PRINCIPAL CAIRNS

PREFACE

In preparing the following pages I have been chiefly indebted
for the materials of the earlier chapters to some MS. notes
by my late uncle, Mr. William Cairns. These were originally
written for Professor MacEwen when he was preparing his
admirable Life and Letters of John Cairns, D.D. LL.D.
They are very full and very interesting, and I have made free
use of them.

To Dr. MacEwen’s book I cannot sufficiently express my
obligations. He has put so much relating to Principal Cairns
into an absolutely final form, that he seems to have left no
alternative to those who come after him between passing over
in silence what he has so well said and reproducing it almost
in his words. It is probable, therefore, that students of the
Life and Letters—and there are many who, like
Mr. Andrew Lang with Lockhart’s Life of Scott, “make
it their breviary “—will detect some echoes of its
sentences in this little book. Still, I have tried to look at
the subject from my own point of view, and to work it out in
my own way; while, if I have borrowed anything directly, I
trust that I have made due acknowledgment in the proper
place.

Among those whom I have to thank for kind assistance, I
desire specially to mention my father, the Rev. David Cairns,
the last surviving member of the household at Dunglass, who
has taken a constant interest in the progress of the book,
and has supplied me with many reminiscences and suggestions.
To my brother the Rev. D.S. Cairns, Ayton, I am indebted for
most valuable help in regard to many points, especially that
dealt with at the close of Chapter VI.; and I also owe much
to the suggestions of my friends the Rev. P. Wilson and the
Rev. R. Glaister. For help in revising the proofs I have to
thank the Rev. J.M. Connor and my brother the Rev. W.T.
Cairns.

J.C.

DUMFRIES, 20th March 1903.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY AND CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER II: DUNGLASS

CHAPTER III: COLLEGE DAYS

CHAPTER IV: THE STUDENT OF THEOLOGY

CHAPTER V: GOLDEN SQUARE

CHAPTER VI: THE CENTRAL PROBLEM

CHAPTER VII: THE APOSTLE OF UNION

CHAPTER VIII: WALLACE GREEN

CHAPTER IX: THE PROFESSOR

CHAPTER X: THE PRINCIPAL

CHAPTER XI: THE END OF THE DAY

FOOTNOTES

PRINCIPAL CAIRNS

CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY AND CHILDHOOD

John Cairns was born at Ayton Hill, in the parish of Ayton,
in the east of Berwickshire, on the 23rd of August 1818.

The farm of Ayton Hill no longer exists. Nothing is left of
it but the trees which once overshadowed its buildings, and
the rank growth of nettles which marks the site of a vanished
habitation of man. Its position was a striking one, perched
as it was just on the edge of the high ground which separates
the valley of the little river Eye from that of the Tweed. It
commanded an extensive view, taking in almost the whole
course of the Eye, from its cradle away to the left among the
Lammermoors to where it falls into the sea at Eyemouth a few
miles to the right. Down in the valley, directly opposite,
were the woods and mansion of Ayton Castle. A little to the
left, the village of Ayton lay extended along the farther
bank of the stream, while behind both castle and village the
ground rose in gentle undulations to the uplands of
Coldingham Moor.

South-eastwards, a few miles along the coast, lay
Berwick-on-Tweed, the scene of John Cairns’s future labours
as a minister; while away in the opposite direction, in the
heart of the Lammermoors, near the headwaters of the
Whitadder and the Dye, was the home of his immediate
ancestors. These were tenants of large sheep-farms; but,
through adverse circumstances, his grandfather, Thomas
Cairns, unable to take a farm of his own, had to earn his
living as a shepherd. He died in 1799, worn out before he had
passed his prime, and his widow was left to bring up her
young fatherless family of three girls and two boys as best
she could. After several migrations, which gradually brought
them down from the hills to the seaboard, they settled for
some years at Ayton Hill. The farm was at the time under some
kind of trust, and there was no resident farmer. The widowed
mother was engaged to look after the pigs and the poultry;
the daughters also found employment; and James, the elder
son, became the shepherd. He was of an adventurous and
somewhat restless disposition, and, at the time of the
threatened invasion by Napoleon, joined a local Volunteer
corps. Then the war fever laid hold of him, and he enlisted
in the regular army, serving in the Rifle Brigade all through
the Peninsular War, from Vimiera to Toulouse, and earning a
medal with twelve clasps. He afterwards returned, bringing
with him a Portuguese wife, and settled as shepherd on the
home-farm of Ayton Castle.

The younger son, John, as yet little more than a child, was
hired out as herd-boy on the neighbouring farm of
Greystonelees, between Ayton and Berwick. His wages were a
pair of shoes in the half-year, with his food in the farm
kitchen and his bed in the stable loft. His schooldays had
begun early. He used afterwards to tell how his mother, when
he was not more than five years old, carried him every day on
her back on his way to school across a little stream that
flowed near their cottage. But this early education was often
interrupted, and came very soon to a close; not, however,
before he was well able to read. Writing he taught himself
later; and, later still, he picked up a good working
knowledge of arithmetic at a night-school. He was a quiet,
thoughtful boy, specially fond of reading, but, from lack of
books, reading was almost out of his reach. He had not even a
Bible of his own, for Bibles were then so dear that it was
not possible for parents in humble life to provide those of
their children who went out into the world with copies even
of the cheapest sort. In place of a Bible, however, his
mother had given him a copy of the Scottish Metre Version of
the Psalms, with a “Preface” to each Psalm and notes by John
Brown of Haddington. This was all the boy had to feed his
soul on, but it was enough, for it was strong meat; and he
valued and carefully kept that old, brown, leather-bound
Psalm-book to the end of his days.

When James left home, the shepherding at Ayton Hill was taken
up by his brother John. Though only a lad in his teens, he
was in every respect, except in physical strength, already a
man. He was steady and thoughtful, handy and capable in farm
work, especially in all that concerned the care of sheep, for
which he had a natural and probably an inherited instinct. He
was also held in great regard by the Rev. David Ure, the
earnest and kindly minister of the Burgher Meeting-house,
which stood behind the Castle woods at the lower end of Ayton
village. The family were of that “strict, not strictest
species of Presbyterian Dissenter,” and John attended also
the Bible-class and Fellowship Meeting. The family of John
Murray, a ploughman or “hind” from the Duns district, and now
settled at Bastleridge, the next farm to Ayton Hill, also
attended Mr. Ure’s church. An intimacy sprang up between the
two families. It ripened into affection between John Cairns
and Alison, John Murray’s only daughter, and in June 1814
they were united in marriage. The two eldest daughters of the
Cairns family had already gone to situations, and were soon
to have homes of their own. The grand old mother, who had
been for so many years both father and mother to her
children, was beginning to feel the infirmities of age. When,
therefore, the young couple took up housekeeping, she left
the home and the work at Ayton Hill to them, and with her
youngest daughter went over to live in Ayton.

John Cairns and his wife were in many respects very unlike
one another. He was of a grave, quiet, and somewhat anxious
temperament, almost morbidly scrupulous where matters of
conscience and responsibility were concerned. She, on the
other hand, was always hopeful, making light of practical
difficulties, and by her untiring energy largely helping to
make these disappear. She had a great command of vigorous
Scotch, and a large stock of homely proverbs, of which she
made frequent and apposite use. Both husband and wife were
excellently well read in their Bibles, and both were united
in the fear of God. Built on this firm foundation, their
union of twenty-seven years was a singularly happy one, and
their different temperaments contributed to the common stock
what each of them separately lacked. Ayton Hill remained
their home for six years after their marriage, and here were
born their three eldest children, of whom the youngest, John,
is the subject of the present sketch.

In the spring of 1820 the trust under which Ayton Hill had
been worked for so many years was wound up, and a new tenant
took the farm. It became necessary, therefore, for the
shepherd to seek a new situation, and this brought about the
first “flitting” in the family history. The Berwickshire
hinds are somewhat notorious for their migratory habits, in
which some observers have found a survival of the
restlessness which characterised their ancestors in former
times, and was alike the result and the cause of the old
Border Forays. Be that as it may, every Whitsunday term-day
sees the country roads thronged with carts conveying
furniture and bedding from one farm to another. In front of
the pile sits the hind’s wife with her younger children,
while the hind himself with his older boys and girls walks
beside the horse, or brings up the rear, driving the family
cow before him. In some cases there is a flitting every year,
and instances have even been known in which anxiety to
preserve an unbroken tradition of annual removals has been
satisfied by a flitting from one house to another on the same
farm.

The Cairns family now entered on a period of migration of
this kind, and in the course of eleven years they flitted no
less than six times. Their first removal was from Ayton Hill
to Oldcambus Mains, in the parish of Cockburnspath, where
they came into touch with the Dunglass estate and the
Stockbridge Church, with both of which they were in
after-years to have so close a connection. The father had
been engaged by the Dunglass factor to act, in the absence of
a regular tenant, as joint steward and shepherd at Oldcambus,
and the family lived in the otherwise unoccupied farmhouse.
The two elder children attended a school less than a mile
distant, and in their absence John, the youngest, who was now
in his fourth year, used to cause no little anxiety to his
careful mother by wandering out by himself dangerously near
to the edge of the high sea-cliffs behind the farmhouse.

At length, in a happy moment, he took it into his head to go
to school himself; and, although he was too young for
lessons, the schoolmaster allowed him to sit beside his
brother and sister. When he was tired of sitting, tradition
has it that the little fellow used to amuse himself by
getting up and standing in the corner to which the school
culprits were sent. Here he duly put on the dunce’s cap which
he had seen them wear, and which bore the inscription, “For
my bad conduct I stand here.”

A tenant having been at length found for Oldcambus Mains, the
family, which had been increased by the birth of three more
children, removed back to the Ayton district, to the farm of
Whiterigg, two miles from the village. The house which they
occupied here is still pointed out, but it has been enlarged
and improved since those days. At that time, like all the
farm servants’ dwellings in the district, it consisted of a
single room with an earthen floor, an open unlined roof of
red tiles, and rafters running across and resting on the wall
at each side. There was a fireplace at one end and a window,
and then a door at right angles to the fireplace. When the
furniture came to be put in, the two box-beds with their
sliding panels were set up facing the fireplace; they touched
the back wall at one end, and left a small space free
opposite to the door at the other. The beds came almost, if
not quite, up to the level of the rafters, and screened off
behind them perhaps a third of the entire space, which was
used as a lumber closet or store. Above the rafters, well
furnished with cleeks for the family stock of hams,
there was spread, in lieu of a ceiling, a large sheet of
canvas or coarse unbleached cotton. There was a table under
the window, a dresser with racks for plates, etc., set
up against the opposite wall, and an eight-day clock between
the window and the fireplace. “Fixtures” were in such houses
practically non-existent; the grate, which consisted merely
of two or three bars or ribs, the iron swey
from which hung the large pot with its rudimentary feet, and,
in some cases, even the window, were the property of the
immigrants, and were carried about by them from farm to farm
in their successive flirtings.

When at Whiterigg, the children attended school at Ayton, and
here young John learned his letters and made considerable
progress in reading. After two years, the death of the
Whiterigg farmer made another change necessary, and the
family returned to the Dunglass estate and settled at
Aikieside, a forester’s cottage quite near to their former
home at Oldcambus Mains, and within easy reach of Oldcambus
School. Aikieside is in the Pease Dean, a magnificent wooded
glen, crossed a little lower down by a famous bridge which
carries the old post road from Edinburgh to Berwick over the
Pease Burn at a height of nearly one hundred and thirty feet.
A still older road crosses the stream close to its mouth,
less than a mile below the bridge. The descent here is very
steep on both sides, but it seems to have been even steeper
in former times than it is now. This point in the old road is
“the strait Pass at Copperspath,” where Oliver Cromwell
before the battle of Dunbar found the way to Berwick blocked
by the troops of General Leslie, and of which he said that
here “ten men to hinder are better than forty to make their
way.”

Beautiful as the Pease Dean is, it has this drawback for
those who live in the vicinity—especially if they
happen to be anxious mothers—that it is infested with
adders; and as these engaging reptiles were specially
numerous and specially aggressive in the “dry year” 1826, it
is not surprising that when, owing to the cottage at
Aikieside being otherwise required, John Cairns was offered a
house in the village of Cockburnspath, he and his wife gladly
availed themselves of that offer. From Cockburnspath another
removal was made in the following year to Dunglass Mill; and
at last, in 1831, the much travelled family, now increased to
eight, found rest in a house within the Dunglass grounds,
after the father had received the appointment of shepherd on
the home-farm, which he held during the rest of his life.

