NORMAN
MACLEOD

[4]

[5]

The designs and ornaments of this
volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown,
and the printing from the press of
Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.

NOTE

My cordial gratitude is due to Mr. William Isbister—’best
of smokers’—for allowing me (and that with
so good a spirit) to quote from the Memoir of Norman
Macleod. The present piece will not have been written
in vain, as the saying is, if it sends readers to that
entertaining quarry.

I have also to thank Mr. J. C. Erskine, Hope Street,
Glasgow (’Be calm, Erskine’), for furnishing me with
certain letters never before published, specimens of
which will be found in the text.

The extracts from the Queen’s books are made with
Her Majesty’s gracious permission.

J. W.

Manse of Drainie, April 1897.

NORMAN MACLEOD

INTRODUCTION

If any modern minister has a place, though it were the
least, among the worthies of his nation, he must have
been a surprising personality. When Scottish life was
based on Calvinism, and there was a Stuart deforming
the Kirk at the sword’s point, a preacher might rise to
be a leader of the people, if not a virtual ruler in the
kingdom. From Knox to Carstairs the line of famous
Scots (such as they are) is black with Geneva gowns.
But for two hundred years the Protestant spirit has gone
all to democracy and the march of intellect, while the
clergy have stood by the vacant symbol, exiled—

‘From the dragon-warder’d fountains
Where the springs of knowledge are,

From the watchers on the mountains
And the bright and morning star.’

So the Church has come down in the world. Her
affairs are her own, and subject to journalistic irony;
with few exceptions her leaders, for all the noise they[10]
may make in their day and generation, have only to die
to be forgotten. One calls to mind certain men who
were not in holy orders, mere sages or poets, and knows
them for the real teachers of their times. In Norman
Macleod the hero as priest reappears, but at some cost
to the clerical tradition. Making little of dogma, and
less of rites, he went deep down into the common heart
for his ground of appeal, and on his lips love, divine and
human, was a tale to move the philosopher and win the
crowd. His work in the world was to make men good
after the pattern of Jesus, and to that work he brought
a burning belief, a boundless sympathy, and rare
oratorical and literary gifts. One in the throng at the
funeral of this great minister was heard to say, ‘There
goes Norman Macleod. If he had done no more than
what he did for my soul, he would shine as the stars for
ever.’ And the like might have been confessed by
thousands; nay, many who never heard his voice nor
saw his face were better for the rumour of such a man.
His name went from the Church to the nation, and
over all English-speaking lands; and with that of
Chalmers has endured.

CHAPTER I

1812-1837

DESCENT—BOYHOOD—STUDENT YEARS

Nothing astonished Dr. Johnson so much, when he was
roving in the Hebrides, as to find men who lived in
huts and quoted Latin. These were the ‘gentlemen
tacksmen,’ and no more remarkable tenantry was ever
seen on any soil. What they did for agriculture I
cannot say; as much, perhaps, as their destroyers, who
made a solitude and called it sheep: but they had
bread to eat and raiment to put on (though they
might sometimes sleep with their feet in the mire), and
their praise is that they sent forth a splendid race to the
fields of honour. Their sons, scant of cash, yet with the
air of nobles, thronged the colleges, nor was there any
career in which laurels were not won by men from the
mountains and the isles. Picture some judge or general
gazing at the ruins of a shieling, and then sneer at the
old Highland tacksmen. From this class Norman
Macleod was descended. His great-grandfather, the
earliest ancestor of whom we have any record, lived in[12]
Skye, at Swordale, near Dunvegan Castle, about the
middle of last century. The tradition is that he was a
good man and the first in his neighbourhood to
introduce family worship. His dearest wish was to see
his first-born a minister of the Church of Scotland. The
estate of the Laird of Macleod was then a sort of feudal
Utopia, in which the ruling idea was the advancement
of the youth. There was a conspiracy of education.
After the schoolmaster (a good hand at the classics for
certain) came a college-bred tutor, who was maintained
by a number of families in common. Then the Chief
made interest at the University for his lads, and in the
vacations entertained the professors at his castle, where
they met their students as fellow-guests. No wonder so
many notable lines sprang from Skye, if, as was said,
these students were all gentlemen.

Norman Macleod, Swordale’s eldest son, having
finished his studies for the Church, acted for some
time as tutor in his native district. Thus he was at
home in September 1773, and, being a favourite at
Dunvegan—you understand? Yes, he met Dr. Johnson.
‘And he used to tell, with great glee, how he found
him alone in the drawing-room before dinner, poring
over some volume on the sofa, and how the doctor,
before rising to greet him kindly, dashed to the ground
the volume he had been reading, exclaiming in a loud
and angry voice, “The author is an ass!”’ In the
following year this young man was preferred to a parish[13]
which to name is to spring all the romance of the
Highlands,—Morven. Upwards of six feet in height,
and of a noble countenance, the stranger from Skye
would be welcome as at least ‘a pretty man’; but was
there none, in that land of seers, to foretell how this
minister should reign in Morven, and his son after him,
each for half a century or more, and how he should be
the founder of a clerical dynasty that would last for
ever? Norman the First presents a rare figure in an
age in which the clergy were noted for anything but
ecclesiastical zeal. He had all the culture that was
going, but did not prefer Horace to David, nor Virgil to
Isaiah, and could hate fanaticism without reducing
religion to a cauld clash of morality. He was the ideal
of a Highland minister, daring the stormy strait and the
misty mountain, swaying the wild Celtic heart by tender
or fiery appeals, and drawing the poor and the troubled
to his door from the remotest glens. The living was of
the smallest, but he acted upon the precept, ‘Do what
you can, and leave the rest to God.’ He had a large
family of sons and daughters, and there were various
workers and dependents settled on the glebe. So at
Fiunary, above the rocky shore of the Sound of Mull
(not far from the inn where the Lad with the Silver
Button had to go from the fireside to his bed, wading
over the shoes), there was a little community by itself,
living a beautiful and wholesome life. The glebe was a
scene of cheerful industry, and, labour done, the bagpipes[14]
would be skirling. In the manse there might be a tutor
and a governess, but the daughters were their own
dressmakers, and the sons worked in their father’s fields.
But the chief part of their education was play; they all
rejoiced in the open air, and Morven entered into their
blood. The boys went fishing and sailing, hunted the
wild cat and the otter, and roamed the heather in quest
of game. By the winter hearth what singing of Gaelic
songs! The minister himself played the fiddle, and
liked to set his children dancing of a night. In this
family religion was no formal lesson: it was the
atmosphere they breathed.

One summer day in the closing year of last century,
General Macleod, chief of the clan, visited the manse of
Fiunary, and took away with him to Dunvegan his young
namesake, the minister’s eldest son, Norman the Second.
Nothing could have been more delightful to the boy, who
cared little for study, preferring any day the seas and the
hills, and was already at sixteen a Highland patriot, with
his head full of the legends of that old castle in the
shadow of which his ancestors were born. The reception
by the clan, especially the piping of a Macrimmon, was
never to be forgotten. During his stay at Dunvegan,
where he was treated like a son, he met many chiefs,
some of them distinguished soldiers home from the wars.
So he returned to Morven more a Highlander than ever,
and with a double measure of the martial spirit that
was then abroad in his native county. He joined the[15]
Argyllshire Fencibles, and rose to the rank of corporal!
If this is an anti-climax, suppose that he was moved
less by military ardour than the love of manly exercises.
At all events it was as an athlete that he chiefly excelled
in his youth. The glory of his college days was that in
physical contests he alone could rival John Wilson, who
was to be known as Christopher North. And remembering
the influences by which his character was moulded
at home, have we not here the promise of a fresh type
of the Christian priest? After serving for about two
years as assistant at Kilbrandon in Lorn, he became in
1808 minister of Campbeltown. Hardly was he settled
in his place when a little crisis occurred in which his
mettle was revealed. The sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper was at hand, and Macleod thought it necessary
to have services in the open air as well as in the church.
His fellow-presbyters, all but one, refused to assist him
in what they regarded as juvenile folly. Nothing
daunted, the young minister had a tent set up, and on
the Sunday morning preached to four thousand. In
the church he held five communion services, while his
friend in turn officiated at the tent. Towards the close,
when the church was crammed,—passages, stairs, and
all,—some of the fathers and brethren appeared, but
their proposals of help were declined. In a short time
his popularity had become such that, when there was
a rumour of his going away, the dissenters offered
to contribute, equally with his own people, for the[16]
augmentation of his stipend. He was to rise to honour
in the Church, and be adored throughout the Highlands;
but long before he died he was effaced by his son.

At Aros, in Mull, lived Mr. Maxwell, the Duke of
Argyll’s chamberlain, a person of note in his day and
place, and a fine man at home. He traced his descent
to a youth who had fled from the Border, all the way to
Kintyre, before the soldiers of Claverhouse; and in his
choice of reading (for one thing) he betrayed the Lowland
strain. His daughter Agnes passed her early
girlhood in Knapdale, where she was educated by old
songs and ballads, and the rapture that was on the lonely
shore. For the rest (not to speak of the inevitable
finishing in Edinburgh), imagine Aros such another home
school as Fiunary. The two houses stood facing each
other on opposite sides of the Sound, and the minister’s
son—Leander in a boat—married the chamberlain’s
daughter.

The eldest child of this pair, the third Norman,
who may be called Norman the Great, was born in
Campbeltown on June 3, 1812. From his earliest
years he was remarkable for ardent affections, the eager
interest he took in everything, and the humour and
imagination with which he seized his little world. Talking
and telling stories at the nursery fire, his tongue
never lay. When only six he could mimic various
characters of the town; and, later, he had an attic fitted
up, in which he and his companions acted plays. For[17]
study he had no aptitude, and at the burgh school the
classics were ill taught; but he entered with a will into
the life of the boyish community, making passionate
friendships, contending with the ‘shore-boys,’—those
raiders of the playground,—and heading expeditions
against the French, and chasing pirates in a punt. But
his great delight as a boy was to visit the vessels at the
quay; he would spend hours on board, learning the
name and the use of everything, and consorting with the
sailors,—all in a world of romance. Other savours of
life on the ocean wave he had in society, which
abounded in naval officers, some attached to the
revenue cruisers, some ‘half-pays’ who had, perhaps,
fought with Nelson. There also were two or three
retired soldiers of distinction, and as many aristocratic
spinsters (drifts from the county), living on their
annuities, and the sheriff with his top-boots and
queue. These, with several old families of the place,
and the usual dignitaries of a burgh, were the quality;
and, cut off as they were from the rest of the world
(Campbeltown being then as an ocean isle for isolation),
they make a quaint picture, like a set in some ancient
novel. Norman mixed in this company, and the heroes
of the services, and the queer old maids—he saw them
every one, and was glad. Not less did he mark the
fishermen’s sons, with their ‘codlike faces and huge
hands like flat-fish,’ or the fools and beggars that were
the heroes of the streets. This varied and stirring[18]
experience, which was of inestimable account in the
making of the man, fell in with the ideal of training that
had been set at Fiunary.

