at the binnacle. An immense wave came rolling behind, and they had but barely time to clutch to the nearest hold, when it broke over them half-mast high, sweeping spars, bulwarks, cordage, all before it, in its course. It pa.s.sed, but the vessel rose not. Her deck remained buried in a sheet of foam, and she seemed settling down by the head.

There was a frightful pause. First, however, the bowsprit and the b.u.t.ts of the windla.s.s began to emerge--next the forecastle--the vessel seemed as if shaking herself from the load; and then the whole deck appeared, as she went tilting over the next wave. 'There are still more mercies in store for us,' said Macivor, addressing his companion: 'she floats still' 'O, Saunders, Saunders!' exclaimed Robert, 'there was surely some G.o.d's soul at work for us, or she would never have _cowed_ you.'"

_Edinburgh: Printed by M'Farlane & Erskine._