CHAPTER II

DUNGLASS

The Lammermoor range, that “dusky continent of barren
heath-hills,” as Thomas Carlyle calls it, runs down into the
sea at St. Abb’s Head. For the greater part of its length it
divides Berwickshire from East Lothian; but at its seaward
end there is one Berwickshire parish lying to the north of
it—the parish of Cockburnspath. The land in this parish
slopes down to the Firth of Forth; it is rich and well
cultivated, and is divided into large farms, each of which
has its group of red-roofed buildings, its substantial
farmhouse, and its long tail of hinds’ cottages. The seaward
views are very fine, and include the whole of the rugged line
of coast from Fast Castle on the east to Tantallon and North
Berwick Law on the west. In the middle distance are the tower
of Dunbar Church, the Bass Rock, and the Isle of May; and
farther off is the coast of Fife, with Largo Law and the
Lomonds in the background. The land is mostly bare of trees,
but there is a notable exception to this in the profound
ravines which come down from the hills to the sea, and whose
banks are thickly clothed with fine natural wood.

Of these, the Pease Dean has already been mentioned. Close
beside it is the Tower Dean, so called from an ancient
fortalice of the Home family which once defended it, and
which stands beside a bridge held in just execration by all
cyclists on the Great North Road. But, unquestionably, the
finest of all the ravines in these parts is Dunglass Dean,
which forms the western boundary of Cockburnspath parish, and
divides Berwickshire from East Lothian. From the bridge by
which the Edinburgh and Berwick road crosses the dean, at the
height of one hundred feet above the bed of the stream, the
view in both directions is extremely fine. About a hundred
and fifty yards lower down is the modern railway bridge,
which spans the ravine in one gigantic arch forty feet higher
than the older structure that carries the road; and through
this arch, above the trees which fill the glen, one gets a
beautiful glimpse of the sea about half a mile away.

Above the road-bridge, and to the right of the wooded dean,
are the noble trees and parks of Dunglass grounds. The
mansion-house, a handsome modern building, part of which
rises to a height of five storeys, is built only some eight
or ten feet from the brink of the dean, on its western or
East Lothian side. About fifty yards farther west are the
ivy-covered ruins of a fine Gothic church, whose massive
square tower and stone roof are still tolerably complete.
This church before the Reformation had collegiate rank, and
is now the sole remaining relic of the ancient village of
Dunglass. In former times the Dunglass estate belonged to the
Earls of Home, whose second title, borne to this day by the
eldest son of the house, is that of Lord Dunglass. But it was
bought about the middle of the seventeenth century by the
Halls, who own it still, and in whose family there has been a
baronetcy since 1687. The laird at the time with which we are
now dealing was Sir James Hall, whose epitaph in the old
church at Dunglass bears that he was “a philosopher eminent
among the distinguished men of an enquiring age.” He was
President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for many years,
and was an acknowledged expert in Natural Science, especially
in Geology. His second son was the well-known Captain Basil
Hall, R.N., the author of a once widely-read book of travels.

Behind the church, and about a hundred yards to the west of
the mansion-house, are the offices—stables, close
boxes, coach-house, etc., all of a single storey, and built
round a square paved courtyard. The coachman’s house is on
one side of this square, and the shepherd’s on the other. The
latter, which is on the side farthest from the “big house,”
has its back to the courtyard, and looks out across a road to
its little bailyard and a fine bank of trees beyond it. It is
neat and lightsome, but very small; consisting only of a
single room thirteen feet by twelve, with a closet opening
off it not more than six feet broad. How a family consisting
of a father, mother, and eight children could be stowed away
in it, especially at night, is rather a puzzling question.
But we may suppose that, when all were at home, each of the
two box-beds would be made to hold three, that a smaller bed
in the closet would account for two more, and that for the
accommodation of two of the younger children a sliding shelf
would be inserted transversely across the foot of one of the
box-beds. Certainly, an arrangement of this kind would fail
to be approved by a sanitary inspector in our times; and even
during the day, when all the family were on the floor
together, there was manifest overcrowding. But the life was a
country one, and could be, and was, largely spent in the open
air, amid healthful surroundings and beautiful scenery.

The income available for the support of such a large
household seems to us in these days almost absurdly
inadequate. The father’s wages rarely exceeded £30 a
year, and they never all his life reached £40. They
were mostly paid in kind. So many bolls of oats, of barley
and of peas, so many carts of coals, so many yards of growing
potatoes, a cow’s grass, the keep of two sheep and as many
pigs, and a free house,—these, which were known as the
gains, were the main items in the account. This system
gave considerable opportunity for management on the part of a
thrifty housewife, and for such management there were few to
surpass the housewife in the shepherd’s cottage at Dunglass.

The food was plentiful but plain. Breakfast consisted of
porridge and milk; dinner, in the middle of the day, of
Scotch kail and pork, occasionally varied by herrings, fresh
or salt according to the season, and with the usual
accompaniments of potatoes and pease bannocks. At supper
there was porridge again, or mashed potatoes washed down with
draughts of milk, and often eaten with horn spoons out of the
large pot which was set down on the hearth. Tea was only seen
once a week—on Sunday afternoons. And so the young
family grew up healthy and strong in spite of the
overcrowding.

Before the removal to Dunglass, the two eldest children had
been taken from school to work in the fields, where they
earned wages beginning at sixpence a day. Their education,
however, was continued in some sort at a night-school. John
and his younger brother James, and the twins, Janet and
William, who came next in order, attended the parish school
at Cockburnspath, a mile away. Cockburnspath is a village of
about two hundred and fifty inhabitants, situated a little
off the main road. It has a church with an ancient round
tower, and a venerable market-cross rising from a platform of
steps in the middle of the village street.

On the south side of the street, just in front of the church,
stood the old schoolhouse—a low one storey building,
roofed with the red tiles characteristic of the
neighbourhood, and built on to the schoolmaster’s two-storey
dwelling. The schoolmaster at this time was John M’Gregor, a
man of ripe and accurate scholarship and quite separate
individuality. The son of a Perthshire farmer, he had studied
for the ministry at St. Andrews University, and had, it was
said, fulfilled all the requirements for becoming a
licentiate of the Church of Scotland except the sending in of
one exercise, This exercise he could never be persuaded to
send in, and that not because he had any speculative
difficulties as to the truth of the Christian revelation, nor
yet because he had any exaggerated misgivings as to his own
qualifications for the work of the ministry; but because he
preferred the teaching profession, and was, moreover,
indignant at what he conceived to be the overbearing attitude
which the ministers of the Established Church assumed to the
parish schools and schoolmasters. This feeling ultimately
became a kind of mania with him. He was at feud with his own
parish minister, and never entered his church except when,
arrayed in a blue cloak with a red collar, he attended to
read proclamations of marriages; and he could make himself
very disagreeable when the local Presbytery sent their annual
deputation to examine his school. Yet he was essentially a
religious man; he had a reverence for what was good, and he
taught the Bible and Shorter Catechism to his scholars
carefully and well.

As he disliked the ministers, so he showed little deference
to the farmers, who were in some sort the “quality” of the
district, and to such of their offspring as came under his
care. The farmers retaliated by setting up an opposition
school in Cockburnspath, which survived for a few years; but
it never flourished, for the common people believed in
M’Gregor, whom they regarded as “a grand teacher,” as indeed
he was. He had a spare, active figure, wore spectacles, and
took snuff. There was at all times an element of grimness in
him, and he could be merciless when the occasion seemed to
demand it. “Stark man he was, and great awe men had of him,”
but this awe had its roots in a very genuine respect for his
absolutely just dealing and his masterful independence of
character.

John Cairns first went to Mr. M’Gregor’s school when the
family removed to Cockburnspath from Aikieside, and he made
such progress that two years later, when he was ten years
old, the master proposed that he should join a Latin class
which was then being formed. This proposal caused great
searchings of heart at home. His father, with anxious
conscientiousness, debated with himself as to whether it
would be right for him thus to set one of his sons above the
rest. He could not afford to have them all taught Latin, so
would it be fair to the others that John should be thus
singled out from them? The mother, on the other hand, had no
such misgivings, and she was clear that John must have his
Latin. The ordinary school fees ranged from three to five
shillings a quarter; but when Latin was taken they rose to
seven and sixpence. Mr. M’Gregor had proposed to teach John
Latin without extra charge, but both his father and his
mother were agreed that to accept this kind offer was not to
be thought of for a moment; and his mother was sure that by a
little contriving and saving on her part the extra sum could
be secured. The minister, Mr. Inglis, who was consulted in
the matter, also pronounced strongly for the proposal, and so
John was allowed to begin his classical studies.

Within two years Greek had been added to the Latin; and, as
the unavoidable bustle and noise which arose in the evening
when the whole family were together in the one room of the
house made study difficult, John stipulated with his mother
that she should call him in the morning, when she rose, an
hour before anybody else, to light the fire and prepare the
breakfast. And so it happened that, if any of the rest of the
family awoke before it was time to get up, they would see
John studying his lesson and hear him conjugating his Greek
verbs by the light of the one little oil-lamp that the house
afforded. Perhaps, too, it was what he saw, in these early
morning hours, of the unwearied and self-forgetful toil of
his mother that taught him to be in an especial degree
thoughtful for her comfort and considerate of her wants both
then and in after-years.

But his regular schooldays were now drawing to an end. His
father, though engaged as the shepherd at Dunglass, had other
duties of a very multifarious kind to discharge, and part of
his shepherd work had been done for him for some time by his
eldest son, Thomas. But Thomas was now old enough to earn a
higher wage by other work on the home-farm or in the woods,
and so it came to be John’s turn to take up the work among
the sheep. When his father told Mr. M’Gregor that John would
have to leave school, the schoolmaster was so moved with
regret at the thought of losing so promising a scholar, that
he said that if John could find time for any study during the
day he would be glad to have him come to his house two or
three nights in the week, and to go over with him then what
he had learned. As Mr. M’Gregor had become more and more
solitary in his habits of late—he was a bachelor, and
his aged mother kept house for him—this offer was
considered to be a very remarkable proof of his regard, and
it was all the more gratefully accepted on that account.

It fortunately happened that the work to which John had now
to turn his hand allowed him an opportunity of carrying on
his studies without interfering with its efficiency. That
work was of a twofold character. He had to “look” the sheep,
and he had to “herd” them. The looking came first. Starting
at six o’clock in the morning, accompanied by the faithful
collie “Cheviot,” he made a round of all the grass-parks on
the home-farm, beginning down near the sea and thence working
his way round to a point considerably higher up than the
mansion-house. His instructions were to count the sheep in
each field, so that he might be able to tell whether they
were all there, and also to see whether they were all afoot
and feeding. In the event of anything being wrong, he was to
report it to his father. The circuit was one of three or four
miles, and the last field to be looked was that in which were
gathered the fifty or sixty sheep that were to be brought out
to the unfenced lawns round the mansion-house and be herded
there during the day.

These sheep were generally to be found waiting close to the
gate, and when it was opened they could quite easily find
their own way down to their feeding-ground. As they passed
slowly on, cropping the grass as they went, John was able to
leave them and go home for his breakfast of porridge and
milk. Breakfast having been despatched, and Cheviot fed, he
once more wrapped his shepherd’s plaid about him, remembering
to put a book or two, and perhaps a piece of bannock, into
the neuk of it, and set out to find his flock. There
was usually little difficulty in doing so, for the sheep knew
the way and did not readily wander out of it; while, even if
they had deviated a little from the direct route, no great
harm would at this stage of their passage have resulted. It
was quite different when they came down to the lawns near the
house. These were surrounded by ornamental shrubbery, and it
was to keep the sheep from invading this and the adjacent
flower-borders that the services of the herd-boy were
required.

What he had to do, then, after he had brought the sheep down,
was to take his place on some knoll which commanded the
ground where they were feeding, and keep an eye on them. If
nothing disturbed them they would feed quietly enough, and a
long spell of reading might be quite safely indulged in. If
any of them showed signs of wandering out of bounds, a stroll
in their direction, book in hand, would usually be quite
sufficient, with or without Cheviot’s aid, to turn them. And
if a leading sheep were turned, the others would, sheep-like,
follow the new lead thus imparted. This was the usual state
of things in fine weather. In wet weather there were not the
same possibilities of study, unless the feeding-ground
happened to be in the neighbourhood of the old church, where
sufficient shelter could be found for reading and the sheep
could be watched through the open doorway. About four
o’clock—in winter somewhat earlier—it was time to
take the sheep back to the fold-field, and then the parks had
to be again looked, this time in the reverse order, the
shepherd’s cottage being gained in time for supper.