But in Campbeltown the boy could not grow up to be
a Highlander after his father’s heart; so in his twelfth
year he was sent to Morven. The old minister was now
gone, and his youngest son was reigning in his stead.
Norman was boarded with the parish schoolmaster, his
business being to learn Gaelic and get acquainted with
the peasantry. Many an evening he spent in some
hut,—the floor the bare earth, the ceiling a roost for
hens; around the fire (which was in the middle of the
apartment, the smoke escaping through a hole in the
roof) a group would gather,—the lasses knitting, the lads
busking hooks; and, heedless of the storm, they made
the hours fly, telling tales and singing songs of their
land. He gloried in the shore, and was to be seen
perched upon a rock, fishing the deep pools. With his
relatives, again (who claimed him when the school-week
was over), he wandered on moor and mountain, or
if they went sailing in the Sound, they would sometimes
camp for the night on some distant island, and see the
loveliest dawns.

Here the romance of Norman’s boyhood came to an
end; he was to exchange Morven, not for ships and
sailors, but for a far other environment in the Lowlands.
In 1825 his father was presented by the Crown, on the
recommendation of all the principal heritors, to Campsie,[19]
a parish in Stirlingshire, within twelve miles of Glasgow.
The minister accepted the living for the sake of his
family, but it cost him some pangs to leave his congregation.
‘I preached my farewell sermon,’ he says
in his fragment of autobiography, ‘and could I have
known beforehand the scene which I then witnessed,
and the feelings that I myself experienced, I do believe
that no inducement could have tempted me to leave
them.’ In his new parish there was a large manufacturing
population; yet he might almost have forgotten that
he was not in the Highlands, the rural part being a
mountainous wild, and the manse near that goal of
excursions, Campsie Glen. The church was a wretched
little structure, and away in the country; but the
minister set to work, and, after much trouble, had a
new one built in the town. For the sake of his
countrymen, of whom there were many in the parish,
he held special services in their native tongue; and it
was during this period of his ministry that he began his
career as a literary apostle to the Gaelic-speaking race.

Of Norman as a boy in Campsie there is nothing
to tell, except that he attended the parish school; nay,
and there is a letter in which he complains, with a
twinkle in his eye, of having salmon and legs of roasted
lamb crammed down his throat. ‘O my dear mamma,
it is only now that a fond mother is missed, when
dangers and misfortunes assail us.’ Hardly less meagre
is the record of his early college life; indeed, before we[20]
get a full view of the student he is a man, and the
strange thing is not that he was undistinguished in his
classes, but that (so far as appears) he was not even
interested in the academic scene. In 1827, when he
entered the University, the old College of Glasgow—now
a railway station—and the old High Street—now a sanitary
thoroughfare—were as they had been in the days
of Andrew Melville,—the one with its hoary walls and
turrets, the other with its picturesque narrows; and in
the grounds there was still that ‘sort of wilderness’
where the duel of the two Osbaldistones was stopped
by Rob Roy. But Norman, the most voluminous of
diarists, has no word of the history or romance of the
place; nor of his fellow-students, though he might have
remarked one Tait (already with the grave brows
befitting an archbishop), and a certain youth in homespun,
with wild eyes and flaming hair, George Gilfillan;
nor yet of his professors, among whom at least three
were worthy of note,—Sir Daniel Sandford, the brilliant
Grecian and fervid orator, Robert Buchanan, of whom,
under the name of ‘Logic Bob,’ reminiscences may be
heard to this day in manses, and one less distinguished
in his place, but likely to be remembered longest,
because he was the friend and biographer of Burns,
Josiah Walker. Macleod was nicknamed ‘the sailor’;
he wore the dress and affected the gait of a Jack tar.
For learning, he dabbled in science and read poetry,
especially Shakespeare and Wordsworth. At home,[21]
whither he repaired on the Fridays, he was all fun and
frolic, and carried mimicry so far that he would speak in
any character but his own. ‘Cease your buffoonery,’ his
father wrote, and (unkindest cut of all) ‘I was much
pleased with the manner of the Stewart boys.’ But this
humour was an extravagant form of that sympathy which
was to make him great. Good Stewart boys! ‘on’y,’ as
Long John says, ‘where are they?’ In after years
Macleod bitterly regretted his neglect of scholarship,
feeling himself at a certain disadvantage in an age
of intellectual ferment. But every man to his vocation,
and that of Norman Macleod was the therapeutics of
religion. For that he was unconsciously preparing
himself by his absorption in the panorama of existence.
He knew he was to be a minister, but he could
never have been the man his country admired, had
his boyish thoughts been focused on his destination,
and not taken up with comrades, and the appearances
of life.

Soon he was to hear, in the lectures of Chalmers, a
trumpet call. Having finished the curriculum of Arts,
he proceeded in 1831 to the Divinity Hall at Edinburgh,
where, at the feet of the first of Scottish ministers and
men, he awoke to the seriousness and mystery of life, and
anticipated with joy his part in the evangelical crusade.
Chalmers, alike by his teaching and his character, was
singularly fitted to be the spiritual master of Macleod.
Almost at once they recognised each other for kindred[22]
natures, and the sympathy of the pupil was repaid
by the professor’s trust.

Another influence at this period went to deepen his
religious feelings, the death of a brother. He had that
passionate attachment to relatives in general which
marks the Celt, and between Norman and James there
had been a peculiar bond of affection. On the last
occasion of their meeting, Norman had engaged in
prayer (for the first time in company), and the invalid
had said, ‘I am so thankful, mother; Norman will be
a good man.’ The death of James was not only an
awful blow at the moment, it marks an epoch in the
other’s life. Immediately after the bereavement, Norman
wrote—’I know not, my own brother, whether you now
see me or not. If you know my heart, you will know
my love for you, and that in passing through this
pilgrimage, I shall never forget you, who accompanied
me so far.’ Nor did he ever forget; again and again,
and long years after, he recalled that pale face, and
thought of immortality.

On the recommendation of Chalmers, Macleod had
been appointed tutor to a young English gentleman, the
son of Henry Preston, of Moreby Hall, Yorkshire. In
the spring of 1834, at the close of his theological course
at Edinburgh, he went with his pupil to Weimar,
carrying letters for the ducal Court. These were from
Lady Vavasour, who had drilled him ‘how to speak to
Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess, sister to[23]
the late Empress of Russia.’ The Court of Weimar!
that was indeed a change. But there and thereabout
he was to be for a whole year, mixing in the very society
which, a few years before, had been adorned by Goethe.
‘There are indeed many advantages for young men
here,’ the seer wrote to Carlyle in 1828, ‘especially for
those of your own country. The Double-Court of the
reigning Grand Duke and the Hereditary Family, at
which they are always kindly and generously received,
constrains them by this mark of distinction to a refined
demeanour at social entertainments of various kinds.’
Imagine Norman waltzing at the State balls, dressed in
cocked hat and sword, with silk stockings and buckled
shoes, and haunting the gardens, the cafés, the theatres,
and the glorious park ‘where the nightingales never
ceased to sing.’ Nevertheless he kept his head, constituting
himself mentor (always a favourite rôle of
his) to the young English residents. As he observed
the German laxity he called for a new Luther, though
he condemned the contrary vice of the Church at
home, that would measure his piety by his reading a
newspaper on Sunday. He made excursions, one as far
as the Tyrol, in the course of which he visited the
picture galleries of Vienna, Munich, and Dresden. But
the great event of his life in Weimar was his falling in
love with the Court beauty,—’La Baronne,’ he calls
her,—which he did in a fashion of poetic worship,
worthy of a hero of romance or song. For years[24]
afterwards, let him hear old Weimar tunes upon the
piano, and his heart will overflow with thoughts that he
cannot utter; a German waltz, and his brain will reel.

In the autumn of 1835, after a residence of some
months at Moreby Hall, where he mingled with the
local squires, and met certain legislators fresh from
St. Stephen’s, he entered the Divinity Hall at Glasgow.
But he did not now cross the quadrangle as if it were
a ship’s deck. For one thing, he was no longer an idle
student, but rose at unearthly hours to grind, or if he
did not, his conscience put in for damages, which took
the form of pages of eloquent remorse. Besides, he
was a great handsome fellow, and, not to speak of his
inner life,—so vitalised by various experience,—he had
seen more than most Scottish students. Add his
conversational powers and boundless vivacity, and he
should be something of a lion in college society. He
became the leader of the Tories, and it was in that
capacity that he had his first taste of fame. At the
Scottish Universities there falls to be elected by the
students, once in three years, an honorary official called
the Lord Rector. The candidates are usually leaders in
the rival political camps. In Glasgow there seemed to
be no chance for a Tory,—men like Jeffrey, Brougham,
Cockburn, and Stanley having carried the day time
out of mind;—but in 1836, under Norman Macleod’s
leadership, the Whig tradition was broken by the
triumphant return of Sir Robert Peel. At the Peel[25]
Banquet, which is almost historical, as the rise of the
Tory tide dates from the oration delivered by the
honoured guest, Norman made his first public
appearance, replying to the toast of the Conservative
students. ‘I think I can see him now,’ says Principal
Shairp, ‘standing forth prominently conspicuous to the
whole vast assemblage, his dark hair, glossy as a black-cock’s
wing, massed over his forehead, the purple hue
of youth on his cheek.’ His speech was striking, and
impressed even Peel. Thus, if the first period of his
college career was obscure, the last ended in a blaze
of glory.

The family were now resident in Glasgow (his father
having been translated to St. Columba’s), and in the
house a number of young gentlemen, some of them
boarders, pursued their college studies under Norman’s
supervision. The scene of their work was ‘the coffee-room,’
and it was always a great moment when their
tutor burst in upon them from his own den, radiant
with life and joy. Among them was John Macintosh
and John Campbell Shairp. Macintosh had come from
Edinburgh with the laurels of first pupil of the New
Academy. In Glasgow College he was at the head
of all his classes, and his scholarship was not more
remarkable than his piety. He was the sort of boy
that takes all the prizes, including the prize for good
conduct. As for Shairp, there is no one with a knowledge
of the best Scotsmen of the last generation but[26]
reveres and loves the memory of that gifted and high-souled
man. Though Macleod was more impressed by
the saintly Macintosh, he found in Shairp, owing to the
wider range of their mutual sympathies, a fitter companion.
They were both Wordsworthians. Macleod could tell
how his enthusiasm had once carried him to Ambleside,
how he had seen and talked with the poet, how the
old man had appeared in a brown greatcoat and a
large straw hat, and had read ‘in his deep voice some
of his own imperishable verses.’ The two students, many
a night under the frosty starlight, walking home from
the Peel Club (of which Macleod was president), kept
firing at each other quotations from their favourite
bard.

