Part 18 (1/1)

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 ed with a second A remarkable case of intrusion had occurred in the district rathermy week's labours in the bank, I set out for the house of a friend in a neighbouring parish on a Saturday evening, that ISabbath, 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 passage entire, as properly a part of h character connected with this northern parish For more than a thousand years it had formed part of the patrie for its great enius; and through whose influence the light of the Reformation had been introduced into this re 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 God whose naraphy occupies no small space in the recorded history of her 'worthies'--had rendered hiion of the tie ymen of the Church[17] I approached the parish froh which I passed, soht, in huge titanic masses, that seemed to soften their purple and blue in the clear sunshi+ne, to the delicate tone of the deep sky beyond; and I could see the yet unwasted snows of winter glittering, in little detached ion were feathered ood; a forest of led oaks and larches, which still blended the tender softness of spring with the full foliage of su plain beloas laid out into fields,with the yet unshot corn; and a noble are for nearly twentyheadlands, and opening in the east to the ateway of rock But the little groups which I encountered at every turning of the path, as they journeyed, with all the sober, well-, 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, froht 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 ed, robust fory firave 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 roups, 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 ca in a contrary direction A Secessionup in the parish, and these forrass and weeds, leads from the main road to the parish church It ith difficulty I could trace it, and there were none to direct round, thickly sprinkled with graves and tombstones, surrounds the church It is a quiet, solitary spot, of great beauty, lying beside the sea-shore; and as service had not yet co the stones, and deciphering the inscriptions I could trace in the rudehistory of the district The older tablets, grey and shaggy 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 theinfluence 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 beloere ”honest men, of blameless character, and who feared God” 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 ”GREATMANOFGodANDFAITHFULMINISTEROF JESUSCHRIST,” 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 e conferred upon the influence of his own character arave in the threshold of the church, that they ard hiht speak to them as they passed 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:--”THISSTONESHALLBEARWITNESS

AGAINSTTHEPARIshi+ONERSOFKILTEARNIFTHEYBRINGANEUNGodLY

MINISTERINHERE” Could the i 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 clergyht 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, coation I wrapped myself up in my plaid, and sat down; and the service went on in the usual course; but it sounded inalyman had reached the middle of his discourse, which he read in an unimpassioned, ation had fallen asleep; and the drowsy, listless expression of the others showed that, for every good purpose, they ht have been asleep too And Sabbath after Sabbath has this unfortunate one the same tiresome round, and with exactly the saarded 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 ofwould have been constituted minister of Auchterarder It is well, too, to learn, that there may be vacancies in the Church where no blank appears in the Almanac”

OnMonday, I found a letter froNon-Intrusionists And so after describing, in the given extract, the scene which I had just witnessed, and coh, and saw for the first ti 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 Ishainst alreed to undertake the editorshi+p of their projected newspaper, the _Witness_ Save for the intense interest hich I regarded the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I believed, by the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have induced ht at the time, with peril and discoed 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 parishi+oners: and fain noould I have lived at peace with all men; but the editorshi+p of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a portion of its duties, ith 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 n, in consequence, h of late years the hope had been beco faint--to leave some little mark behind me in the literature of my country; but the last rened The newspaper editor writes in sand when the flood is co opinion for the present, hethe cause to be a good one, I prepared for a life of strife, toil, and co the cost, I very considerably exaggerated it; but I trust I may say that, in all honesty, and with no sinister aie, I _did_ count it, and fairly undertook to make the full sacrifice which the cause deed that our new paper should start with the neelvemonth (1840); and I ements 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 , and had a curious illustration of the pohich his ”_deep ht suppose, to call forth the vehe one of his points, he quoted from my ”Memoir of William Forsyth” a brief anecdote, set in description of a kind whichfroour and force The extraordinary ie served to show reat 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 feeeks before; but on this occasion I saw rather more of hiical 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 co scenes of the Cro looked up to Chalest 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 acco nareatly nobler in sentieneral intellect With any of our other Scottishthat 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, froment, be now taken anew; and that many of the others employed fine faculties in work, literary and h 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 hiood in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited the 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 ”accomplish him on this occasion as the _poet_ Chalmers