After supper, John would go into Cockburnspath to recite the
lessons he had prepared to Mr. M’Gregor. The schoolmaster
never prescribed any definite section to be learned; he left
this to his pupil, in whose industry and interest in his work
he had sufficient confidence. He rarely bestowed any praise.
A grim smile of satisfaction, and sometimes a “Very well,
sir,” were all that he would vouchsafe; but to others he
would be less reticent, and once he was heard to say, “I have
so far missed my own way, but John Cairns will flourish yet.”

John is described as having been at this time a well-grown
boy, somewhat raw-boned and loose-jointed, with an eager
look, ruddy and healthy, and tanned with the sun, his hair
less dark than it afterwards became. He was fond of schoolboy
games—shinty, football, and the rest—and would
play at marbles, even when the game went against him, until
he had lost his last stake. Archery was another favourite
amusement, and he was expert at making bows from the
thinnings of the Dunglass yews, and arrows tipped with iron
ousels—almost the only manual dexterity he
possessed. Like all boys of his class, his usual dress was a
brown velveteen jacket and waistcoat and corduroy trousers
that had once been white.

Along with the teaching he got from Mr. M’Gregor, there went
another sort of education of a less formal kind which still
deserves to be mentioned. Now that he was earning a
wage,—it was about eightpence or tenpence a
day,—which of course went into the common stock, he
ventured occasionally to ask his mother for sixpence to
himself. With this he could obtain a month’s reading at the
Cockburnspath library. A very excellent library this was, and
during the three years of his herding he worked his way
pretty well through it. It was especially strong in history
and standard theology, and in these departments included such
works as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Mitford’s
History of Greece, Russell’s Modern Europe,
Butler’s Analogy, and Paley’s Evidences. In
biography and fiction it was less strong, but it had a
complete set of the Waverley Novels in one of the early
three-volume editions. When he went to Mr. M’Gregor’s, John
used often to take butter churned by his mother to the
village shop, and the basket in which he carried it was
capacious enough to hold a good load of books from the
library on the return journey.

All the family were fond of books, and the small store of
volumes, mostly of old Scotch divinity, in the little
bookcase at Dunglass was well thumbed. But reading of a
lighter kind was also indulged in, and on winter nights, when
the mother was plying her spinning-wheel and the father had
taken down his cobbler’s box and was busily engaged patching
the children’s shoes, it was a regular practice for John to
sit near the dim oil-lamp and read to the rest. Sometimes the
reading would be from an early number of Chambers’s
Journal, sometimes from Wilson’s Tales of the
Borders, which were then appearing—both of these
being loans from a neighbour. But once a week there was
always a newspaper to be read. It was often a week or a
fortnight old, for, as it cost sixpence halfpenny, it was
only by six or eight neighbours clubbing together that such a
luxury could be brought within the reach of a working-man’s
family; but it was never so old as to be uninteresting to
such eager listeners.

But the most powerful of all the influences which affected
John Cairns at this period of his life remains to be
mentioned—that which came to him from his religious
training and surroundings. The Christian religion has acted
both directly and indirectly on the Scottish peasantry, and
it has done so the more powerfully because of the democratic
character of the Presbyterian form which that religion took
in Scotland. Directly, it has changed their lives and has
given them new motives and new immortal hopes. But it has
also acted on them indirectly, doing for them in this respect
much of what education and culture have done for others. It
has supplied the element of idealism in their lives. These
lives, otherwise commonplace and unlovely, have been lighted
up by a perpetual vision of the unseen and the eternal; and
this has stimulated their intellectual powers and has so
widened their whole outlook upon life as to raise them high
above those of their own class who lived only for the
present. All who have listened to the prayers of a devout
Scotch elder of the working-class must have been struck by
this combination of spiritual and intellectual power; and one
thing they must have specially noticed is that, unlike the
elder of contemporary fiction, he expressed himself, not in
broad Scotch but in correct and often stately Bible English.

But this intellectual activity is often carried beyond the
man in whom it has first manifested itself. It tends to
reappear in his children, who either inherit it or have their
own intellectual powers stimulated in the bracing atmosphere
it has created. The instances of Robert Burns and Thomas
Carlyle, who both came out of homes in which
religion—and religion of the old Scottish
type—was the deepest interest, will occur to everyone.
Not the least striking illustration of this principle is
shown in the case of John Cairns. In the life of his soul he
owed much to the godly upbringing and Christian example shown
to him by his parents; but the home at Dunglass, where
religion was always the chief concern, was the nursery of a
strong mind as well as of a strong soul, and both were fed
from the same spring. In this case, as in so many others,
spiritual strength became intellectual strength in the second
generation.

The Cairns family attended church at Stockbridge, a mile
beyond Cockburnspath and two miles from Dunglass, and the
father was an elder there from 1831 till his death. The
United Secession—formerly the Burgher—Church at
Stockbridge occupied a site conveniently central for the wide
district which it served, but very solitary. It stood amid
cornfields, on the banks of a little stream, and looked
across to the fern-clad slopes of Ewieside, an outlying spur
of the Lammermoors. Except the manse, and the beadle’s
cottage which adjoined it, there was no house within sight,
nor any out of sight less than half a mile away.

The minister at this time was the Rev. David M’Quater Inglis,
a man of rugged appearance and of original and vigorous
mental powers. He was a good scholar and a stimulating
preacher, excelling more particularly in his expository
discourses, or “lectures” as they used to be called. When he
tackled some intricate passage in an Epistle, it was at times
a little hard to follow him, especially as his utterance
tended to be hesitating; but when he had finished, one saw
that a broad clear road had been cut through the thicket, and
that the daylight had been let in upon what before had been
dim. “I have heard many preachers,” said Dr. Cairns, in
preaching his funeral sermon nearly forty years later, “but I
have heard few whose sermons at their best were better than
the best of his; and his everyday ones had a strength, a
simplicity, and an unaffected earnestness which excited both
thought and Christian feeling.” Nor was he merely a preacher.
By his pastoral visitations and “diets of examination” he
always kept himself in close touch with his people, and he
made himself respected by rich and poor alike.

The shepherd’s family occupied a pew at Stockbridge in front
of the pulpit and just under the gallery, which ran round
three sides of the church. That pew was rarely vacant on a
Sunday. There was no herding to be done on that day, and in
the morning the father looked the sheep in the parks himself
that the herd-boy might have his full Sabbath rest. He came
back in time to conduct family worship, this being the only
morning in the week when it was possible for him to do so,
although in the evening it was never omitted, and on Sunday
evening was always preceded by a repetition of the Shorter
Catechism. After worship the family set out for church, where
the service began at eleven.

The situation of Stockbridge, it has been already said, was
solitary, but on Sundays, when the hour of worship drew near,
the place lost its solitude. The roads in all directions were
thronged with vehicles, men on horseback, and a great company
on foot; the women wearing the scarlet cloaks which had not
yet given place to the Paisley shawls of a later period, and
each carrying, neatly wrapped in a white handkerchief, a
Bible or Psalm-book, between whose leaves were a sprig or two
of southernwood, spearmint, or other fragrant herb from the
cottage garden.

The service lasted about three hours. There was first a
“lecture” and then a sermon, each about fifty minutes long;
several portions of psalms were sung; and of the three
prayers, the first, or “long prayer,” was seldom less than
twenty minutes in length. In summer there was an interval of
half an hour between the lecture and the sermon, “when,” says
Mr. William Cairns, “there was opportunity for a delightful
breathing-time, and the youths who were swift of foot could
just reach the bottom of a hill whereon were plenteous
blaeberries, and snatch a fearful joy if one could swallow
without leaving the tell-tale marks on the lips and tongue.”

At the close of the afternoon service there was a Sunday
school, chiefly conducted by Mr. Inglis himself, at which an
examination on the sermon that had just been delivered formed
an important part of the exercises. And tradition has it that
the questioning and answering, which had at first been evenly
distributed among the pupils, usually in the end came to
resolve themselves pretty much into a dialogue between Mr.
Inglis and John Cairns. It was here that the minister first
came to close grips with his elder’s son and took the measure
of the lad’s abilities. After he did so, his interest in
John’s classical studies was constant and helpful; and,
although he gave him no direct assistance in them (if he had
done so, he would have called down upon himself the wrath of
Mr. M’Gregor), he was always ready to lend him books and give
him useful advice.

After three years at herding and at Mr. M’Gregor’s, the
question arose, and was the subject of anxious debate in the
family councils, as to what was to be done with John. He was
now sixteen. His elder brother, Thomas, had got a post under
his father, whom he afterwards succeeded as shepherd at
Dunglass. His elder sister had gone to a situation. And now
James, the brother next younger than himself, had also left
home to be apprenticed to a tailor. It was time for some
decision to be come to with regard to him. Mr. M’Gregor was
anxious that a superstructure should be built on the
foundation laid by himself by his going to College. Mr.
Inglis’s advice was unhesitatingly given in the same
direction. With his father, the old scruples arose about
setting one of his children above the rest; but again his
mother’s chief concern was more about ways and means. His
father’s question was, Ought it to be done? his
mother’s, Can it be done? There were great
difficulties in the way of answering this practical question
in the affirmative. There were then no bursaries open for
competition; and though the expenses at home were not so
great as they had once been, now that three of the family had
been so far placed in life, the University class-fees and the
cost of living, even in the most frugal way, entailed an
expense which was formidable enough. Still, the mother
thought that this could be faced, and, in order to acquaint
herself more fully with all the facts of the situation, she
resolved to pay a long-promised visit to her youngest
brother, who with his family was now living in Edinburgh. He
was a carrier between that city and Jedburgh, and, though
still in a comparatively humble way, was said to be doing
well.

The visit was a great success. Mrs. Cairns was most warmly
received by her brother and his wife, who proposed that John
should stay with them and share with their own family in what
was going. This offer was gratefully accepted, so far as the
question of lodging was concerned. As to board, John’s mother
had ideas of her own, and insisted on paying for it, if not
in money at least in kind. Thus it was settled that John was
to go to College, but nothing was settled beyond this.
Perhaps his parents may have had their own wishes, and his
minister and his schoolmaster their own expectations, about a
career for him; but in the boy’s unworldly heart there was
nothing as yet beyond the desire for further learning and the
earnest resolution to be not unworthy of the sacrifices which
had made the realisation of this desire possible. He worked
at his herding up till the day before he left for the
University, in the end of October 1834; and then, starting in
the middle of the night with William Christison, the
Cockburnspath carrier, he trudged beside the cart that
conveyed the box containing his clothes and his scanty stock
of books all the thirty-five miles between Dunglass and
Edinburgh.

CHAPTER III

COLLEGE DAYS

When John Cairns entered the University of Edinburgh in
November 1834 he passed into a world that was entirely
strange to him. It would be difficult to imagine a greater
contrast than that between the low-roofed village school and
the spacious quadrangle surrounded by heavily balustraded
stone terraces and stately pillared façades, into
which, at the booming of the hourly bell, there poured from
the various classrooms a multitudinous throng of eager young
humanity. And he himself in some mysterious way seemed to be
changed almost beyond his own recognition. Instead of being
the Jock Cairns who had herded sheep on the braes of
Dunglass, and had carried butter to the Cockburnspath shop,
he was now, as his matriculation card informed him, “Joannes
Cairns, Civis Academiae Edinburgeniae;” he was addressed by
the professor in class as “Mr. Cairns,” and was included in
his appeal to “any gentleman in the bench” to elucidate a
difficult passage in the lesson of the day.

He attended two classes this winter—that of “Humanity”
or Latin taught by Professor Pillans, and that of Greek under
the care of Professor George Dunbar. Pillans had been a
master at Eton, and at a later period Rector of the Edinburgh
High School. He was a little man with rosy cheeks, and was a
sound scholar and an admirable teacher, whose special “fad”
was Classical Geography. Dunbar had begun life as a working
gardener at Ayton Castle. He had compiled a Greek Lexicon
which had some repute in its day, but he was not an inspiring
teacher, and his gruff manners made him far from popular.