For Wordsworth’s poetry Macleod had been prepared,
because its materials were within his own emotional
experience. Passage after passage only interpreted and
defined for him feelings which he had long known
in the presence of wild nature. Of the influences
that went to form his moral constitution not the least
marked was that of Highland scenery. Even amidst
the gaieties of Weimar, he would shut his eyes, and,
whistling a Highland tune, see the old hills. The
autumn after he was licensed—1837—the last before
his life-work began—was spent in Morven and Skye.
He speaks of ‘passionate hours in the lonely mountains,’
and, to judge from his journal, his excitement
in these scenes was wonderful, varying from ecstatic[27]
delight to solemn awe and worship. On a peak of
the Coolins he burst out singing the Hundredth Psalm.
Along with this must be taken his keen consciousness
of the hereditary associations. During his holiday
he preached in ‘the same pulpit where once stood a
revered grandfather and father.’ ‘As I went to the
church,’ he writes, ‘hardly a stone or knoll but spoke
of something which was gone, and past days crowded
upon me like the ghosts of Ossian, and seemed, like
them, to ride even on the passing wind and along the
mountain tops. What a marvellous, mysterious world is
this, that I in this pulpit, the third generation, should
now, by the grace of God, be keeping the truth alive on
the earth, and telling how faithful has been the God of
our fathers.’

CHAPTER II

1838-1843

LOUDOUN—NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY

Just after his return from this tour, Macleod was presented,
virtually at the instance of Chalmers, to the living
of Loudoun, in Ayrshire. On March 5, 1838, he was
ordained. From this time onward his private journal
is largely the record of religious introspection. With
the other earnest ministers of that period, he took up the
feelings and the language of the old Puritans. One
cannot forget Robertson, on his appointment to the
charge of Ellon, pacing the room for hours in the silence
of the night, ‘and, all unconscious of being overheard,
praying for mercy to pardon his sin and grace to help
him in his embassy for Christ.’ This is good to know,
but a little of it goes a long way. When my brother has
entered into his closet and shut the door, I do not wish
to spy upon his spiritual straits, or listen at the keyhole
to his penitential groans. That Macleod, on assuming
his first ministerial charge, deeply felt his responsibility,
is clear from his doings as well as from his diary. The[29]
young minister had never doubted the truth of the
religion which, more by example than by precept, had
come down to him from his fathers. And the doctrines
of Christianity were to him not merely true, they were
vividly realised in his heart and imagination. In criticism,
at this time, his highest flight was to name certain
antinomies of Calvinism as nuts to crack. On the other
hand, in his frank acceptance of the goodly world, and
in his passion for characters (which was such that he
would go scouting for the ludicrous), he seemed to have
more of the humanist than the saintly temperament.
Nothing could have been more alien to him than the
plaint of a latter-day poet—

‘Strange the world about me lies,
Never yet familiar grown,

Still disturbs me with surprise,
Haunts me like a face half-known.’

And he had met in Germany, somewhat to his astonishment,
men who danced on a Sunday, and still showed
Christian graces; nay, men who were reverent and
pious, though they could not have subscribed to the
Westminster Confession.

The parish of Loudoun is a broad green wooded
valley, through which runs the Irvine Water, celebrated
in song. At one end, on a pleasant slope, the towers
of the castle shine out above the trees; at the other,
several miles distant, lie the villages of Newmilns and
Darvel, where the mass of the population resided. The[30]
farmers were a sturdy, pious race, as befitted the descendants
of the Covenanters; but in the weavers Macleod
encountered a new and formidable type of sinner. The
eighteenth century had spoken to their fathers; on
matters of religion their authority was Tom Paine; of
politics, Robespierre qualified by Chartism. Thus the
minister, whose business, as he conceived it, was to pilot
souls to heaven, had no sooner taken the helm than he
found himself among rocks and breakers. He was little
of a politician, and no priest, which was fortunate, as a
formal defence of the Church or of Toryism against such
antagonists would have been the worst tactics; but, being
a man, he got hold of many of the weavers in the end.
“Poor souls!” he could say; “how I do love the working
classes!” and that was a note he never lost. Besides
the human, he approached them on the secular ground.
On geology, which was then a fine new weapon to the
adversaries of the Church, he gave a course of lectures
which made a sensation, particularly among the hand-loom
atheists, many of whom became communicants.

The moral condition of Newmilns was terrible in the
young pastor’s eyes, and he would sometimes despair,
thinking that all his efforts were in vain. There was in
him some touch of the divine yearning, ‘O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem!’ If he woke in the night-time, he communed
with God. Far from flagging, the ambassador for Christ
piled agencies on means, and, as it were, took the place
by storm. The church was crowded to suffocation; he[31]
preached on week-days in various parts of the parish,
instituted Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and meetings
for young men; and, for the sake of the poorest of the
poor, held services to which none were admitted who
wore good clothes. In the course of a year he would
visit several thousand families, and as in public he
denounced evil-doers in general, in private he singled
them out for rebuke and exhortation.

In his Loudoun ministry there is just perceptible an
official smack, a note of externality; he has not yet
entirely freed himself from the mechanical theory of
salvation. For example, he was much taken up with the
work of winning or, if need were, extorting confessions
of repentance and faith from dying unbelievers. There
was one with whom the zealous young ambassador strove
hard, all to induce the invalid to speak. ‘Before I go
have you nothing to say?’ The man lifted up his
skeleton hand and panted out—’No, no, noth—nothing.’
At a later period Macleod would rather have
sympathised with the poet, who wanted no priest—

‘—to canvass with official breath
The future and its viewless things,
That undiscovered mystery
Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he.’

The manse of Loudoun is a little way out of Newmilns,
in the direction of the castle, and overlooking the road;
on one side, a pretty garden, and at the back the glebe,[32]
a beautiful brae. In that very house Robert Burns once
spent a night. Coming down in the morning, he was
asked whether he had slept well. ‘I have been praying
all night,’ the poet answered; ‘if you go up to my room
you will find my prayers on the table.’ He had been
thinking of the sweet life of the household and all he
might have been. But this tradition did not move
Macleod; indeed, at that time he was unjust to the poet,
as what cleric was not? Invited to take the chair at a
Burns Festival in Newmilns, he replied (disloyal to
Wordsworth for once) that he could not, dared not, as a
Christian minister, commemorate such a man.

His life at Loudoun, notwithstanding his professional
industry, was full of brightness and charm. Much of
his leisure was passed among his flowers, or he went into
the woods and sat listening to the birds. In the winter
evenings, to his sister Jane, who kept house for him, he
read aloud from the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and,
a new writer, Dickens; and she in turn entertained him
with German sonatas and Gaelic songs. At Loudoun
Castle, then inhabited by the Dowager Marchioness of
Hastings, widow of the celebrated Governor-General, he
was not only a welcome guest, but a trusted friend. His
conversational gifts might account for his acceptability
at the tables of the great, but he was never the mere
diner-out, still less the nice chaplain. In any company
he would speak, when occasion offered, from the heart
to the heart, and it was at first startling to see the laugh[33]
die out of the face of the big jolly parson, and hear
sudden lessons or tales that shook the inmost soul, and
drew the awkward tear. Lady Hastings gave him the key
of a vault in Loudoun Kirk where lay the right hand
of her dead husband, which had been sent from Malta;
and, sure enough one morning, as the Marchioness lay
dying, he was summoned to fetch the relic that it might
be buried in her grave.

The ‘coffee-room fellows’ held reunions at Loudoun.
Referring to one of these, Shairp says: ‘We wandered by
the side of the Irvine Water, and under the woods, all
about Loudoun Castle, and Norman was, as of old, the soul
of the party. He recurred to his old Glasgow stories, or
told us new ones derived from his brief experience of
the Ayrshire people, in whom, and in their characters, he
was already deeply interested. All day we spent out of
doors; and as we lay, in that balmy weather, on the banks
or under the shade of the newly-budding trees, converse
more hearty it would be impossible to conceive.’

Through Shairp (who was now a student of Oxford)
he was kept abreast of the Tractarian movement; not to
his peace of mind, for he was protestant and presbyterian
to the core. Once, while staying at Moreby, he had
attended a magnificent confirmation ceremony in York
Minster, but his raptures over the stained windows and
‘the great organ booming like thunder through the never-ending
arches’ suddenly vanished in the recollection of
a sacramental scene which he had witnessed in the[34]
Highlands—’no minster but the wide heaven, no organ
but the roar of the eternal sea, the church with its lonely
churchyard and primitive congregation.’ So far from
having any leanings to High Churchism, he saw no harm
in a layman administering the sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper. Another sign is that, Highlander as he was, he
had no sympathy with the Jacobites; he said that Charlie
was never his darling, and spoke of the low cunning and
tyrannical spirit of the Stuarts. The Anglo-Catholic
movement he simply abhorred. ‘Well,’ he wrote to
Shairp, ‘what think you of Puseyism now? You have
read No. 90, of course,—you have read the article on
Transubstantiation,—you have read it! Great heavens!
is this 1841?’ Shairp, who wet his feet in the rising
tide, piped in vain to his friend about the greatness of
Newman. Macleod could not understand a beautiful
soul who spent his mornings in idolatry, a sage of the
nineteenth century for whom the only question was—Anglican
Church or Roman?

Into what hole, Bezonian? speak or die.

Protestantism is more than a creed. Men may rail at
the Scarlet Woman, and yet, in the matter of ecclesiastical
claims, be little Beckets. In the non-intrusion controversy,
such as it was in the end, Macleod’s attitude
was partly determined by his dislike of sacerdotal
pretensions. Since the law courts had declared the
measures of the General Assembly illegal, the non-intrusionists[35]
intrusionists had set themselves up against the judges,
and in the course of their defiance were justifying, by
word and deed, Milton’s saying, that ‘new presbyter was
just old priest writ large.’ The question was not now
of patronage, but of the Headship of Christ, the crown-rights
of the Redeemer; practically the old quarrel
between priests and kings.

As to the necessity of checking the power of the patron
there was not from the first any difference between the
two sides. Everybody recognised that the people,
having won political freedom, would have a voice in
the appointment of ministers. To patronage, indeed,
the Scots never consented, were never reconciled; they
always looked upon it as a wrong, they could always
say, ‘An enemy hath done this.’ Both Knox and
Melville asserted the right of the people to elect their
ministers, and the Kirk, as often as it had the chance,
got rid of patronage. The evil seemed to be cast out
for ever at the Revolution, but in 1712 it was surreptitiously
restored. The Act of Queen Anne, which
was nothing but a Jacobite intrigue, handing over the
Kirk to the Pretender’s friends, was introduced behind
the nation’s back, and passed in spite of the strenuous
opposition of the General Assembly. For many years
and in various ways the Kirk tried to get it repealed.
In a single decade there were upwards of fifty disputed
settlements before the courts, and about the middle of
the century the dissenters numbered a hundred thousand.[36]
To make matters worse, the party which, under the name
of Moderates, systematically championed the patrons,
rose to absolute power in the Kirk. Before a presentee
could be settled he had to receive the call, a document
in his favour signed by the heads of families: this the
Moderates treated as a mere form, and minimised it
more and more till they got quit of it altogether—except
the name. Ministers were inducted with the military
at their back. At length, weary of the struggle, the
people gave in, and the descendants of the Covenanters
endured intrusion almost dumbly for twenty years, under
the iron rule of Robertson. As Dr. Chalmers said in
his grandiose way: ‘The best, the holiest feelings of our
Scottish patriarchs, by lordly oppressors, sitting in state
and judgment, were barbarously scorned.’