The day was cal in from the German Ocean, on which our little vessel rose and fell, and which sent the surf high against the rocks The sunshi+ne played ae of an overhanging wood; or caught, half-way down, so 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 severalthe 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 theirechoes, and to reply to them doubtfully and monosyllabically, at the least possible expense of mind His face wore, meanwhile, an air of dreas and bosky hollows, and would have enjoyed himself more had he been alone In the middle of one noble 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 froe 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 tiade 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 a 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 itation at the tih brief, was expressive of the gratification which its snatch of incident had conveyed As our skiff sped on a few oar-lengths ulls, that had been sporting in the sunshi+ne over a shoal of sillocks; and a few of the that rose ileam as it followed the himself to my minister, who sat beside hiull? I think _I_ would Sea-gulls are free of the three ele but half a , 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 similaryear, I ure stationed on the sward-crested trap-rock which juts into the sea i 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 un to wrinkle in detached belts and patches the mirror-like blackness of the previous cal since day-break; and the sunlight danced on the new-raised wavelets; while a thin long wreath of blueits tail like a snake round the distant Inchkeith, was slowly raising the folds of its dragon-like neck and head fro fortalice, and tower, and spire, and the noble curtain of blue hills behind And there was Chal the exquisiteness of the scene, as only by the true poet scenery can be enjoyed Those striking s, and which so often, without apparent effort, lay the hly he es retained in his ns by which he thought, and, as such, for I have seen his Astronore critic, as if they had been but the chapters of awhich, 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 Thoination,”

furnish adequate exa critic ould 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 ht 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 h for many years a planter in Jamaica, his affections were still wared He was a writer, as of old, of sweet simple verses, and as sedulous a reader as ever; and, had tiether in the caves, as we had done ed the shores for shell-fish and crabs He had had, however, in passing through life, his full share of its cares and sorrows A young lady to whoed in early youth had perished at sea, and he had rele, too, in his business relations, with the eh a West Indian cli to tell on his constitution, his circuh tolerably easy, were not such as to permit his per year to Jaston paper, an intimation of his election to the Colonial House of Representatives, and the outline of a well-toned sensible address to his constituents, in which he urged that the sole hope of the colony lay in the education and ro 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 circuth breaking down, in a climate little favourable to Europeans, he died about three years ago--with the exception of , the last of my Marcus' Cave colobe

I closed my connexion with the bank at the terave a feeeks very sedulously to geology, during which I was fortunate enough to find speciassiz 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 atteh it looked quite well enough in my friend Mr Carruthers' report, and which was, I suppose, in soized for by the fiddlers, who struck up at its close, ”A ratifying part of the entertainment, that old Uncle Sandy was present, and that his health was cordially drunk by the conised character ofleave 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 ofthe first twelveical chapters, which were fortunate enough to attract the notice of the geologists of the British association, asseow, and which, in the collected form, compose my little work on the Old Red Sandstone The paper itself rose rapidly in circulation, till it ulti what are known as our first-class 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 sa the course of the first three years, my employers doubled my salary I am sensible, however, that these are but s back upon my youth, I see, methinks, a wild fruit tree, rich in leaf and blossoh 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 as sport to the young lad may assume the form of serious misfortune to the man, it ence 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 h, iteducation

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Tho 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 fa is the passage which was honoured on this occasion by Chalmers, and which told, in his hands, with all the effect of the :--”Saunders Macivor, the rave and somewhat hard-favoured man, powerful in bone and muscle, even after he had considerably turned his sixtieth year, and rity and the depth of his religious feelings

Both the mate and his devout ere especial favourites with Mr

Porteous of Kilmuir--a ils of a fore; 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 inht-ti in utter terror to the fearful roarings of the wind, as it howled in the chith, when she could lie still no longer, she arose, and crept along the passage 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 ly rose, and entered his closet The 'Elizabeth' at this criticalthe northern shores of the Moray Firth The fearful skerries of Shandwick, where so allant 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 townsether at the binnacle An i behind, and they had but barely time to clutch to the nearest hold, when it broke over thee, all before it, in its course It passed, but the vessel rose not Her deck re down by the head

There was a frightful pause First, however, the bowsprit and the butts of the windlass began to e herself from the load; and then the whole deck appeared, as she went tilting over the next wave 'There are stillhis companion: 'she floats still' 'O, Saunders, Saunders!' exclaimed Robert, 'there was surely some God's soul at work for us, or she would never have _cowed_ you'”

_Edinburgh: Printed by M'Farlane & Erskine_