Trained by a country schoolmaster, and having no experience
of competition except what a country school affords, John
Cairns had until now no idea of his own proficiency
relatively to that of others; and it was something of a
revelation to him when he discovered how far the grounding he
had received from Mr. M’Gregor enabled him to go. His
classical attainments soon attracted notice, and at the end
of the session, although he failed to win the Class Medals,
he stood high in the Honours Lists, and was first in private
Latin studies and in Greek prose. Nor were these the only
interests that occupied him. A fellow-student, the late Dr.
James Hardy, writes of him that from the first he was great
in controversy, and that in the classroom during the ten
minutes before the appearance of the professor, he was always
the centre of a knot of disputants on the Voluntary Church
question or some question of politics. Also it is recorded
that, on the day after a Parliamentary election for the city,
he had no voice left, having shouted it all away the day
before in honour of the two successful Whig candidates.

During this session, as had been previously arranged, he
lodged in Charles Street with his mother’s brother, whose
eldest son, John Murray, shared his room. For this cousin,
who was about his own age, he had always the greatest regard,
and he was specially grateful to him for the kindness with
which he helped him over many of the difficulties which, as a
raw lad from the country, he experienced when he first came
to live in the city. The friendship between the cousins
remained unbroken—though their paths in life were
widely different—till they died, within a fortnight of
each other, nearly sixty years later.

All through the winter a box travelled with the Cockburnspath
carrier every three or four weeks between Edinburgh and
Dunglass, taking with it on the outward journey clothes to be
washed and mended, and on the return journey always including
a store of country provisions—scones, oatmeal, butter,
cheese, bacon, and potatoes. The letters that passed between
the student and his family were also sent in the box, for as
yet there was no penny post, and the postage of a letter
between Dunglass and Edinburgh cost as much as sixpence
halfpenny or sevenpence. Often, too, John would send home
some cheap second-hand books, for he had a general commission
to keep his eye on the bookstalls. Amongst these purchases
was sometimes included a Bible, so that before the end of the
winter each member of the family had a separate Bible to take
to church or Sunday school.

At the close of the winter session he accepted the invitation
of another brother of his mother, who was a farmer at
Longyester, near Gifford in East Lothian, on the northern
fringe of the Lammermoors, to come and be tutor to his three
boys during the summer. At Longyester he spent four very
happy months in congenial work among kind people. He learned
to ride, and more than once he rode along the hill-foots to
Dunglass, twenty miles to the eastward, to spend the Sunday
with his father and mother.

During these months he also came into personal contact with a
family whose influence on him during these early years was
strong and memorable—the Darlings of Millknowe.
Millknowe is a large sheep-farm in the heart of the
Lammermoors, just where the young Whitadder winds round the
base of Spartleton Law. The family at Millknowe, consisting
at this time of three brothers and two sisters, all of whom
had reached middle life, were relatives of his father, the
connection dating from the time when his forebears were
farmers in the same region. They were a notable family, full
of all kinds of interesting lore, literary, scientific, and
pastoral, and they exercised a boundless hospitality to all,
whether gentle or simple, who came within their reach. One of
them, a maiden sister, Miss Jean Darling, took a special
charge of her young cousin, and in a special degree won his
confidence. From the first she understood him. She saw the
power that was awakening within him, and was, particularly in
his student days, his friend and adviser.

As the summer of 1835 advanced, it came to be a grave
question with him whether he could return to college in the
ensuing winter. His father had had a serious illness; and,
though he was now recovering, there was a doctor’s bill to
settle, and he still required more care and better
nourishment than ordinary. Cairns was afraid that, with these
extra expenses to be met, his own return to College might
involve too serious a drain on the family resources. While
matters were in this state, and while he was still at
Longyester, he received a request from Mr. Trotter, the
schoolmaster of his native parish of Ayton, to come and
assist him in the school and with the tuition of boarders in
his house. This offer was quite in the line of the only ideas
as to his future life he had as yet entertained; for, so far
as he had thought seriously on the subject, he had thought of
being a teacher. On the other hand, while his great ambition
was to return to the University, the fact that most of his
class-fellows in the past session had been older than himself
suggested to him that he could quite well afford to delay a
year before he returned.

So he went to Ayton, lodging while there with his father’s
youngest sister, Nancy, who had come thither from Ayton Hill
along with her mother, when her brother John was married in
1814, and had remained there ever since. Cairns had not been
two months in Ayton before his responsibilities were
considerably increased. Mr. Trotter resigned his office, and
the heritors asked the assistant to take charge of the school
until a new teacher should be appointed. There were between
one hundred and fifty and two hundred children in the school;
he was the sole teacher, and he was only seventeen. Moreover,
some delay occurred before the teacher who had been appointed
to succeed Mr. Trotter could come to take up his work. But
Cairns proved equal to the situation. The tradition is that
his rule was an exceedingly stern one, that he kept the
children hard at work, and that he flogged extensively and
remorselessly.

When the new master arrived upon the scene, he subsided into
his original post of assistant. It had been his original
intention to go back to the University in November 1836; but
as that date approached it became evident that the financial
difficulty was not yet removed, so he accepted an engagement
to continue his work in Ayton for another year.

His stay in Ayton was a very happy one. He liked his work,
and had several warm friends in the village and district.
Among these were Mr. Ure, the kindly old minister who had
married his parents and baptized himself. Then there was Mr.
Stark, minister of another Secession church in the
village—a much younger man than Mr. Ure, but a good
scholar and a well-read theologian. There was also a
fellow-student, Henry Weir, whose parents lived in Berwick,
and who used often to walk out to Ayton to see him, Cairns
returning the visits, and seeing for the first time, under
Weir’s auspices, the old Border town in which so much of his
own life was to be spent.

All this while he was working hard at his private studies. To
these studies he gave all the time that was not taken up by
his teaching. He read at his meals, and so far into the night
that his aunt became alarmed for his health. He worked his
way through a goodly number of the Greek and Latin classics,
in copies borrowed from the libraries of the two ministers;
and he not only read, but analysed and elaborately annotated
what he read. But in the notes of the books read during the
year 1837 a change becomes evident. It can be seen that he
took more and more to the study of theology and Christian
evidences, and his note-books are full of references to
Baxter and Jeremy Taylor, to Robert Hall, Chalmers, and
Keith.

At length in the summer a crisis was reached. A letter to his
father, which has not been preserved, announced that his
views and feelings with regard to spiritual things had
undergone a great and far-reaching change, and that religion
had become to him a matter of personal and paramount concern.
Another letter to Henry Weir on the same subject is of great
interest. It is written in the unformed and somewhat stilted
style which he had not yet got rid of, and, with
characteristic reticence, it deals only indirectly with the
details of the experience through which he has passed, being
in form a disquisition on the importance of personal
religion, and a refutation of objections which might occur to
his correspondent against making it the main interest of his
life.

“My dear Henry,” the letter concludes, “I most earnestly wish
that you would devote the energies of your mind to the
attentive consideration of religion, and I have no doubt
that, through the tuition of the Divine Spirit, you would
speedily arrive at the same conviction of the importance of
the subject with myself, and then our friendship would, by
the influence of those feelings which religion implants, be
more hallowed and intimate than before. I long ardently to
see you.”

The experience which has thus been described caused no great
rift with the past, nor did it produce any great change in
his outward life. He did not dedicate himself to the
ministry; he did not, so far as can be gathered, even become
a member of the Church; and although for a short time he
talked of concentrating his energies on the Greek Testament,
to the disparagement of the Greek and Latin classical
writers, within two months we find him back at his old
studies and strenuously preparing for the coming session at
College. But a new power had entered into his life, and that
power gradually asserted itself as the chief and dominating
influence there.

Cairns returned to the University in the late autumn of 1837,
enrolling himself in the classes of Latin, Greek, and Logic.
Although he maintained his intimacy with his uncle’s family,
he now went into lodgings in West Richmond Street, sharing a
room with young William Inglis, son of the minister at
Stockbridge, then a boy at the High School. Here is the
description he gives to his parents of his surroundings and
of the daily routine of his life: “The lodging which we
occupy is a very good room, measuring 18 feet by 16 feet, in
every way neat and comfortable. The walls are hung with
pictures, and the windows adorned with flowers. The rent is
3s. 6d., with a promise of abatement when the price of coals
is lowered. This is no doubt a great sum of money, but I
trust it will be amply compensated by the honesty,
cleanliness, economy, and good temper of the landlady…. I
shall give you the details of my daily life:—Rise at 8;
8.30-10, Latin class; 10-1, private study; 1-2, Logic; 2-3,
Greek class; 4-12.30, private study. As to
meals—breakfast on porridge and treacle at 8.15; dine
on broth and mutton, or varieties of potatoes with beef or
fish, at 3.15; coffee at 7; if hungry, a little bread before
bed. I can live quite easily and comfortably on 3s. or 3s.
6d. per week, and when you see me you will find that I have
grown fat on students’ fare.”

At the close of the session he thus records the result of his
work in one of the classes:—

“There is a circumstance which but for its connection with
the subject of clothes I should not now mention. You are
aware that a gold medal is given yearly by the Society of
Writers to the Signet to the best scholar in the Latin class.
Five are selected to compete for it by the votes of their
fellow-students. Having been placed in the number a fortnight
ago, I have, after a pretty close trial, been declared the
successful competitor. The grand sequence is this, that at
the end of the session I must come forward in the presence of
many of the Edinburgh grandees and deliver a Latin oration as
a prelude to receiving the medal. Although I have little fear
that an oration will be forthcoming of the ordinary length
and quality, I doubt that the trepidation of so unusual a
position will cause me to break down in the delivery of it;
but we shall see. The reference of this subject to the
clothes you will at once discern. The trousers are too tight,
and an addition must be made to their length. The coat is too
wide in the body, too short and tight in the sleeves, and too
spare in the skirt. As to my feelings I shall say nothing,
because I do not look upon the honour as one of a kind that
ought to excite the least elation … I would not wish you to
blazon it, nor would I, but for the cause mentioned, have
taken any notice of it.”

Besides this medal, he obtained the first place in the Greek
class. In Logic he stood third, and he carried off a number
of other prizes. He had been in every way the better for the
interruption in his course; his powers had matured, he knew
what he could do, and he was able to do it at will, and from
this point onward he was recognised as easily the first man
of his time in the University. But he had now to look about
him for employment in the vacation; and for a while, in spite
of the successes of the past session, he was unable to find
it, and was glad to take some poorly paid elementary
teaching. But at length, by the good offices of one of the
masters in the Edinburgh Academy, backed by the strong
recommendation of Professor Pillans, he became tutor in the
family of Mr. John Donaldson, W.S., of whose house, 124
Princes Street, he became an inmate. “What I want,” said Mr.
Donaldson to the professor, “is a gentleman.” “Well,” replied
Pillans, “I am sending you first-rate raw material; we shall
see what you will make of it.” He retained this situation
till the close of his University course, to the entire
satisfaction of his employer and his family, and with great
comfort to himself—the salary being more than
sufficient for his simple needs.

He had, as we have seen, attended the class of Logic during
his second session; but as he was then devoting his main
strength to classics, and as the subject was as yet quite
unfamiliar to him, he did not fully give himself up to it nor
yield to the influence of the professor, Sir William
Hamilton. But during the summer, while he was at Mr.
Donaldson’s, in going again over the ground that he had
traversed during the past session, he was led to read the
works of Descartes, Bacon, and Leibnitz, with the result that
mental philosophy at once became the supreme interest of his
academic life, and, when the winter came round again, he
yielded entirely to its spell and to that of the great man
who was then its most distinguished British exponent.

The class of Hamilton’s that he attended in the session of
1838-39 was that of Advanced Metaphysics. It so happened that
at that time a hot controversy was going on about this very
class. The Edinburgh Town Council, who were the patrons of
Hamilton’s chair, claimed also the right to decide as to what
subjects the professor should lecture on, and pronounced
Metaphysics to be “an abstruse subject, not generally
considered as of any great or permanent utility.” But, while
this controversy was raging without, within all was calm. “We
were quietly engaged”—wrote Cairns twenty years
later—”in our discussions as to the existence of the
external world while the storm was raging without, and only
felt it to be another form of the non-ego; while the
contrast between the singular gentleness and simplicity of
our teacher in his dealings with his pupils, and his more
impassioned qualities in controversy, became more
remarkable.”1 Hamilton’s philosophy may
not now command the acceptance that once belonged to it, and
that part of it which has been most influential may be put
to-day to a use of which he did not dream, and of which he
would not have approved, but Hamilton himself—”the
black eagle of the desert,” as the “Chaldee Manuscript” calls
him—was a mighty force. The influence of that vehement
and commanding personality on a generation of susceptible
young men was deep and far-reaching. He seized and held the
minds of his students until they were able to grasp what he
had to give them,—until, in spite of the toil and pain
it cost them, they were made to grasp it. And he
further trained them in habits of mental discipline and
intellectual integrity, which were of quite priceless value
to them. “I am more indebted to you,” wrote Cairns to him in
1848, “for the foundation of my intellectual habits and
tastes than to any other person, and shall bear, by the will
of the Almighty, the impress of your hand through any future
stage of existence.”