After the French Revolution the awakening of man’s
spirit, extending from letters and politics to religion, led
in Scotland to the rise of the Evangelical party. They
had lofty notions of ecclesiastical authority, and manifested
their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose holiness
was qualified by originality, such as Macleod
Campbell, whom they incontinently deposed. But, for
all that, they were the best of the clergy, because they
were in vital earnest with the highest things.

What was their policy on the question of intrusion?
In some way it should prevent the patron from thrusting
in a minister against the will of the congregation. The
General Assembly of 1834, the first in which the[37]
Evangelicals outnumbered the Moderates, conferred
upon the majority of heads of families (being communicants)
the right of vetoing, without assigning reasons,
the settlement of a presentee. Now it is conceivable
that one might be eager for reform, and yet disapprove
of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stop
intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it
would have led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees
on trivial and absurd pretexts, rejection for rejection’s
sake. Popular election entails complete responsibility,
but when men have to take their ministers from a
patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another
without saying why, they will be apt to use their licence
to make up for their slavery. This were hardly worth
remarking but for the assumption, conveyed in many an
oration, that the policy was as admirable as the principle
which it embodied. Let the non-intrusionists have all the
praise of meeting, in some sort, the just claim of the people.

The General Assembly, however, had gone beyond its
powers. Both the House of Lords and the Court of
Session pronounced the Veto Law to be ultra vires, the
judges holding that the presbytery was bound to take on
trials any presentee to whom there was no objection on
the ground of morals, scholarship, or doctrine. Notwithstanding
this, the General Assembly stuck to the veto.
So there would be rejected presentees demanding, in
accordance with the law, to be taken on trials, and
presbyteries at their wits’ end, pulled one way by the[38]
General Assembly, and another way by the civil Court.
The General Assembly ordered the presbytery of Strathbogie
not to take on trials a certain presentee who had
been vetoed. The presbytery obeyed. But the Court of
Session declared the order of the General Assembly to
be illegal. Thereupon the presbytery, by a majority of
seven, admitted the presentee. For that the seven were
deposed. And now came the event which was the cause
of the Disruption. The minority in the General Assembly,
failing to see how it could be rebellion to obey the law
of the land, treated the deposition of these men as null
and void. The question then was, which of the two sides
was the Church of Scotland? Parliament, all the time,
was trying to reconcile parties by changes in the law, but
as it always insisted on making the presbytery the final
judge of the fitness of presentees, the non-intrusionists
would not hear of legislation.

It was not till near the end of the struggle that the
minister of Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The
thunder of the captains and the shouting had been long
in his ears without stirring him to action. He was all in
his vocation, the cure of souls,—the mystery of existence
ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and
death, or remembered his days upon the hills. ‘I wished,’
he said, ‘to keep out of this row, and to do my Master’s
work and will in my dear, dear parish.’ Some clerics are
listless in religion; but when a question of church politics
is raised, alert as a horse at the sound of the trumpet.[39]
Macleod hated controversy, and said it was the worst
way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he
might have sung, ‘How happy could I be with neither!’
In him the opposing types were blended; he had all the
humanism which marked the one,—the love of letters,
the relish of things, the superiority to clerical prejudice,—with
all the zeal of the other for the cause of the gospel.
But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred
‘the cold gentlemanly Moderate’ to ‘the loud-speaking
high professor.’ And the non-intrusionists were claiming
to be the only true Christian ministers in the land, nay
more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared that they
were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting
instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes
of the Moderate clergy, and preached, telling the people
that now, for the first time, the gospel was in their ears.
‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ they said, ‘will have left the
Church when we go.’ In a pamphlet written by
Macleod, ‘A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk,’
which had a large sale, Saunders observes: ‘I ken
mony that are foremost eneuch in this steer that in my
opinion hae little o’ the meekness and gentleness o’
Christ.’ He must have been thinking of the minister
who said that ‘the devil was preparing a cradle in
hell for the opposition.’ Everything in the popular
cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ‘earthly, sensual,
devilish’; vox populi, vox Dei, and no mistake. The
struggle against the civil courts was ‘one of the most[40]
illustrious conflicts for the spirituality and liberty of the
Church of Christ of which any record can be found either
in modern or in ancient times.’ What Macleod could least
endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper.
They insisted on remaining in an Established Church,
while flying in the face of the law by which it was established.
The Headship of Christ was bound up with the
resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an order
of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh.

As for patronage, Macleod was probably willing that it
should be abolished altogether, but he could not support
the veto in defiance of the declared law of the Church.
‘I’m desperate keen for gude reform,’ says Saunders
again, ‘and would like the folk to hae mair poo’er, but I
would like to get it in a legal way.’ Macleod believed that
the Establishment was necessary for the religious welfare
of the country, and saw nothing that was worth the risk
of its existence. Not till it became evident that the non-intrusionists
were bent on destroying the Church did he
join in the conflict. ‘It will be our bounden duty,’ one
of the leaders had said, ‘to use every effort that if we be
driven out, they shall be driven out too; it is our bounden
duty to bear this testimony that the Church ought to be
established on the principles which we are contending
for, or that there should be no establishment in the land
at all.’ When things like that were being said, Macleod,
in alarm, plunged into the whole literature of the controversy.
The position he reached was this, that when there[41]
was a dispute as to the privileges granted by the State
to the Church, it was for the civil court to interpret the
terms of the contract. He became one of the Forty, a
set of Independents, whose chief distinction is that they
promoted parliamentary legislation for the reform of
patronage. While opposed to the revolutionary policy,
they were not Moderates, for they countenanced some of
the acts of the majority. They were as little for Erastus
as for Hildebrand.

A non-intrusionist deputation came to Newmilns.
Macleod allowed them to harangue in the church, but
he took care to be present, and when they invited the
auditors to sign certain resolutions, springing up, he
asked the people to wait till they heard from their
minister the other side of the question. ‘The evening
came, and the church was crammed with all sects and
parties. I do believe I never had a greater pressure on
my soul than I had before this meeting. I did not so
much possess the subject as the subject possessed me.
Between anxiety to do right and a feeling of degradation
that I should be looked upon by even one Christian
brother as inimical to the Church of Scotland, not to
speak of the Church of Christ, I was so overcome that
during the singing of the psalm—

“Therefore I wish that peace may still
Within Thy walls remain”—

I wept like a very child. I spoke, however, for three[42]
and a half hours, and not a soul moved!… The result
has been most gratifying. Of ten elders not one has left
me. The people are nearly unanimous, or at all events
so attached to me personally that they are about to present
to me a gold watch and an address from all parties.’

About the same time (February 1843) circumstances
compelled him to take action in the presbytery. Along
with the Veto Law the Chapel Act had been passed,
giving seats in the church courts to the ministers of
non-territorial charges. The House of Lords had just
declared that also to be illegal, when the Presbytery
of Irvine met to elect commissioners to the General
Assembly. The minister of Loudoun happened to be
Moderator. Should he allow the chapel ministers to
vote? There was more in his mind than the law; ‘it
was the avowed intention,’ he says, ‘of the High Church
party to get the majority in the Assembly by means of
the Quoad Sacras … and then, as the Assembly of the
National Church, to dissolve the connection between
Church and State, excommunicating those who might
remain.’ Refusing the illegal votes, he set up a separate
presbytery; and here was the first actual split in the
Church.

Of all the members of the General Assembly who witnessed
or took part in the procession from St. Andrew’s
Church on May 18, 1843, there were none more sorrowful
than the minister of Loudoun. But ere the day
was over a little indignation came to his relief. ‘How[43]
my soul rises against those men who have left us to
rectify their blundering, and then laugh at our inability
to do so!’ Principal Tulloch has said that the act of
secession would always be deemed heroic in the history
of Scotland; but Norman Macleod, who, unlike the other,
was an eye-witness and in the thick of events, wrote
in his journal immediately after the Disruption: ‘The
great movements, the grand results, will certainly be
known, and everything has been done in the way most
calculated to tell on posterity (for how many have been
acting before its eyes!): but who in the next century
will know or understand the ten thousand secret
influences, the vanity and pride of some, the love of
applause, the fear and terror, of others, and, above all,
the seceding mania, the revolutionary mesmerism, which
I have witnessed within these few days.’ For himself
he felt how much easier it would have been to go than
it was to stay. ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘did I have such a fortnight
of care and anxiety. Never did men engage in a task
with more oppression of spirit than we did, as we tried
to preserve the Church for the benefit of our children’s
children. The Assembly was called upon to perform a
work full of difficulty, and to do such unpopular things
as restoring the Strathbogie ministers, rescinding the
Veto, etc. We were hissed by the mob in the galleries,
looked coldly on by many Christians, ridiculed as
enemies to the true Church, as lovers of ourselves,
seeking the fleece; and yet what was nearest my own[44]
heart and that of my friends was the wish to preserve the
Establishment for the well-being of Britain. While the
“persecuted martyrs of the Covenant” met amid the
huzzas and applauses of the multitude, with thousands
of pounds daily pouring in upon them, and nothing to
do but what was in the highest degree popular; nothing
but self-denial, and a desire to sacrifice name and fame,
and all but honour, to my country, could have kept
me in the Assembly. There was one feature of the
Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the
fever of secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to
the Free Church.’ In the course of one of his speeches
in the rump Assembly he exclaimed: ‘We shall
endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled,
and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which
we shall, I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the
beautiful spectacle which was presented to us on Sabbath
evening, in the dense crowd assembled here to ask
the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me
to distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing
out, Nec tamen consumebatur. We shall try to bring our
ship safe to harbour, and if we haul down the one flag,
“Retract: no, never,” we shall hoist another, “Despair:
no, never.” And if I live to come to this Assembly an old
man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate
our present position, in endeavouring through good report
and bad report to preserve this great national institution
as a blessing to them and to their children’s children.’

[45]

The Free Church was always in his eyes ‘just an
outburst of presbyterian Puseyism,’ and undoubtedly
its rise was marked by a clerical reign of terror. Mr.
Skelton testifies: ‘The air of Edinburgh is generally
bitter with Calvinism, and in 1843 it was particularly
inclement. The Free Kirk, having just made a heroic
sacrifice, were naturally rather out of temper. Cakes
and ale, consequently, were quite at a discount. The
re-enactment of the old sumptuary laws of the Puritans
began to be talked of again. The national beverage was
interdicted. Young professors could not be permitted
to indulge in promiscuous dancing. The presbytery
thundered hoarsely against the profanation of the Sabbath
as practised on Leith Pier, or round Arthur’s Seat.
The slightest sign of independent vitality, intellectual
or religious, was sourly repressed by a party in which
the secular intolerance of the democracy was curiously
combined with the spiritual pretensions of the hierarchy.’
‘A gloomy fanaticism,’ writes the father of Norman
Macleod, ‘followed the breaking up of the Established
Church, and perhaps in no part of the country did this
bitterness exist more strongly than in the Western
Islands. In Skye, especially, it led to dividing families,
and separating man from man, and altogether engendered
strife which I fear it will take years to calm down.’

Although too young, even if he had been fit, to be in
the front of the battle, the minister of Loudoun was
notable among the remnant; and with his repute, besides,[46]
as a pastor, it was no wonder that he was besieged with
offers of livings. He refused the first charge of Cupar,
Fife; the Tolbooth and St. John’s, Edinburgh; Campsie,
Maybole, St. Ninian’s. He accepted Dalkeith. Then he
learned how much his people at Loudoun were attached
to him. Many whom he had thought rocks sent forth
tears. At the church gate, after his farewell sermon,
there was a mournful crowd; and as he walked home he
was waylaid by watchers, who seized his hand, and
invoked upon him the blessing of God.

CHAPTER III

1843-1851

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

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

Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none
saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc
that had been made by the Disruption, than the minister[48]
of Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career,
intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love,
and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were
brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even
to the family altar, embittering divisions! To a mind
like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical
principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in
the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings
as to the side which he had taken in the great
controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the
Establishment might have been in the end more
irrevocably shattered had the High Church party remained
within. He veered between angry lamentation
over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates,
and aversion from the faults of the new zealots—’vanity,
pride, and haughtiness that would serve
Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb; church
ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with
Loyola; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism
which Maynooth can alone equal.’ If the Establishment
was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand.
At the same time he perceived only too well what was
good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in
full sympathy with them in their devotion to the
evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of
forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master,
divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes.
He saw the seceders popular and victorious,—theirs all[49]
the energy, all the faith; while the Kirk was not only
outwardly broken, but chill and listless within,—her
ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly
promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more
to their stipends than their work. Among other
instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with
particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when
Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the
Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a
petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: ‘I
declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe
to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for
Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep
conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all
statesmen for it! Not one man to form a protestant
party, not one! God have mercy on the country!’
On the question of policy it is probable that he changed
his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of
his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and
for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For
him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of
Protestantism. ‘The Church of Scotland,’ he said as
late as 1850, ‘is daily going down hill.’ Yet he felt
certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving
of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of
grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How
was the National Church to be revived? The aristocracy
had but one thing in view—the landed interest; Peel[50]
was a trimmer; there was nothing in mere numbers.
What was wanted was an inner work in the hearts of
clergy and people. ‘If we were right in our souls,’ he
wrote, ‘out of this root would spring the tree and
fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living
water.’ Two vows he took, one that he would devote
himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he
would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among
all who loved Christ.

At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact
with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with
the help of his congregation, which he developed into
a society of Christian workers. He went about preaching
in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points
he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got
hung round with placards of the Lord’s Prayer and the
Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of
Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when
the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary,
the minister showed that money would be better spent
in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to
him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his
days among his ‘brothers and sisters.’ There is a
little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions
of his tales. ‘On coming home this evening, I saw a
number of boys following and speaking to, and
apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in
his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close by[51]
the wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had
got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild
birds. I asked the boys who he was. “Eh! he’s a
wee boy gaun’ aboot beggin’, wi’out faither or mither.”’
The minister took him to the manse, and consigned
him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By
and by ‘the door was opened, and in marched my
poor boy, paraded in by Jessie,—a beautiful boy, clean
as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful
clean shirt, his hair combed and divided; and Jessie
gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the
background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips; he
looked round him in bewilderment. “There he is,”
said Jessie; “I am sure ye’re in anither warld the night,
my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore?” “No.” “What
will ye dae noo?” “I dinna ken.” “Will ye gang awa’
and beg the night?” “If ye like.” “No,” said I, “be off
to your bed and sleep.”’

He was led to ponder the social as well as the
religious problem presented by life in the slums. In
the events of the year of revolution he took a keen
interest. ‘The Chartists are put down,’ he remarked
scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by
no means end with the victory of the special constable.
‘Snug the joiner,’ he observed, ‘is a man as other
men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered,
which in rags shivers in the cold, while the “special”
goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair,[52]
saying, “The scoundrels are put down.” We demand
from them patience while starving—do we meet their
demands for bread? Special! what hast thou done
for thy brother? Ay—don’t stare at me or at thy
baton—thy brother, I say! Hast thou ever troubled
thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast
about giving him a broken head?’ He rejected the
remedies of the politicians—reform of taxation, high
wages, the suffrage,—holding that the only cure lay
‘in the personal and regular communion of the better
with the worse—man with man—until each Christian,
like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be
saved.’ Such was the spirit in which he toiled among
the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made
a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity
students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty
Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod.

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

The year following he was charged, along with his uncle[53]
the minister of Morven, and another, with a more
distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there
were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the
Secession had been felt; shrieks of Veto, Cæsar, Headship,
mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods.
The deputies were for British North America; their
business was to preach, and to explain the action of the
constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with
Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of
Morven? And such an expedition would peculiarly
suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign
countries, and having an object that excited his religious
enthusiasm.

On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool
in June) he found in one of the berths a dying
man, and conversed with him about the state of his
soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to
speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor
fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to
her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him
those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very
thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the
minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged
into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave
alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not
shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in
tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of
raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of his[54]
sincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those
who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles,
and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always
the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good
humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every
one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship
reached its destination, the passengers drank the health
of the deputies with three times three.

At Washington he had an interview with the President,
Mr. Polk,—’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark
complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he
was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to
a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought,
‘shall I now see the strange sight—a brother-man for
sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron
bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in
the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of
the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for
the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted
him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her
child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing
his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to
the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’
Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its
most mitigated form, and yet the impression made
upon him ‘by seeing instead of hearing was overwhelmingly
bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my
brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime—without[55]
their consent—slaves for life—slaves from childhood;—it
was enough.’ During the American war he
declared that the British sympathy for the South was to
him an inscrutable mystery.

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

In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever
fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or
three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty
miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a
lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse
and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he
was busy taking in the primeval forest—the tufted
heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the
leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the
chop-chop-chop of the pioneer’s axe in the weird
silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with
tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining
a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be an[56]
Englishman, and would quiz them about their savage
language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to
their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as
their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same
as in the old land. ‘This angry spirit of Churchism,’ he
says, ‘which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland,
thunders at the door of every shanty in the backwoods.’
For himself, in explaining the Church question, he
avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his
opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who
(unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings
confessed that he could not find fault with one expression.
Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart
scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed,
in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment.
At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies
attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country;
on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming
boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of
vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service
in the open air. ‘The tent,’ writes Norman, ‘was on
a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and
neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld
the most touching and magnificent sight. There were
(in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about
four thousand people here assembled! John had finished
a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head
bare at the head of the white communion table, and was[57]
about to exhort the communicants. There was on
either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass
of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I
entered the tent and looked around; I have seen grand
and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed
them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were
slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the
body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or
clime—as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the
communicants, every head bent down to the white
board, and watched the expressions of the weather-beaten,
true Highland countenances around me, and
remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty
forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were
in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that
they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness—as these
and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst
the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came
from the Lord’s Table, can you wonder that I hid my
face, and “lifted up my voice and wept”? Oh that my
father had been with us! what a welcome he would
have received!’ At various spots he met men from
Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his
grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod
found a woman who, the moment he entered her house,
burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which
he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic
the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife’s[58]
sister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the
exiles! In one place two old elders put their arms about
Norman’s neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his
cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new
sources of emotion; it was more that at the age of thirty-three
he could say: ‘I have had peeps into real Canadian
life: I have seen the true Indians in their encampment;
I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above
Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men
with their canoes and the North-westers on their
way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some
to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I
have been shaken to atoms over “corduroy” roads,
and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been
privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to
defend my poor and calumniated Church from many
aspersions.’

During this visit there came to him rumours of a
movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His
heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky.
For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the
leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Conference,
held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to
his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever
spent on earth. ‘What a prayer was that of Octavius
Winslow’s! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the
tears pour down my cheeks.’ There was developed in him
a new love for his ministerial brethren. ‘I felt like a[59]
man who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and
he had never seen them before.’ The Alliance was
formed in August at the Freemasons’ Hall, London, in
an assembly composed of a thousand representative
Christians from America and the Colonies, and from
almost every country in Europe. The project sprang
from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical
men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and
Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities
throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference,
a general conference once every lustrum in some
European capital, reports from branches on events touching
religious liberty: such were the methods by which
these good men proposed to bring about the golden
year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth,
that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners
in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in
Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at
least we are told. There was doubtless at first a powerful
tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or
none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president,
‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a
sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not
been presented to the eyes of God or man…. And is
there not another class of eyes which may be said to be
upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are
not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know
not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of your[60]
meeting much of their interests may be suspended. But,
brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason
to think that no such gathering as this would take place,
and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be
watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that
they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or
the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of
the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10);
we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are
directed towards us.’ A few days later he told the
Conference that he had been in the committee-room,
and ‘he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when
he said that the world’s interests and the interests of
humanity were trembling in the balance.’ At a point
in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects,
‘The respected speaker here paused, evidently overcome
by his feelings.’ The orator ‘hoped brethren
would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his
feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other
subject but that which concerned religion and its great
interests: but from his childhood he never could refrain
from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that
of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed
he was a perfect child.’ Did Norman cry, Hear, hear?
On the contrary, he also would be greetin’. The time
came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the
word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach.
Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being a[61]
member of the business committee, a frequent chairman
of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized
in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony;
and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen,
and Americans, all united by the bond of a common
religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another
good thing he owed to the Alliance—the privilege of
visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr.
Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain
progressive movements which had been reported from
these countries. By the year 1847 he had seen the
working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the
borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from
the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen
his attachment to the Church of Scotland.