Cairns was first in Hamilton’s class at the close of the
session, and also first in Professor John Wilson’s Moral
Philosophy Class. “Of the many hundreds of students,” Wilson
wrote four years later, “whose career I have watched during
the last twenty years, not one has given higher promise of
excellence than John Cairns; his talents are of the highest
order; his attainments in literature, philosophy, and science
rare indeed; and his character such as to command universal
respect.”

This winter he joined with eight or nine of Hamilton’s most
distinguished students in forming the “Metaphysical Society,”
which met weekly for the purpose of discussing philosophical
questions. In a Memoir which he afterwards wrote of John
Clark, one of the founders of this Society, he thus describes
the association that led to its being formed, and that was
further cemented by its formation: “Willingly do I recall and
linger upon these days and months, extending even to years,
in which common studies of this abstract nature bound us
together. It was the romance—the poetry—of
speculation and friendship. All the vexed questions of the
schools were attempted by our united strength, after our
higher guide had set the example. The thorny wilds of logic
were pleasant as an enchanted ground; its driest
technicalities treasured up as unspeakably rare and precious.
We stumbled on, making discoveries at every step, and had all
things common. Each lesson in mental philosophy opened up
some mystery of our immortal nature, and seemed to bring us
nearer the horizon of absolute truth, which again receded as
we advanced, and left us, like children pursuing the rainbow,
to resume the chase. In truth, we had much of the character
of childhood in these pursuits—light-heartedness,
wonder, boundless hope, engrossment with the present,
carelessness of the future. Our old world daily became new;
and the real world of the multitude to us was but a shadow.
It was but the outer world, the non-ego, standing at
the mercy of speculation, waiting to be confirmed or
abolished in the next debate; while the inner world, in which
truth, beauty, and goodness had their eternal seat, should
still survive and be all in all. The play of the intellect
with these subtle and unworldly questions was to our minds as
inevitable as the stages of our bodily growth. Happy was it
for us that the play of affection was also active—nay,
by sympathy excited to still greater liveliness; and that a
higher wisdom suffered us not in all these flowery mazes to
go astray.”2

From indications contained in the brief Memoir from which
this extract is taken, as well as from references in his
correspondence, it would appear that about this time he
subjected his religious beliefs to a careful scrutiny in the
light cast upon them by his philosophical studies. From this
process of testing and strain he emerged with his faith
established on a yet firmer basis than before. One result of
this experience may perhaps be found in a letter to his
father, in which he tells him that he has been weighing the
claims of the Christian ministry as his future calling in
life. He feels the force of its incomparable attractions, but
doubts whether he is fitted in elevation and maturity of
character to undertake so vast a responsibility. Besides, he
is painfully conscious of personal awkwardness in the common
affairs of life, and unfitness for the practical management
of business. And so he thinks he will take another year to
think of it, during which he will complete his College
course.

He spent the summer of 1839 with the Donaldson family at
their country seat at Auchairn, near Ballantrae, in south
Ayrshire, occupying most of his leisure hours in mathematical
and physical studies in preparation for the work of the
coming winter. In the session of 1839-40, his last at the
University, he attended the classes of Natural Philosophy and
Rhetoric, taking the first place in the latter and only just
missing it in the former. He attended, besides, Sir William
Hamilton’s private classes, and was much at his house and in
his company. In April 1841 he took his M.A. degree, coming
out first in Classics and Philosophy, and being bracketed
first in Mathematics. Among his fellow-students his
reputation was maintained not merely by the honours he gained
in the class lists, but by his prowess in the debating arena.
Besides continuing his membership in the Metaphysical
Society, he had also been, since the spring of 1839, a member
of the Diagnostic, one of the most flourishing of the older
students’ debating societies. Of the Diagnostic he speedily
became the life and soul, and discussed with ardour such
questions as the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Vote by Ballot, and
the Exclusion of Bishops from the House of Lords. One
memorable debate took place on the Spiritual Independence of
the Church, then the most burning of all Scottish public
questions. The position of the Non-Intrusion party in the
Established Church was maintained by Cairns’s friend Clark,
while he himself led on the Voluntary side. The debate lasted
two nights, and, to quote the words of one who was present,
“Cairns in reply swept all before him, winning a vote from
those who had come in curiosity, and securing a large Liberal
majority. Amidst a scene of wild enthusiasm we hoisted his
big form upon our shoulders, and careered round the old
quadrangle in triumph. Indeed he was the hero of our College
life, leaving all others far behind, and impressing us with
the idea that he had a boundless future before
him.”3

CHAPTER IV

THE STUDENT OF THEOLOGY

Over Cairns’s life during his last session at the University
there hung the shadow of a coming sorrow. His father’s
health, which had never been robust, and had been failing for
some time, at length quite broke down; and it soon became
apparent that, although he might linger for some time, there
was no hope of his recovery. In the earlier days of his
illness the father was able to write, and many letters passed
between him and his student son. The following extracts from
his letters reveal the character of the man, and surely
furnish an illustration of what was said in a former chapter
about the educative effect of religion on the Scottish
working-man:—

“DUNGLASS, Dec, 23,1839.

“I would not have you think that I am overlooking the Divine
agency in what has befallen me. I desire to ascribe all to
His glory and praise, who can bring order out of confusion
and light out of darkness; and I desire to look away from
human means to Him who is able to kill and to make alive,
knowing that He doth not grieve willingly nor afflict the
children of men.”

“DUNGLASS, Jan. 5, 1840.

“As I have no great pain except what arises from coughing, I
have reason to bless the Lord, who is dealing so bountifully
with me…. It would be unpardonable in me were I not
endeavouring to make myself familiar with death in the forms
and aspects in which he presents himself to the mind. Doubts
and fears sometimes arise lest I should be indulging in a
false and presumptuous hope, and, as there is great danger
lest we should be deceived in this momentous concern, we
cannot be too anxious in ascertaining whether our hope be
that of the Gospel, as set forth in His Word of truth. Still,
through the grace and mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom, I
trust upon scriptural grounds, I can call my Saviour, I am
enabled to view death as a friend and as deprived of its
sting, and this is a source of great comfort to me and cheers
my drooping mind. I can say that my Beloved is mine and I am
His, and that He will make all things to work together for
His own glory and my eternal good. Dear son, I have thus
opened my mind to you, and I trust that your prayers will not
be wanting that my faith may be strengthened, and that all
the graces of the Holy Spirit may abound in me, to the glory
of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

During this and part of the next year Cairns remained in Mr.
Donaldson’s family, and his relations with that family as a
whole, as well as his special work in the tuition of the
young son and daughter of the house, were of the most
agreeable kind. He had by this time, however, formed some
intimate friendships in Edinburgh, and there were several
pleasant and interesting houses that were always open to him.
One of these deserves special mention. Among his most
intimate College friends was James McGibbon Russell, a
distinguished student of Sir William Hamilton, and one of the
founders of the Metaphysical Society. Russell was the son of
a Perthshire parish minister, but his parents were dead, and
he lived with an uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald
Wilson, whose own family consisted of two sons and three
daughters. Cairns was introduced by Russell to the Wilson
family, and soon became intimate with them. His special
friend—at last the dearest friend he had in this
world—was the younger son, George, afterwards the
well-known chemist and Professor of Technology in the
University of Edinburgh. No two men could be less
alike—George Wilson with a bright, alert, nimble mind;
Cairns with an intellect massive like his bodily frame, and
characterised chiefly by strength and momentum; and yet the
two fitted into each other, and when they really got to know
each other it might truly be said of them that the love
between them was wonderful, passing the love of women.

By the midsummer of 1840 Cairns had come to a final decision
about his future calling. “I have,” he wrote to his father on
13th June, “after much serious deliberation and prayer to God
for direction, made up my mind to commence this year the
study of divinity, with a view to the office of the ministry
of the Gospel. I pray you, do implore the grace of God on my
behalf, after this very grave and solemn determination.”

The Secession Church, to which he belonged, and to whose
ministry he desired to seek admission, had no theological
tutors who were set apart for the work of teaching alone. Its
professors, of whom there were four, were ministers in
charges, who lectured to the students during the two holiday
months of August and September. The curriculum of the
“Divinity Hall,” as it was called, consisted of five of these
short sessions. During the remaining ten months of each year
the student, except that he had to prepare a certain number
of exercises for the Presbytery which had him under its
charge, was left very much to do as he pleased.

Cairns entered the Hall, at that time meeting in Glasgow, in
the August of 1840. Of the four professors who were on the
staff of the institution, and all of whom were capable men,
only two need here be mentioned. These were Dr. Robert Balmer
of Berwick and Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. Dr. Balmer was a
clear-headed, fair-minded theologian—in fact, so very
fair, and even generous, was he wont to be in dealing with
opponents that he sometimes, quite unjustly, incurred the
suspicion of being in sympathy, if not in league, with these
opponents. He is specially interesting to us in this place,
because Cairns succeeded him first in his pulpit, and then,
after a long interval, in his chair. Dr. Brown, the grandson
and namesake of the old commentator of Haddington, was a man
of noble presence and noble character, whose personality
“embedded in the translucent amber of his son’s famous
sketch” is familiarly known to all lovers of English
literature. He was the pioneer of the scientific exposition
of the Scriptures in the Scottish pulpit, and was one of the
first exegetical theologians of his time. His point of view
may be seen in a frequent criticism of his on a student’s
discourse: “That is truth and very important truth, but it is
not the truth that is taught in this passage.” Being
so, it was simply “matter in the wrong place,” dirt to
be cleared away as speedily as possible.

Cairns had been first attracted to Dr. Brown by his speeches
on the Annuity Tax, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical impost for
which he had suffered the spoiling of his goods, and he had
been for more than a year a member of his church in Broughton
Place; but it was only now that he came to know him really
well. Henceforth his admiration for Dr. Brown, and the
friendship to which Dr. Brown admitted him, were to be
amongst the most powerful influences of his life. Among his
fellow-students at the Hall were several young men of
brilliant promise, such as John Ker, who had been first
prizeman in the Logic class in Hamilton’s first session, W.B.
Robertson, Alexander MacEwen, Joseph Leckie, and William
Graham. Of these, Graham, bright, witty, versatile, the most
notorious of punsters and the most illegible of writers, was
his chief intimate, and their friendship continued unbroken
and close for half a century.

But meanwhile the shadow was deepening over the home at
Dunglass. All through the autumn and early winter his father
was slowly sinking. He was only fifty-one, but he was already
worn out; and his disease, if disease it might be called, had
many of the symptoms of extreme old age. His son saw him for
the last time near the close of the year. “I cannot say,” he
wrote to Miss Darling, “that depression of spirits was the
only, or even the chief, emotion with which I bade farewell
to my father. There was something so touching in his patience
and resignation, so calm and inwrought in his meek submission
to the Divine will, that it affected me more strongly than
raptures of religious joy could have done. He displays the
same evenness of temper in the sight of death as has marked
his equable and consistent life.”

He died in the early morning of 3rd January 1841. His son
William thus describes the scene: “It was the first time any
of us except our mother had looked on the face of the dying
in the act of departing, and that leaves an impression that
can never be effaced. When the end came, and each had truly
realised what had happened, our mother in a broken voice
asked that ‘the Books’ might be laid on the table; then she
gave out that verse in the 107th Psalm—

It was her voice, too, that raised the tune. Then she asked
Thomas to read a chapter of the Bible and afterwards to pray.
We all knelt down, and Thomas made a strong effort to steady
his voice, but he failed utterly; then the dear mother
herself lifted the voice of thanksgiving for the victory that
had been won, and after that the neighbours were called
in.”4

Cairns was soon to have further experience of anxiety in
respect to the health of those who were near to him. Towards
the close of the year in which his father died, his brother
William, who had almost completed his apprenticeship to a
mason at Chirnside, in Berwickshire, was seized with
inflammation, and for some weeks hung between life and death.
At length he recovered sufficiently to be removed under his
elder brother’s careful and loving supervision to the
Edinburgh Infirmary, where he remained for four months.
During all that time Cairns visited his brother twice every
day, he taught himself to apply to the patient the galvanic
treatment which had been prescribed, and brought him an
endless supply of books, periodicals, and good things to eat
and smoke.

In the end of 1842 George Wilson was told by an eminent
surgeon that he must choose between certain death and the
amputation of a foot involving possible death. He agreed at
once to the operation being performed, but begged for a week
in which to prepare for it. He had always been a charming
personality, and had lived a life that was outwardly
blameless; but he had never given very serious thought to
religion. Now, however, when he was face to face with death,
the great eternal verities became more real to him, and
during the week of respite the study of the New Testament and
the counsel and sympathy and prayers of his friend Cairns
prepared him to face his trial with calmness, and with “a
trembling hope in Christ” in his heart. The two friends, who
had thus been brought so closely together, were henceforth to
be more to each other than they had ever been before.

The next year, 1843, was a memorable one in the
ecclesiastical history of Scotland. Cairns, though not
sympathising with the demand of the Non-Intrusion party in
the Church of Scotland for absolute spiritual independence
within an Established Church, had an intense admiration for
Chalmers, and was filled with the greatest enthusiasm when he
and the party whom he led on the great 18th of May clung fast
to the Independence and left the Establishment behind them.
Indeed his enthusiasm ran positively wild, for it is recorded
that, when the great procession came out of St. Andrew’s
Church, Cairns went hurrahing and tossing up his hat in front
of it and all the way down the hill to Tanfield Hall. To Miss
Darling, who had no sympathy with the Free Church movement,
he wrote: “I know our difference of opinion here. But you
will pardon me for saying that I have never felt more
profound emotions of gratitude to God, of reverence for
Christianity, of admiration of moral principle, and of pride
in the honesty and courage of Scotsmen, than I did on that
memorable day.”

In the autumn of this year he was able to carry out a project
which he had had before him, and for which he had been saving
up his money for a long time. This was the spending of a year
on the Continent. It was by no means so common in those days
as it has since become for a Scottish theological student to
attend a German University. Indeed, until the early Forties
of last century, such a thing was scarcely known. Then,
however, the influence of Sir William Hamilton, and the
interest in German thought which his teaching stimulated,
created the desire to learn more about it at its source.

It is natural that this movement should have affected the
students of the Secession Church before it reached those of
the Establishment; for not only were they less occupied with
the great controversy of the day and its consequences, but
their short autumn session left them free to take either a
winter or a summer semester, or both, at a German
University without interrupting their course at home. The
late Dr. W.B. Robertson of Irvine used to lay claim to having
been the pioneer of these “landlouping students of divinity.”
John Ker and others followed him; and when Cairns set out in
1843, quite a large company of old friends were expected to
meet at Berlin. Cairns’s departure was delayed by the illness
of James Russell, who was to have accompanied him, but he set
out towards the end of October. He had accepted an
appointment as locum tenens for four weeks in an
English Independent chapel at Hamburg, which delayed his
arrival at Berlin until after the winter semester had
commenced. But this interlude was greatly enjoyed both by
himself and by the little company of English merchants who
formed his first pastoral charge, and who, on a vacancy
occurring, made a strong but fruitless attempt to induce him
to remain as their permanent minister.

Arrived in Berlin, he joined his friends—Nelson,
Graham, Wallace, and Logan Aikman. With Nelson he shared a
room in the Luisenstrasse, where they set up that household
god of all German students—a “coffee-machine,” with the
aid of which, and some flaming spiritus, they brewed
their morning and evening beverage. They dined in the middle
of the day at a neighbouring restaurant, on soup, meat,
vegetables, and black bread, at a cost of threepence.

At the University, Cairns heard four or five lectures daily,
taking among others the courses of Neander on Christian
Dogmatics, Trendelenburg on History of Philosophy, and
Schelling, the last of the great philosophers of the
preceding generation, on Introduction to Philosophy. Of
these, Schelling impressed him least, and Neander most.
Through life he had a deep reverence for Neander, whom he
regarded, with perhaps premature enthusiasm, as the man who
shared with Schleiermacher the honour of restoring Germany to
a believing theology.

Here is the description he gives of him in a letter from
Berlin to George Wilson: “Suppose yourself in a large square
room filled with Studiosi, each with his inkstand and immense
Heft before him and ready to begin, when precisely at
11.15 a.m. in shuffles a little black Jew, without hat in
hand or a scrap of paper, and strides up to a high desk,
where he stands the whole time, resting his elbows upon it
and never once opening his eyes or looking his class in the
face; the worst type of Jewish physiognomy in point of
intellect, though without its cunning or sensuality; the face
meaningless, pale, and sallow, with low forehead, and nothing
striking but a pair of enormous black eyebrows. The figure is
dressed in a dirty brown surtout, blue plush trousers, and
dirty top-boots. It begins to speak. The voice is loud and
clear, and marches on with academic stateliness and gravity,
and even something of musical softness mixes with its notes.
Suddenly the speaker turns to a side. It is to spit, which
act is repeated every second sentence. You now see in his
hands a twisted pen, which is gradually stripped of every
hair and then torn to pieces in the course of his mental
working. His feet, too, begin to turn. The left pirouettes
round and round, and at the close of an emphatic period
strikes violently against the wall. When he has finished his
lecture, you see only a mass of saliva and the rags of his
pen. Neander is out of all sight the most wonderful being in
the University. For knowledge, spirituality, good sense, and
indomitable spirit of the finest discretion on moral
subjects, the old man is a real marvel every way. In private
he is the kindest but also the most awkward of mortals. His
lectures on Dogmatik and Sittenlehre I value
beyond all others, and I would gladly have come to Berlin to
hear him alone.”

Besides hearing these University lectures, Cairns read German
philosophy and theology for nine or ten hours daily, took
lessons in Hebrew from a young Christian Jew named
Biesenthal,5 and in these short winter
months acquired such a mastery of German as a spoken language
that in the spring he was urged by Professor Tholuck of Halle
to remain and qualify as a Privatdocent at a German
University. He also gained a knowledge of men and things
German, and a living interest in them, which he retained
through life.

At the close of the winter semester, the last weeks of
which had been saddened by the news of James Russell’s death;
he set out on a tour extending over three months, and planned
to include the principal cities and sights of Central and
Southern Europe. He had only about £20 in his pocket,
but he made this cover all the expenditure that was necessary
for his modest wants. He travelled alone and, whenever it was
possible, on foot, in the blouse and peaked cap of a German
workman, and with a light knapsack strapped on his shoulders.
He avoided hotels and lived cheaply, even meanly; but, with
his splendid health, simple tastes, and overflowing interest
in all that he saw, this did not greatly matter.

His classical studies, and an already wide knowledge of
European history, suggested endless interesting associations
with the places through which he passed; and the picture
galleries furnished him with materials for art criticisms
which, considering that he had had few opportunities of
seeing paintings, surprise one by their insight and grasp. At
Wittenberg we find him standing by the grave of Luther in the
Castle Church, and reflecting on the connection between his
presence there and the life and work of the man whose body
lay below. “But for him there had neither been a Scotland to
send out pilgrim students of theology, nor a Germany to
receive them.”

At Halle he has interesting interviews with Tholuck and
Julius Müller; from Dresden he diverges to Herrnhut,
where he witnesses the ordination of a Moravian missionary
and takes part in a love-feast. At Prague, that wonderful
city where the barbaric East begins, he finds his deepest
interest stirred by the Jewish burying-ground and the hoary
old synagogue. And so he passes on from city to city, and
from land to land, by Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, to
Innsbruck, thence over the Brenner to Trent and Venice, and
by Bologna to Florence and Rome. Returning by Genoa, Milan,
and the Italian Lakes, he passes into Switzerland, and
travels homeward by the Rhine. During this tour, when, in
spite of the heat, he frequently walked forty-five or fifty
miles a day, he had little time for letter-writing; but a
small paper-covered book, in which he each night jotted down
in pencil his impressions of what he had seen during the past
day, has fortunately been preserved. From this three brief
extracts may be made, and may serve as specimens of the
whole, which is virtually reproduced entire in Dr. MacEwen’s
Biography. The first contains a description of the Jewish
cemetery at Prague: “Through winding, filthy, pent-up, and
over-peopled lanes, in the part of the old town next the
river, heaped up with old clothes, trinket-ware,
villainous-looking bread, and horrid sausages, one attains to
an open space irregularly and rudely walled in and full of
graves. The monuments date from the tenth century. No
language can give an idea of its first impression. At one end
one sees innumerable masses of grey weather-beaten stones in
every grotesque angle of incidence and coincidence, but all
rude and mean, covered with mystic Hebrew letters and
half-buried amid long grass, nettles, and weeds. The place
looks exactly as if originally a collection of dunghills or,
perhaps, of excavated earth, left to its natural course after
the corpses had been thrown in and the rude billets set over
them. The economy of the race is visible in their measure for
the dead, and contrasts wonderfully with the roominess and
delicate adornment of German churchyards in general. The hoar
antiquity of the place is increased by a wilderness of alders
which grow up around the walls and amidst the stones,
twisted, tangled, stunted, desolately old and yet renewing
their youth, a true type of the scattered, bruised, and
peeled, yet ineradicable Israel itself.”

An incident at Novi, between Genoa and Milan, is thus
described: “I had strolled into a vineyard behind the town,
quite lonely and crowned with one cottage. On one of the
secluded paths I found a little girl lying on the grass, with
her face turned up to the sun and fast asleep. The breeze
played beautifully with her hair, and her dress fluttered and
rustled, but there she lay, and nothing but the heaving of
her frame, which could hardly be distinguished from the
agitation of the wind, proved that she was only asleep. I
stood gazing for a long while, thinking of the Providence
that watched alike over the child in its slumberings and the
pilgrim in his wanderings; and as I saw her companions
playing at no great distance, I left the spot without
awakening the absent little one. As I was passing the cottage
door, however, I was overtaken by the mother in evident
agitation. She pointed along the path I had come by, as if
she feared her child had wandered to the highway or been lost
amid the wild brushwood that grew on that side of the
vineyard. I soon made her understand that the
piccolina was just behind her, and waited till she
bounded away and returned with the crying thing in her arms,
loading it with gentle reproaches and me with warm
expressions of gratitude.”

At Milan it must be admitted that he goes into raptures over
the Cathedral, but one is glad to note that he reserves an
ample tribute of enthusiasm for the old church of St.
Ambrose: “In the cloister of St. Ambrose I saw the famous
cypress doors which the saint closed against Theodosius,
time-worn but solid; the brazen serpent, the fine pulpit with
the bas-relief of the Agape, and the veritable Episcopal
chair of marble, with solid back and sides, and lions
embossed at the corners, in which he sat in the councils of
his presbyters. It is almost the only relic I have done any
honour to. I knelt down and kissed it, and forgot for the
time that I was both Protestant and Presbyterian.”

After a stormy and perilous voyage from Antwerp, he reached
Newcastle in the first week of August, and started at once
for Edinburgh to be present at the opening of the Divinity
Hall. At the Dunglass lodge-gate his brother David, who was
waiting for a letter which he had promised to throw down from
the “Magnet” coach as he passed, caught a hurried glimpse of
him, lean and brown as a berry after his exertions and his
exposure to the Italian sun. On the following Saturday he put
his pedestrian powers to the proof by walking from Edinburgh
to Dunglass, when he covered the thirty-five and a half miles
in seven hours and fifty minutes, having stopped only twice
on the way—once in Haddington to buy a biscuit, and
once at a wayside watering-trough to take a drink.

The Hall session of 1844 was Cairns’s last, and the next step
for him to take in ordinary course was to apply to a
Presbytery for license as a probationer. He had, however,
some hesitation in taking this step, mainly because he was
not quite clear whether the real work of his life lay in the
discharge of the ordinary duties of the ministry, or whether
he might not render better service by devoting himself, as
opportunity offered, more exclusively to theological and
literary work in behalf of the Christian faith. His friend
Clark, whom he consulted in the matter, strongly urged him to
decide in favour of the latter alternative. His speculative
and literary faculties, he urged, had already been tested
with brilliant results; his powers as a preacher, on the
other hand, were as yet an unknown quantity, and Clark
thought it doubtful if they would be appreciated by an
average congregation. The struggle was severe while it
lasted, but it ended in Cairns deciding to go on to the
ministry in the ordinary way. In November 1844 be applied to
the Edinburgh Presbytery of the Secession Church for license,
and he received it at their hands in the following February.
He had not long to wait for a settlement. Dr. Balmer of
Berwick, one of his divinity professors, had died while he
was in Switzerland, and on his deathbed had advised his
congregation to wait until Cairns had finished his course
before electing a successor. Accordingly, it was arranged
that he should preach in Golden Square Church, Berwick, a few
weeks after he received license. The result was that a
unanimous and enthusiastic call was addressed to him. He
received another invitation from Mount Pleasant Church,
Liverpool, of which his friend Graham was afterwards
minister; but, after some hesitation, he decided in favour of
Berwick.