How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might
care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an
ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be
plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring
after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental
susceptibility. He came under the influence of his
heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and
holy man; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a
kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed
‘thou true man, poet of the backwoods.’ He was
getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling,
not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with
Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had become[62]
of the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tübingen, dying.
After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge.
There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He
had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists, and had
assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the
West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a
frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the
Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals
the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He
calls him his ‘dearest Norman,’ his ‘beloved Norman,’
whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss;
speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes
him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest
hours of his life, much mental development, and not
a few faithful and well-timed warnings—a friend the
thought of whom brightened his future. ‘Think of
you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.’
When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his
friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for
Tübingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty-four
hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was
two o’clock in the morning when he arrived in the town.
He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid’s
door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to
a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs.
Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that he had
received his relatives on their arrival with a strange
coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst not[63]
enter his room without an invitation. Pondering this
mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions,
was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere
the final victory of Christ was achieved? He sent a note
into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his
friend would see him. The answer was, ‘Come now.’
The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a
sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black
hair with an ‘intense and painful lustre.’ With loving
gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible
voice said, ‘I am holding communion with God,’ and
they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the
visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and
told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the
old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world,
mentioned an hour at which he would be glad
to have another meeting. So he was brought back
completely to his old self. He had been mentally disturbed
by his mother’s arrival, because, thinking that he
might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from
his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he
would sit of an evening ‘with closed eyes, and head
drooping on his breast,’ listening in silence to old
Scottish tunes—’Wandering Willie,’ ‘The Flowers o’ the
Forest,’ ‘The Land o’ the Leal’; and, again, with an air
of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of
soon meeting Chalmers. ‘My spirit,’ wrote Norman,
‘felt no less than awed before him.’ The companions[64]
took farewell of each other on the 11th of
March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was
dead.

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

CHAPTER IV

1851-1860

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

The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many
years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish
him from his father—was a shining exception to the
prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the
rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the
National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first,
was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles
set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks.
Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the
‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum,
seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only
wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a
Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually
the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod,
a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new
evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for
a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasm[66]
went far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they
were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction
he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook;
if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with
tears.

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

The spirit of Macleod’s ministry is partly to be traced
to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his
work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early
master in the neighbouring parish of St. John’s must[67]
have been in his mind. These two pastors were equal
in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisation
of the masses, equal in their capacity for work.
But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the
people like a statesman, and had his principles and
plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual,
and thought most of a moral change. Of the social
question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in
relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the
thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy.
Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater
patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average
man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart;
which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod
was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the
tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all
his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after
intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the
Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St.
Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers,
wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers,
however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to
instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony.

Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park,
Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie
Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the
Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and
winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration,[68]
with something even of romance, when he heard the
first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. ‘People
talk,’ he wrote, ‘of early morning in the country, with
bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I
prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand
hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which
are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day—the
type of a new era. I feel these are awake with
me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on—to
fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work,
and fulfil my grand and glorious end.’ And he thought,
with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard
and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the
rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability,
many working men shunned the churches, and looked
askance at ‘the lads in black.’ Ah! if they only knew,
thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come
to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour.
He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But
how was he to reach the masses scattered through his
enormous cure? In his hands the Barony congregation
became what every muster of converts was in the days
of the apostles,—a society for Christian work. Worship,
meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacraments,
is a mediæval invention. Norman Macleod held
that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good
actions. Indeed, for æsthetic and ceremonial (since
there must be forms) he had too little care. Of the[69]
Barony Church a certain noble lord remarked, ‘I have
seen one uglier’; and once Macleod had to admonish
the congregation in these terms: ‘Scripture commands
us to sing, not grunt; but if you are so constituted that it
is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is
best to be silent.’ But here were people who met to
engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of
sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good
advice. ‘A Christian congregation,’ he says, ‘is a
body of Christians who are associated not merely to
receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public
worship, but also “to consider one another and to provoke
to love and good works,” and as a society to do
good to all as they have opportunity…. The society
of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations
or congregations like an army acting through
its different regiments, is the grand social system which
Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of
sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing
all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’

Having made himself personally acquainted with his
congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for
the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious,
educational, and social needs of the parish should be
met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary
network. By means of meetings, for which given agents
were responsible, the minister came in contact with his
parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerous[70]
Sunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For
four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free
Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he
furnished both pastors and congregations. In the
first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he
collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff
of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare
of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people
in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually
raised from the congregation, which was one of the
poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the
heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-buildings
for thousands of children; with evening classes for
adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at
their A B C. He started congregational savings banks,
and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment-rooms
attractive with books and amusements; in which
things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer.

The best organisation would have been of little avail
but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers
by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by
his personal influence, which was at once paternal and
commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example
of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all,
by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church
was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass,
no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen
into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptiness[71]
of churches; and the foolishness of preaching is
obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity
is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more
zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have
no creed at all. There would be no outcry against
preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a
century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with
its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great
preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old
story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth
these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in
Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession
of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a
Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we
will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of
majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces;
intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as
one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of
his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling
tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great,
sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman,
reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found
themselves as it were in a different world, so changed
was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth
who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the
High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of
worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself
was in the pulpit—bearded, bronzed, and dilated to a[72]
giant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man;
it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the
tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out
upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that
never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a
vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another
church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher
had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the
congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the
evening service was to be conducted by the minister of
the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part,
even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When
the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the
throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was
something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon,
and here and there you might see some flagging of
attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to
give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for
three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience
bound as with a spell; his utterance waxed rapid and
passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner
of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one
overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in building
the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry
infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold.
Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of
Macleod’s that ‘it was all true and very moving’—the ne
plus ultra of praise—and that he did not know ‘the man[73]
in the Church of England who could have preached
such a sermon.’ ‘The greatest and most convincing
preacher I ever heard,’ is the confession of Sir Arthur
Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching
was ‘the perfection of art without art,’ ‘he spoke as
a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower
order,’ his effectiveness was due to ‘truth and honesty,
guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed
in manly speech face to face.’ His power in the pulpit
seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the
success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These
were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None
but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass
into the church. It was no uncommon thing for
gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce; and they
must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair
pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should
penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had himself
rigged out in ‘the cast-off working dress of a coach-builder—a
dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped
shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.’ ‘I stood,’ he
says, ‘waiting among the crowd of poor men and women
that were shivering at the gate, biding the time. Many of
these women were very old and very frail…. Poor
souls! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and
his sayings. I conversed with several working men who
had attended all the series from the first, three or four
years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotch[74]
who attended. He said, “All nations go and hear the
Doctor.” … “A’body likes the Doctor,” said another.
One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said “he
kent great lots o’ folk that’s been blessed by the Doctor,
baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that
wrought wi’ me, o’ the name o’ Boyd, and he came ae
nicht out o’ curiosity, and he was convertit afore he
raise from his seat, and he’s a staunch Protestant to this
day, every bit o’ him, though his father and mother,
and a’ his folks, are sair against him for’t.”’ None of the
cushions or books were removed from the seats, and
the witness says that the decorum was as good as at
the regular service. ‘In reference to the mother and
grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand
stand for character, which made the poor man next to
me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of
testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor’s remarks
on the subject been delivered from a platform, they
would have elicited thunders of applause.’ If one
realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can
understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons,
commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses.
‘Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to understand,
the misery which his loss has created in the
paternal home! He is bringing down the grey hairs
of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him,
and loved him ere he could know of the existence and
unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest day[75]
or night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth
her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood
in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.’

Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the
most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his
generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of
Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats: of a
horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat,
he says, ‘I wish he could have known how much I
pitied him’; and of the camel, ‘The expression of his
soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek submission
and patient endurance ever since travelling
began in these deserts. The poor “djemel” bends his
neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several
hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to
the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of
suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be redressed
by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftesbury.’
In the scene of man’s life his spirit eagerly
responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be,
never recovering from the surprises of existence. So,
with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both
human and religious, he sometimes found himself in
strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended
in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He
would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath
false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he
discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight,[76]
surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence
with the working folk was that he felt no difference from
their social position, but spoke to them on the ground
of common humanity, without affected familiarity or
priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in
view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience
was that the lower and the upper classes were very much
alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court
could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman
Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.[1] The
preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy
ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ‘O sickness,
pain, and death! what republican levellers are these of
us all!’[2] There is a zeal for the people, a worship of
humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory.
The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his
bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may
turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of
the suffering race. Macleod’s sympathy was for the
individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry,
whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching
affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest
exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He
fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist,
weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’s[77]
experience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when
the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside,
opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often
in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious
splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He
saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old
father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and
died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside
of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having
been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner
had excused himself to his wife as follows: ‘Dinna be
ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I
did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief
from the parish, and I didna like to beg; but I kent if
I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow
and orphans.’ Always, when Macleod told that story,
he went into an ecstasy, shouting, ‘That man was a
hero!’

Considering the moral and material plight of the
masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At
Dalkeith he had written A Plea for Temperance, in which,
while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates,
and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued
that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate
use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the
teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a
speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating
the working classes from the charge of drunkenness.[78]
The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages,
raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the
brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop
of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men
from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they
should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying
grace!

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

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

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

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

[80]

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

The working men of Glasgow more than once testified
in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and
gold they had none, they said, but they would retain
for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857
his wife was lying as it were at the point of death,
‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin
which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it
was the same. Free Church people and people of all
Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me;
cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets,
asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time a[81]
surreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a
moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath
Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds.
For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry,
and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in
mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned
to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His
name was oftener heard in common talk than that of
any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’
Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day
a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom
he did not know. Thinking that they might be new
adherents, he went to the house, which was up three
flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After
praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his
congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to
the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it
would never dae to risk Norman.’[4]

There was always, however, a religious section not
just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike
a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the
whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him
dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s
definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long
singing of psalms.’[5] ‘As for sadness and gloom,’ he[82]
says somewhere, ‘in accepting all things from our
Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’
How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance
hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls
whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a
country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and
telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked,
with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he
was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type
he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the
way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the
local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not
omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one,
a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and
his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a
neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see——
drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in
Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared,
though many had been invited. He did so at the risk
of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against
the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to
mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated
the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble
protest for the independence and dignity of humanity
expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’
and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality
had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral
verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were never[83]
written, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was
a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at
Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one
of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than
he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained
expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out.
When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of
them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he
thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to
see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now
amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory,
it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all
in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the
links of our Puritan fetters?

‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used
to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained.
‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it
were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are
no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, and vice versâ: some
avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod
not only attended to all departments of a minister’s
work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it
implied service to the Church or the community. Early
in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the
General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical
liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment,
he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise
the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiastical[84]
barriers which stood in the way of the secular advance.
Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the
repeal of the theological tests for university professors.
But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen
that his name rose in the religious world. He preached
every year for the London Missionary Society, and when
he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission
Reports there was always a crowd.

CHAPTER V

EDITOR AND AUTHOR

Pursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment
Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, the
Edinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described
as a miniature plan or first sketch of Good 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:—

The next refers to the birth of his first child:

‘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.’

The Christian Magazine gave way to Good Words,
which was started in 1860. His assumption of the
editorship proved to be the most important circumstance[88]
in 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 Words was 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. Private[89]
remonstrances poured in; the paper was tabooed by
religious societies; the Record, 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 upon Good 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 Words carried 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 from Good 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 of Good Words, Macleod
had published little that was of interest outside religious[90]
circles. 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 the Life of M’Cheyne, to
which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise.
In the mass of his contributions to Good Words there
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 religious[91]
aim, 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 part
Of danger on the roaring sea:

A devil rises in my heart
Far 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 unregenerate[92]
character—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 in Billy Buttons the 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 in The 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 ye are
a 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 elaborate[93]
decline 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 of Good Words he 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 in Good Words before
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 the[94]
cratur 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 is The 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, and[95]
shows 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 anger[96]
was 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 and[97]
worship 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 perhaps The Reminiscences of a Highland
Parish. This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the
saying in The Old Lieutenant about 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;[98]
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 the Row. ‘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 the Row into 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, and[99]
lost 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 music
Guiding all the stately spheres,

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

[100]

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.

[101]

Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,
Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roar
Ae 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 VI

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 of[103]
Crathie 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 we all tried to please self, and live for that, 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 Queen[104]
and 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 isle
The 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,[105]
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,
‘When he was 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 her[106]
spirit 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 sure[107]
enough, 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’ Shanter
and A 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 VII

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; but[109]
the 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 in Good 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 of Good Words, Alexander[110]
Strahan, 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 no[111]
trace 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 Dead[112]
Sea, 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 generation[113]
of 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 to[114]
Macaulay ‘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 would[115]
give, 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 Faith[116]
because, 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 word Scotch, 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.[117]
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 pray extempore, 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 than[118]
to 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, are[119]
accustomed 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!’ We[120]
must 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.

[121]

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 prose
The 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 Commandments
In 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 word
Decalogue that did all the mischief. What it was they[122]
did 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 a sell together! We are sold to
Donkeys, and for them we 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 on no 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 valiant[123]
Norman 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 on The
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 document[124]
was 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 breach
For 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 sword
Of the Lord,
And Forward!’

CHAPTER VIII

1867-1872

INDIA—THE APEX—THE END

The vision of millions upon millions in the far East
worshipping idols had long haunted Macleod’s imagination,
and, with his sense of apostleship waxing as the
years went on, heathendom became more and more to
him a mystery and a horror. The Asiatic was a man:
reach his heart, it was the same as ours, and must open
to the religion of humanity. To Macleod’s stamp of
Christian the whole idea of foreign missions was
peculiarly congenial; every enterprise in that field, whatever
Church had the credit, he hailed with enthusiasm.
In 1858, when Angell James was appealing for a hundred
missionaries to go to China, Macleod sent forth, in the
Edinburgh Christian Magazine, a voice to the British
Churches:—

Let us say in justice to our own deep conviction as to the
momentous importance of this subject—to the grandeur of the cause
which our revered father advocates—to the sense we entertain of
the clear and imperative duty of the Church of Scotland at this
crisis—that we bid him God-speed with all our hearts; and express
our firm faith that these hundred missionaries and many more will[126]
soon be in the field, with some contributed by our own Church, to
take part in this glorious enterprise about to open for the establishment
in China, so long enslaved by Satan, of that blessed kingdom
which is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.

The Church of Scotland had a footing in India, and it
was there that his interest was fixed. There be rosy
thousand-pounders whose eloquent wails over the dearth
of missionaries draw handkerchiefs in the ladies’ gallery,
and if the cynic says that the command is not ‘Get
others to go’ but ‘Go ye,’ it is good exegesis and a
palpable hit. But Macleod was busy among the heathen
at home, and from 1864, when he was made convener
of the India Mission, his mind was possessed with the
thought of an embassy to Hindostan. The Sabbath
question arose, and, expecting ostracism, he gave up his
prospect; indeed, a section of the committee, as he afterwards
learned, moved for his resignation. The General
Assembly, however, in 1867, upon advices from Calcutta,
requested him to visit India. ‘How strange and sudden,’
he wrote, ‘that I, who two years ago was threatened with
deposition and made an offscouring by so many, am this
year asked by the Assembly to be their representative in
India!’ Among his acquaintance far and near, high and
humble, the news that Norman Macleod was going to
India created a sensation. The Queen wrote: ‘his life
is so valuable that it is a great risk.’ He received letters
from Stanley, Helps, and Max Müller. The presbytery
gave him a dinner, at which the chair was taken by the[127]
chief Sabbatarian. Fifty private friends, including
ministers of all denominations, entertained him at a feast.
He in his turn held a luncheon, in the course of which he
perambulated the tables, speaking the befitting word to
each of thirty guests. Portraits of himself, his wife, and
his mother, painted by Macnee, were presented to him;
and four hundred working men gave Mrs. Macleod
her husband’s bust in marble. There was a general
feeling that he might never return. ‘Come life or death,’
he said of his undertaking, ‘I believe it is God’s will.’
For several weeks he had worked so hard, and gone
through so much excitement, that when he started he
was utterly worn out; and throughout the tour, from
first to last, he was afflicted with a swelling of the limbs.

Fortunate he was in having for his fellow-deputy
Dr. Watson, the minister of Dundee, who thought
with him on religious matters (though pawky to
the point of genius) and was kin to him in spirit.
To hear these two in the parts of Highland drovers
was, by all accounts, the greatest treat in the world.
After a short stay in Paris, where Macleod preached,
and got a collection for the expenses of the deputation,
on the sixth of November they embarked
at Marseilles, having chosen the overland passage.
Macleod was charmed with the coast scenery about
Toulon; Corsica and Sardinia reminded him of the
Western Highlands; but in all the Mediterranean
there was no sight that affected him so much as the[128]
house of Garibaldi. At Alexandria he learned from
his old dragoman, whom he happened to meet, that
travellers, ever since the advice given in Eastward,
were examining the backs of horses and mules before
they bought them, so that Meeki, able to cheat no
more, had taken to another trade. Thus Macleod had
for certain done one good thing in his life. On the
voyage down the Red Sea, having once preached for
an hour with the thermometer at 90°, he got a warning
of what might be in store for him in India. ‘At the
close,’ says Dr. Watson, ‘he was almost dead; his face
was flushed, his head ached, his brain was confused,
and when he retired to his cabin the utmost efforts
were required to restore him.’ Old Indians poured
jugs of iced water over his head. Yet, referring to the
heat, he could write home, ‘I just thaw on, laugh and
joke, and feel quite happy.’ One morning he got up
at three o’clock, and in ‘a white Damascus camel-hair
dressing-gown’ sat on deck, sneering at the Southern
Cross. According to his wont he was taken up with
his fellow-passengers, among whom were soldiers who
had fought in the Mutiny, young officers on their way
to Magdala, civilians who had governed provinces and
spent years among the remotest tribes, politicians,
journalists, and adventurers. Unlike his companion,
he had a cabin to himself, and, in the course of the
voyage, it was more and more like a pawnbroker’s
shop. One day Watson perceived in the chaos a[129]
decent silk hat with its sides meeting like a trampled
tin pan. ‘Man,’ said Norman, by way of explanation,
‘last night I felt something very pleasant at my feet;
I put my feet on it and rested them—I was half
asleep. How very kind, I thought, of the steward to
put in an extra air cushion! and when I looked in the
morning, it was my hat.’ In the bustle of the preparations
for landing at Bombay he was heard crying,
‘Steward, did you see my red fez?’ ‘Is it a blue one?’
‘No!’ roared Norman, ‘it’s a red one. If you see it,
bring it, and if any fellow won’t give it up, bring his
head along with it.’ So Watson writes to Mrs. Macleod.
Macleod, for his part, complaining to Mrs.
Watson of her husband’s inextinguishable laughter,
declares, ‘But for my constant gravity he would ruin the
deputation.’ He was presented with an address, signed
by the captain, the officers, and the whole of the
passengers, ‘expressing their grateful sense of the
peculiar privilege they had enjoyed in his society and
his ministrations.’

At the first sight of India, a land so full of romantic
and mysterious interest, Macleod as a Briton, and still
more as a Christian, was strangely moved. The working
plan of the deputies may be stated in a dozen words:
Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, with a loop of travel at each.
In one city as in another Macleod had much the same
round of triumphs and of toils. He conferred with
missionaries of different Churches; inspected colleges[130]
and schools; and, accompanied by the highest aristocracy,
both native and English, delivered sermons and
addresses to enormous crowds. The Brahman worship
he took pains to study, and made a point of quizzing
the most cultured Hindoos. Socially he was treated as
if he had been the special commissioner, not of the
General Assembly, but of the Crown. Governors,
military commanders, and bishops gave dinners and
receptions in his honour. He was never well, but the
killing fatigue at the centres was relieved by the trips to
inland stations. From Bombay the deputies went to
Poonah and Colgaum, whence returning they visited
the caves of Karli. Sir Alexander Grant—afterwards
Principal of Edinburgh University—at whose house
Macleod met a select party of educated natives, has left
this testimony: ‘He talks to them in a large, conciliatory,
manly way, which is a perfect model of missionary style.
I had the most charming talks with him, lasting always
till 2 a.m., and his mixture of poetry, thought, tenderness,
manly sense, and humour was to me perfectly delightful.
I had no idea his soul was so great.’ At a bungalow on
the road to Colgaum he had what he calls a dangerous
encounter with a snake. He had wished to see a real
cobra, and Dr. Watson reported that there was one
outside basking in the moonshine. So off went Norman
with his Lochaber crook. ‘Slowly and cautiously I
approached, with uplifted staff and beating heart, the
spot where the dragon lay, and saw him, a long grey[131]
monster! As the chivalrous St. George flashed upon
my mind, I administered a fearful stroke to the brute;
but from a sense of duty to my wife and children rushed
back to the bungalow in case of any putting forth of
venom, which might cause a vacancy in the Barony,
and resolved to delay approaching the worm till next
morning. Now, whatever the cause was, no one, strange
to say, could discover the dead body when morning
dawned. A few decayed branches of a tree were alone
discovered near his foul den, and these had unquestionably
been broken by some mighty stroke; but the cobra
was never seen afterwards, dead or alive…. Why my
friend laughed so heartily at my adventure I never
could comprehend, and have always avoided asking
him the question.’ Their route to Madras was by sea
to Calicut, and across country by rail from Beypore.
In their excursions from Madras they went two
hundred miles, as far as to Bangalore. At Calcutta,
where they arrived about the middle of January,
Macleod, for the first time, received the impression
of the imperial power of the British. Thinking of
Government House, he says: ‘I have trod the gorgeous
halls of almost every regal palace in Europe, from
Moscow to Naples, and those of the republican White
House at Washington, but with none of these could I
associate such a succession of names as those of the
men who had governed India.’ He got on terms of
friendship with the Governor-General, Lord Lawrence,[132]
but a State dinner, given on account of the deputies,
he had to forego. His health was giving way, as was
inevitable from the high pressure at which he had been
working in a burning climate. Nevertheless he went
about the business of the embassy. One day, when he
had been three weeks in Calcutta, he spoke at a
morning meeting; held an examination in the General
Assembly’s Institution, and addressed the students in
the great hall; was the chief guest at a luncheon; and
in the evening, at the most brilliant public dinner ever
held in the city, delivered a great speech. That night
‘the bull,’ which had been ‘after him all day,’ caught
and tossed him, and there was a sudden end to his work
in India. From a kind of noble vanity he had, Macleod
could never bear to have the appearance of shirking a
task. Next morning, tolerably well with his way of
it, he telegraphed home, ‘Off for the Punjaub’; but
at a conference of doctors it was decided that ‘it
would be attended with danger to his life should
he persist in his intention of continuing his tour to
Sealkote.’