Meanwhile changes had been taking place in the home circle at
Dunglass. His brother William, whose illness has been already
referred to, had now passed beyond all hope of recovering the
use of his limbs. Having set himself resolutely to a course
of study and mental improvement under his brother John’s
guidance, he was able to accept a kindly proposal made to him
by Sir John Hall of Dunglass, that he should become the
teacher of the little roadside school at Oldcambus, which
John had attended as a child. On the marriage of his eldest
brother in the summer of 1845 the widowed mother came to keep
house for him, and henceforth the Oldcambus schoolhouse
became the family headquarters. But that summer brought
sorrow as well as change. Another brother, James, a young man
of vigorous mental powers, and originally of stalwart
physique, who had been working at his trade as a tailor in
Glasgow, fell into bad health, which soon showed the symptoms
of rapid consumption. He came home hoping to benefit by the
change, but it became increasingly clear that he had only
come home to die. He lingered till the autumn, and passed
away at Oldcambus at the end of September. It was with this
background of change and shadow that the ordination of John
Cairns took place at Berwick on August 6, 1845.

CHAPTER V

GOLDEN SQUARE

Berwick is an English town on the Scottish side of the Tweed.
As all that remained to England of the Scottish conquests of
Edward I., it was until the Union of the Crowns the Calais of
Scotland. It thus came to be treated as in a measure separate
from England although belonging to it, and was for a long
time separately mentioned in English Acts of Parliament, as
it still is in English Royal Proclamations. This status of
semi-independence which it so long enjoyed has helped to give
it an individuality more strongly marked than that of most
English towns.

In religious matters Berwick has more affinity to Scotland
than to England. John Knox preached in the town for two years
by appointment of the Privy Council of Edward VI., and in
harmony with his influence its religious traditions were in
succeeding generations strongly Puritan, and one of its
vicars, Luke Ogle, was ejected for Nonconformity in 1662.

After the Revolution of 1688 this tendency found expression
in the rise and growth of a vigorous Presbyterian Dissent;
and in the early years of the eighteenth century there were
two flourishing congregations in the town in communion with
the Church of Scotland. But as these soon became infected
with the Moderatism which prevailed over the Border, new
congregations were formed in connection with the Scottish
Secession and Relief bodies, and it was of one of
these—Golden Square Secession Church—that John
Cairns became the fourth minister in 1845.

Berwick is one of the very few English towns which still
retain their ancient fortifications. The circuit of the
walls, which were built in the reign of Elizabeth, with their
bastions, “mounts,” and gates, is still practically complete,
and is preserved with care and pride. A few ruins of the
earlier walls, which Edward I. erected, and which enclosed a
much wider area than is covered by the modern town, still
remain; also such vestiges of the once impregnable Castle as
have not been removed to make way for the present
railway-station. Beyond this, there is little about Berwick
to tell of its hoary antiquity and its eventful history. But
its red-roofed houses, rising steeply from the left bank of
the Tweed, and looking across the tidal river to the villages
of Tweedmouth and Spittal, have a picturesqueness of their
own, whether they are seen when the lights and shadows of a
summer day are playing upon them, or when they are swathed in
the white folds of a North Sea haar.

The Berwick people are shrewd, capable, and kindly, and
combine many of the good qualities of their Scotch and
Northumbrian neighbours. Their dialect is in some respects
akin to the Lowland Scotch, with which it has many words in
common; and it has also as a prominent feature that rising
intonation, passing sometimes almost into a wail, which one
hears all along the eastern Border. But the great outstanding
characteristic of Berwick speech is the burr a rough
guttural pronunciation of the letter “i.” With nothing but
the scanty resources of our alphabet to fall back upon, it is
quite impossible to represent this peculiarity phonetically,
but it was once remarked by a student of Semitic tongues that
the sound of the Hebrew letter ‘Ayin is as nearly as possible
that of the burr, and that, if you want to ascertain the
correct Hebrew pronunciation of the name Ba’al, all
you have got to do is to ask any Alderman of Berwick to say
“Barrel”6

In 1845 the population of Berwick was between 8000 and 9000.
“It included,” says Dr. MacEwen, “some curious elements.” Not
the least curious and dubious of these was that of the lower
class of the old Freemen of the Borough. These men had an
inherited right to the use of lands belonging to the
Corporation, which they let; and to a vote at a Parliamentary
election, which they sold. When an election drew near, it was
a maxim with both political parties that the Freemen must be
conciliated at all costs; and the Freemen, knowing this, were
quite prepared to presume on their knowledge. Once, at an
election time, it happened that in the house of a prominent
political leader in Berwick a fine roast of beef was turning
before the kitchen fire, and was nearly ready for the dinner
table, when a Freeman walked in, lifted it from the spit, and
carried it off. No one dared to say him nay, for had he not a
vote? and might not that vote turn the election?

At the other end of the social scale were the half-pay
officers, the members of neighbouring county families, and
the attorneys and doctors, who in some degree constituted the
aristocracy of Berwick, and most of whom attended the
Episcopalian Parish Church. The bulk of the shopkeepers and
tradesmen, with some of the professional men and a large
proportion of the working people, were Dissenters, and were
connected with one or other of the half-dozen Presbyterian
congregations in the town. Of these that of which Cairns was
the minister was the most influential and the largest, having
a membership of about six hundred.

The church was in Golden Square, of which it may be said that
it is neither a square nor yet golden, but a dingy close or
court opening by an archway from the High Street, the main
thoroughfare of Berwick. The building was till recently a
tannery, but the main features of it are still quite
distinguishable. It stood on the left as one entered from
High Street, and it had the usual high pulpit at its farther
end, with a precentor’s desk beneath it, and the usual deep
gallery supported on metal pillars running round three of its
four sides. The manse, its door adorned with a decent brass
knocker, stood next to the church, on the side farthest from
the street. It gave one a pleasant surprise on entering it to
find that only its back windows looked out on the dim little
“square.” In front it commanded a fine view of the river,
here crossed by a quaint old bridge of fifteen arches, which,
owing to the exigencies of the current, is much higher at the
Berwick end than at the other, and, as an Irishman once
remarked, “has its middle all on one side.” For some little
time, however, after Cairns’s settlement, he did not occupy
the manse, but lived in rooms over a shop in Bridge Street;
and when at length he did remove into it, he took his
landlady with him and still remained her lodger.

For the first five years of his ministry Cairns devoted
himself entirely to the work which it entailed upon him, and
steadily refused to be drawn aside to the literary and
philosophical tasks which many of his friends urged him to
undertake. He had decided that his work in Berwick demanded
his first attention, and, until he could ascertain how much
of his time it would absorb, he felt that he could not go
beyond it. On the early days of the week he read widely and
hard on the lines of his Sunday work, and the last three days
he devoted to writing out and committing to memory his two
sermons, each of which occupied about fifty minutes in
delivery. The “committing” of his sermons gave him little or
no trouble, and he soon found that it could be relegated
without anxiety to Saturday evening. And he got into the
habit of preparing for it by a Saturday afternoon walk to the
little yellow red-capped lighthouse at the end of Berwick
Pier. At the upper end of the pier was a five-barred gate,
and on the way back, when he thought that nobody was looking,
he would vault over it with a running leap.

His preaching from the first made a deep impression.
Following the old Seceder tradition, and the example of his
boyhood’s minister Mr. Inglis, and of his professor Dr.
Brown, his discourse in the forenoon was always a “lecture”
expository of some extended passage of Scripture, and forming
one of a consecutive series; while that in the afternoon
followed the familiar lines of an ordinary sermon. But there
was nothing quite ordinary in his preaching at any time. Even
when there was no unusual flight of eloquence, there was
always to be noted the steady march of a strong mind from
point to point till the conclusion had been reached; always a
certain width and elevation of view, and always the ring of
irresistible conviction. And although the discourse had been
committed to memory and was reproduced in the very words that
had been written down in the study, no barrier was thereby
interposed between the preacher and his hearers.
Somehow—at least after the first few
paragraphs—when he had properly warmed to his work, the
man himself seemed to break through all restraints and come
into direct and living contact with his hearers.

His action sermon, i.e. the sermon preached before the
Communion, was always specially memorable and impressive. He
had the subject chosen weeks, and sometimes even months,
beforehand, and, as he had no other sermon to write for the
Communion Sunday, he devoted the whole of the preceding week
to its preparation. His action sermons, which were those he
usually preached on special occasions when he was away from
home, dealt always with some theme connected with the Person
or Work of Christ. They were frequently apologetic in their
conception and structure, full of massive argument, which he
had a remarkable power of marshalling and presenting so as to
be understood by all; but the argument, reinforced by bursts
of real eloquence, always converged on the, exaltation of the
Redeemer. “I never thought so much of him as I do to-day,”
said one of his hearers to another after one of these
sermons, “I never thought so much of Christ as I do to-day,”
replied the other; and that reply showed that in at least one
case the purpose of the preacher in preparing and delivering
his sermon had been fulfilled.

On the Sunday evening Cairns had a Bible-class of over one
hundred young men and women, to which he devoted great care
and attention. “It was the best hour of the day to us,” wrote
one who was a member of this class. “He was nearer us, and we
were nearer him, than in church. The grandeur and momentum of
his pulpit eloquence were not there, but we had instead a
calm, rich, conversational instruction, a quiet disclosure of
vast stores of information, as well as a definite dealing
with young hearts and consciences, which left an unfading
impression.”

But Cairns was no mere preacher and teacher. He put out his
full strength as truly in his pastoral work as in his work
for and in the pulpit. He visited his large congregation
statedly once a year, offering prayer in each house, and
hearing the children repeat a psalm or portion of Scripture
which he had prescribed the year before. He timed these
visits so accurately that he could on one occasion banter one
of his elders on the fact that he had received more than his
due in one year, because the last visitation had been on the
1st of January and this one was on the 31st of December. A
good part of his visiting had to be done in the country,
because a considerable section of his congregation consisted
of farmers or hinds from Northumberland, from the “Liberties
of Berwick,” and even from Scotland, which first begins three
miles out from the town. These country visitations usually
concluded with a service in a barn or farm-kitchen, to which
worshippers came from far and near.

But besides this stated and formal visitation, which was
intimated from the pulpit, constant attention was bestowed on
the sick, the bereaved, the poor, the tempted, and all others
who appealed specially to the minister’s heart or his
conscience. And yet there was no sense of task-work or of a
burden to be borne about his relations to his congregation.
His exuberant frankness of manner, contrasting as this did
with the reserved and somewhat stiff bearing of his
predecessor Dr. Balmer, won the hearts of all. And his keen
sense of the ludicrous side of things often acted as an
antiseptic, and kept him right both with himself and with his
people.

Once, however, as he used to tell, it brought him perilously
near to disaster. He was in the middle of his sermon one
Sunday afternoon in Golden Square. It was a hot summer day,
and all the doors and windows were open. From the pulpit he
could look right out into the square, and as he looked he
became aware of a hen surrounded by her young family pecking
vigorously on the pavement in search of food, and clucking as
she pecked. All at once an overwhelming sense of the
difference between the two worlds in which he and that hen
were living took possession of him, and it was with the
utmost difficulty that he restrained himself from bursting
into a shout of laughter. As it was, he recovered himself
with a mighty gulp and finished the service decorously
enough.

Cairns was also assisted in his work by his phenomenal powers
of memory. After reading a long sermon once, or at most twice
over, he could repeat it verbatim. Once when he was
challenged by a friend to do so, he repeated, without
stopping, the names of all the children in his congregation,
apologising only for his imperfect acquaintance with two
families who had recently come. Another instance of this is
perhaps not so remarkable in itself, but it is worth
mentioning on other grounds. Five-and-thirty years after the
time with which we are now dealing, when he was a professor
in Edinburgh, some of his students were carrying on mission
work in a growing district of the city. An iron church was
erected for them, but the contractor, an Englishman, before
his work was finished was seized with illness and died. He
was buried in one of the Edinburgh cemeteries, and Dr. Cairns
attended the funeral. Having ascertained from the widow of
the dead man that he had belonged to the Church of England,
he repeated at the grave-side the whole of the Anglican
Burial Service. When he was asked afterwards how he had thus
come to know that Service without book, he replied that he
had unconsciously got it by heart in the early days of his
Berwick ministry, before there was either a cemetery or a
Burials Act, when he had been compelled to stand silent and
hear it read at the funerals of members of his own
congregation in the parish churchyard.