Before quitting India he took a holiday excursion.
He had seen the Red Indians in their encampment, he
had been on the summit of the high tower at Moscow,
he had sat on the Mount of Olives, he had floated in a
raft upon the Danube; and now, behold him threading
the lanes of holy Benares, mounted on an elephant!
He saw the marble glories of Mohammedan Agra, and[133]
examined all the famous scenes of the Mutiny, especially
Delhi, where his heart glowed as he remembered
Nicholson. From Delhi he returned direct to Calcutta;
whence, on board of an old man-of-war, in company
with Lady Lawrence and her daughter, he sailed for
Egypt. One little incident of the voyage is worth
remembrance. He had been very attentive to the
sailors, not only preaching in the forecastle on Sundays,
but at other times reading to them selections from
his sea stories. Now at Aden they had shipped an
African boy who had been taken from a slaver, and
when Macleod was about to leave the vessel, a deputation
of the crew approached him, leading the little negro by
the hand. ‘And now, your Reverence,’ said one, ‘I
hope you won’t be offended if we name this here nigger
boy Billy Buttons.’

Cairo and the Pyramids once more; then home by
Malta, Sicily, Naples, and Rome.

Notwithstanding many predictions, he had come back,
and in apparent vigour; but his health was undermined,
India had done for Norman. Though to a certain
section of the clergy he was still an object of suspicion,
his magnificent services could not be denied, and,
besides, in the Indian undertaking—his years and his
physique considered—there was a gallantry, a derring-do,
that stirred men’s spirits finely. So, on his first rising to
speak in the General Assembly, after his return, he
received an ovation. His speech, giving the results[134]
arrived at by the deputation, lasted for two hours, and,
in an intellectual point of view, is perhaps the highest of
all his works. There is a thorough grasp of the whole
problem of the conversion of the Hindoos, with splendid
ability in the presentation. Of the contest against the
system of caste he says:

I hesitate not to express the opinion that no such battle has ever
before been given to the Church of God to fight since history began,
and that no victory, if gained, will be followed by greater consequences.
It seems to me as if the spiritual conquest of India was
a work reserved for these latter days to accomplish, because
requiring all the previous dear-bought experiences of the Church,
and all the preliminary education of the world, and that, when
accomplished,—as by the help of the living Christ it shall,—it will
be a very Armageddon: the last great battle against every form of
unbelief, the last fortress of the enemy stormed, the last victory
gained as necessary to secure the unimpeded progress and the final
triumph of the world’s regeneration.

He shows how the evangelising methods with which
we are familiar at home are inapplicable in India.
‘One of the noblest and most devoted of men, Mr.
Bowen of Bombay, whom I heard thus preach, and
who has done so for a quarter of a century, informed
me in his own humble, truthful way,—and his case
is not singular except for its patience and earnestness,—that,
as far as he knew, he had never made one
single convert.’ In insisting on education as the
first means all authorities are now at one with him;
but his other idea, that in India the various Christian
sects should forget their differences, and aim at a[135]
native Church, which should be independent of
Western creeds, is still a devout imagination.

Is the grand army to remain broken up into separate divisions,
each to recruit to its own standard, and to invite the Hindoos to
wear our respective uniforms, adopt our respective shibboleths,
and learn and repeat our respective war-cries, and even make caste
marks of our wounds and scars, which to us are but the sad
mementoes of old battles?[7]

He foresaw a time when for idols would be substituted
Jesus, the divine yet human brother; for the
Puranas the Bible; for caste Christian brotherhood;
and for weary rite and empty ceremony the peace of
God.

The Moderatorship, which is the presidency of the
General Assembly, is the highest office in the Church.
The appointment lies with the members, but in practice
the retiring dignitary, on the opening day, names his
successor, who has in fact been chosen six months
before at a secret conclave. Some such arrangement is
necessary, as the Moderator has to wear an antique and
elaborate scheme of apparel. Supposing the General
Assembly were to reject the nominee, picture the[136]
situation! There behind the door would be the proud
one, giving the last touch to his ruffles, casting a final
glance at his buckled shoes, while a gentleman in mere
coat and trousers was marching to the Chair! On the
whole the college of Moderators has proved an excellent
body of electors, and seldom has it done itself more
credit than in promoting Norman Macleod. In 1869 he
was, to be sure, the chief man in the Church, but the old
Moderators were just the persons who would be most
shocked by his view of the first day of the week. In
offering to so recent a culprit the greatest honour which
the Church had to bestow, they showed no little
magnanimity, even were the idea of muzzling him not
altogether absent. ‘I should like to be at the head of
everything,’ Norman had said in his youth, and though
too good a man to sacrifice any of his moral being to
ambition, undoubtedly he was fond of power. The
Moderatorship he at first, both by word and letter,
refused, chiefly on the ground of his desire for freedom
in the expression of his opinions. But of course it was
all right!

During the session of the General Assembly the
Moderator has an exciting round of social duties. Every
morning he entertains a number of the clergy and their
wives to breakfast, and at the dinners and receptions in
Holyrood Palace he is the principal figure, next to the
representative of the Sovereign. But the great event
for the Moderator is the closing address, which he[137]
delivers about midnight to a mixed crowd. After that
comes the most impressive scene of all, when they stand
and sing—

‘Pray that Jerusalem may have
Peace and felicity;

Let them that love thee and thy peace
Have still prosperity.’

Speaking of the creed Macleod was so vague (mindful
of the old hands after all) that he might as well have
passed the matter off with one of his favourite quotations—

‘I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!’

But of his oration there is one part that, were it only
known, would grow in importance the more the cry
for disestablishment was heard. The age, he says, is
against, and rightly against, monopolies of every kind.
To defend a State Church on the ground of treaties is
idle; the question is whether it satisfies the nation.
Nor does he argue for the preservation of the Establishment
on any such ground as the need of a placard
on the nation’s door, Religion recognised within.
Voluntaryism is not only insufficient to meet the spiritual
wants of the country, but involves the dependence of the
clergy. On the other hand, the Church exists for the
people, and has no interests apart from theirs. When it
ceases to have the general confidence it loses its right
to the endowments, which are held in trust for the[138]
common good. A national Church should therefore be
comprehensive, and that to the furthest limit compatible
with its existence as a Christian institution. Every
ecclesiastical question, whether of government, of
worship, or even of doctrine (provided only that the
essential faith be kept) should be decided with a single
eye to the national interest. Were he living now,
Macleod would probably advocate the union of the
presbyterian Churches at any cost to the Establishment
except the loss of the teinds.

He was no sooner released from the General Assembly
than he was off to Berlin, where he fixed missionaries
for the aborigines of India. Home again, he resumed
his peregrinations in the country, with ‘a fire in his
bones for a Mission and a Church on the point of
perishing.’ Oh it is wonderful, after his so strenuous
day, to see the passion and hurry with which, in spite
of the burden of the flesh, he struggles onward in
the falling of the eve. His religious feelings and aspirations
grew more and more absorbing and intense. As
his life seemed not for long in this world, he thought
the more of the next. Education beyond the grave,
progress everlasting, was the favourite conception of his
closing years.

In 1871, having an acute attack of gout, he was
ordered by Sir William Jenner to take the waters at Ems.
Towards the end of the year he owned to himself, for the
first time, that he was unequal to his tasks. The least thing[139]
exhausted him, he could not sleep. Early in the following
spring he went to St. Andrews to address the students.
‘We were all struck,’ wrote his old friend Shairp, then
Principal of the University, ‘by his worn and flaccid
appearance…. After describing very clearly and
calmly the state of the mission and its weakness for
want of both fit men and sufficient funds, his last words
were—“If by the time next General Assembly arrives
neither of these are forthcoming, there is one who
wishes he may find a grave!”’ A few weeks later his
infirmities had so increased that he was compelled to
give up the India Mission. One more effort to rouse the
Church he was resolved to make, were it his last. When
in the ensuing General Assembly he rose to speak, the
House was crowded and as still as death; it was clear to
all that the warrior of God would soon enter into rest.
His utterance was so rapid as to beat the reporters, but
the speech was said to be the finest he ever made.
The most striking passage is one rounding off his
argument that the Westminster Confession was not for
India:—

‘Am I to be silent lest I should be whispered about,
or suspected, or called “dangerous,” “broad,” “latitudinarian,”
“atheistic”? So long as I have a good conscience
towards God, and have His sun to shine on me,
and can hear the birds singing, I can walk across the
earth with a joyful and free heart. Let them call me
“broad.” I desire to be broad as the charity of Almighty[140]
God, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the
good: who hateth no man, and who loveth the poorest
Hindoo more than all their committees or all their
Churches. But while I long for that breadth of charity
I desire to be narrow—narrow as God’s righteousness,
which as a sharp sword can separate between eternal
right and eternal wrong.’

On his birthday he wrote to Shairp: ‘As I feel time so
rapidly passing, I take your hand, dear old friend, with a
firmer grip.’ That day, by his express desire, his family
were all gathered round him. As husband, father,
brother, son, never man was more devoted. After two
weeks of restlessness and want of sleep, suddenly the end
came. About midday on the sixteenth of June, reclining
on the sofa, he uttered a cry. As his wife sprang to his
side, he sighed and passed away.

The news that Norman Macleod was dead sent a
thrill through the nation. His funeral was the most
imposing ever seen in Glasgow. At the services, which
were held in the Barony Church and in the Cathedral,
ministers of different denominations took part. There
were between three and four thousand in the procession,
including magistrates, sheriffs, and professors, all in their
official robes, and two representatives of royalty. As
far as to the outskirts of the city the route was thronged
with spectators. An old woman, blinking in the brilliant[141]
weather, was overheard saying to herself, Eh, but Providence
has been kind to Norman, gi’en’ him sic a
grand day for his funeral! He was buried beside his
father in Campsie. There are monuments: a tablet
at Loudoun; a statue near the site of the old Barony
Church; and two stained windows at Crathie, the gift
of Her Majesty the Queen.