Rather more than a year and a half after his ordination, in
May 1847, the Secession Church in which he had been brought
up, and of which he was now a minister, entered into a union
with another of the Scottish non-Established Churches, the
Synod of Relief. There was thus formed the United
Presbyterian Church, with which his name was afterwards to be
so closely associated. The United Church comprised five
hundred and eighteen congregations, of which about fifty
were, like those in Berwick, in England; the nucleus of that
English Synod which, thirty years later, combined with the
English Presbyterian Church to form the present Presbyterian
Church of England. References in his correspondence show that
this union of 1847, which afterwards had such happy results,
excited at the time little enthusiasm, and was entered into
largely as a matter of duty. “It is,” he writes, “like the
union, not of two globules of quicksilver which run together
of themselves, but of two snowballs or cakes of mud that need
in some way very tough outward pressure. I hope that the
friction will elicit heat, since this neither cold nor hot
spirit is not to edification.”

The other letters of this period range over a wide variety of
subjects. With John Clark he compares experiences of
ministerial work; with John Nelson he discusses European
politics as these have been affected by the events of the
“year of revolutions,” 1848; with George Wilson he discourses
on every conceivable topic, from abstruse problems of
philosophy and theology to the opening of the North British
Railway; while his mother and his brothers, William and
David, the latter of whom about this time left his work in
the Dunglass woods to study for the ministry, are kept in
touch with all that he knows they will best like to hear
about. But in all this wide field of human life and thought
and activity, which he so eagerly traverses, it is quite
evident that what attracts him most is the relation of it all
to a higher and an eternal order. With him the main interest
is a religious one. Without an atom of affectation, and
without anything that is at all morbid on his part, he
reveals this at a hundred points. In this connection a letter
which he wrote to Sir William Hamilton and which has since
become well known, may be quoted here; and it, with Sir
William’s reply, will fittingly conclude the present chapter.
This letter bears date November 16, 1848, and is as
follows:—

“I herewith enclose the statement respecting the Calabar
Mission of our Church, which I take blame to myself for
having so long delayed to send. My avocations are very
numerous, and a habit of procrastination, where anything is
to be written, has sadly grown on me with time. I cannot even
send you this brief note without testifying, what I could not
so well utter in your presence, my unabated admiration of
your philosophical genius and learning, and my profoundly
grateful sense of the important benefits received by me both
from your instructions and private friendship, I am more
indebted to you for the foundation of my intellectual habits
and tastes than to any other person, and shall bear, by the
will of the Almighty, the impress of your hand through any
future stage of existence. It is a relief to my own feelings
to speak in this manner, and you will forgive one of the most
favoured of your pupils if he seeks another kind of
relief—a relief which he has long sought an opportunity
to obtain—the expression of a wish that his honoured
master were one with himself in the exercise of the
convictions, and the enjoyment of the comforts, of living
Christianity, or as far before himself as he is in all other
particulars. This is a wish, a prayer, a fervent desire often
expressed to the Almighty Former and Guide of the spirits of
men, mingled with the hope that, if not already, at least
some time, this accordance of faith will be attained, this
living union realised with the great Teacher, Sacrifice, and
Restorer of our fallen race. You will pardon this
manifestation of the gratitude and affection of your pupil
and friend, who, if he knew a higher, would gladly give it as
a payment of a debt too great to be expressed. I have long
ago been taught to feel the vanity of the world in all its
forms—to renounce the hope of intellectual distinction,
and to exalt love above knowledge. Philosophy has been to me
much; but it can never be all, never the most; and I have
found, and know that I have found, the true good in another
quarter. This is mysticism—the mysticism of the
Bible—the mysticism of conscious reconciliation and
intimacy with the living Persons of the Godhead—a
mysticism which is not like that of philosophy, an irregular
and incommunicable intuition, but open to all, wise and
unwise, who take the highway of humility and prayer. If I
were not truly and profoundly happy in my faith—the
faith of the universal Church—I would not speak of it.
The greatest increase which it admits of is its sympathetic
kindling in the hearts of others, not least of those who know
by experience the pain of speculation, the truth that he who
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I know you will
indulge these expressions to one more in earnest than in
former years, more philanthropic, more confident that he
knows in whom he has believed, more impressed with the duty
of bearing everywhere a testimony to the convictions which
have given him a positive hold at once of truth and
happiness.

“But I check myself in this unwonted strain, which only your
long-continued and singular kindness could have emboldened me
to attempt; and with the utterance of the most fervent wishes
for your health, academical success, and inward light and
peace, I remain your obliged friend and grateful pupil.”

To which Sir W. Hamilton replied as follows:—

“EDINBURGH, Dec. 4, 1848.

“I feel deeply obliged to you for the kindness of your
letter, and trust that I shall not prove wholly unworthy of
the interest you take in me. There is indeed no one with whom
I am acquainted whose sentiments on such matters I esteem
more highly, for there is no one who, I am sure, is more
earnest for the truth, and no one who pursues it with more
independence and, at the same time, with greater confidence
in the promised aid of God. May this promised aid be
vouchsafed to me.”7

CHAPTER VI

THE CENTRAL PROBLEM

It was confidently expected, not merely by Cairns’s personal
friends but by others in a much wider circle, that he would
make a name for himself in the world of letters and
speculative thought. It was not only the brilliance of his
University career that led to this expectation, for,
remarkable as that career had been, there have been many men
since his time who, so far as mere prize taking is concerned,
have equalled or surpassed him—men who never aroused
and would not have justified any high-pitched hopes about
their future. But Cairns, in addition to gaining academic
distinctions, seems to have impressed his contemporaries in a
quite exceptional degree with a sense of his power and
promise. Professor Masson, writing of him as he was in his
student days, thus describes him: “There was among us one
whom we all respected in a singular degree. Tall,
strong-boned, and granite-headed, he was the student whom Sir
William Hamilton himself had signalised and honoured as
already a sterling thinker, and the strength of whose logic,
when you grappled with him in argument, seemed equalled only
by the strength of his hand-grip when you met him or bade him
good-bye, or by the manly integrity and nobleness of his
character.”8 And again, writing of him
as he was at a later date, the same critic gives this
estimate of his old fellow-student’s mental calibre: “I can
name one former student of Sir William Hamilton’s, now a
minister in what would be accounted in England one of the
straitest sects of Scottish Puritanism, and who has
consecrated to the duties of that calling a mind among the
noblest I have known and the most learned in pure philosophy.
Any man who on any subject of metaphysical speculation should
contend with Dr. Cairns of Berwick-on-Tweed, would have
reason to know, ere he had done with him, what strength for
offence and defence there may yet be in a Puritan minister’s
hand-grip.”9

That this is no mere isolated estimate of a partial friend it
would not be difficult to prove. This was what his friends
thought of him, and what they had taught others outside to
think of him too. The time, however, had now come when it had
to be put to the proof. During the first five years of his
ministry at Berwick, as we have seen, Cairns devoted himself
entirely to his work in Golden Square. He must learn to know
accurately how much of his time that work would take up,
before he could venture to spend any of it in other fields.
But in 1850 he felt that he had mastered the situation, and
accordingly he began to write for the Press. The ten years
between 1850 and 1860 were years of considerable literary
activity with him, and it may be said at once that their
output sustained his reputation, and even added to it. There
falls to be mentioned first a Memoir of his friend John
Clark, who, after a brief and troubled ministerial career,
had died of cholera in 1849. Cairns’s Life of him, prefixed
to a selection from his Essays and Sermons, fills only
seventy-seven small pages, and it is in form to a large
extent a defence of metaphysical studies against those who
regard them as dangerous to the Christian student. But it
contains many passages of great beauty and tenderness, and
delineates in exquisite colours the poetry and romance of
College friendships. “I am greatly charmed,” wrote the author
of Rab and his Friends to Cairns, “with your pages on
the romance of your youthful fellowship—that sweet hour
of prime. I can remember it, can feel it, can scent the
morn.”10

In 1850 the North British Review, which had been
started some years previously in the interests of the Free
Church, came under the editorship of Cairns’s friend Campbell
Fraser. Although he was a Free Church professor, he resolved
to widen the basis of the Review, and he asked Cairns
to join his staff, offering him as his province German
philosophy and theology. Cairns assented, and promised to
furnish two articles yearly. The first and most important of
these was one which appeared in 1850 on Julius Müller’s
Christian Doctrine of Sin. This article, which is well
and brightly written, embraces not merely a criticism of the
great work whose name stands at the head of it, but also an
elaborate yet most lucid and masterly survey of the various
schools of theological thought which were then grouping
themselves in Germany. Other contributions to the North
British during the next four years included articles on
“British and Continental Ethics and Christianity,” on “The
Reawakening of Christian Life in Germany,” and on “The Life
and Letters of Niebuhr”; while yet other articles saw the
light in the British Quarterly Review, the United
Presbyterian Magazine, and other periodicals. In 1858
appeared the important article on “Kant,” in the eighth
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was
written at the urgent request of his friend Adam Black, and
which cost him ten months reading and preparation.

As has been already said, his reputation appears to have been
fully maintained by these articles. They brought him into
touch with many interesting people, such as Bunsen and F.D.
Maurice; and, in Scotland, deepened the impression that he
was a man with a future. In 1852 John Wilson resigned the
Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the University of
Edinburgh, and the Town Council, who were the patrons of the
chair, took occasion to let Cairns know that he might have
the appointment if he desired it. He declined their offer,
and with characteristic reticence said nothing about it
either to his relatives or to his congregation. He threw
himself, however, with great ardour into the support of the
candidature of his friend Professor P.C. M’Dougall, who
ultimately was elected to the post.

Four years later Sir William Hamilton died, and a fierce
fight ensued as to who was to be his successor. The two most
prominent candidates were Cairns’s friend Campbell Fraser,
then Professor of Logic in the New College, Edinburgh, and
Professor James Frederick Ferrier of St. Andrews. Fraser was
then a Hamiltonian and Ferrier was a Hegelian, and a great
hubbub arose between the adherents of the two schools. This
was increased and embittered by the importation of
ecclesiastical and political feeling into the contest; Fraser
being a Free Churchman, and Ferrier receiving the support of
the Established Church and Tory party. The Town Council were
very much at sea with regard to the philosophical
controversy, and, through Dr. John Brown, they requested
Cairns to explain its merits to them. Cairns responded by
publishing a pamphlet entitled An Examination of
Professor Ferrier’s Theory of Knowing and Being. This
pamphlet had for its object to show that Ferrier’s election
would mean a renunciation of the doctrines which, as
expounded by Hamilton, had added so greatly to the prestige
of the University in recent times as a school of philosophy,
and also to expose what the writer conceived to be the
dangerous character of Ferrier’s teaching in relation to
religious truth. It increased the storm tenfold. Replies were
published and letters sent to the newspapers abusing Cairns,
and insinuating that he had been led by a private grudge
against Ferrier to take the step he had taken. It was also
affirmed that he was acting at the instigation of the Free
Church, who wanted to abolish their chair of Logic in the New
College, but could not well do so so long as they had its
present incumbent on their hands. A doggerel parody on
John Gilpin, entitled “The Diverting History of John
Cairns,” in which a highly coloured account is given of the
supposed genesis of the pamphlet, was written and found wide
circulation. The first two stanzas of this effusion were the
following:—

Cairns found it needful to issue a second pamphlet,
Scottish Philosophy: a Vindication and Reply, in
which, while tenaciously holding to what he had said in the
last one, he challenged Ferrier to mention one single
instance in which he had made a personal attack on him. When
at length the vote came to be taken, and Fraser was elected
by a majority of three, there were few who doubted that the
intervention of the Berwick minister had been of critical
importance in bringing about this result.

Two years later George Wilson, who was now a professor in the
University, had the satisfaction of intimating to his friend
that his alma mater had conferred on him the degree of
D.D., and in the following year (1859) a much higher honour
was placed within his reach. The Principalship of the
University became vacant by the death of Dr. John Lee, and
the appointment to the coveted post, like that to the two
professorships, was in the hands of the Town Council. It was
informally offered to Cairns through one of the councillors,
but again he sent a declinature, and again he kept the matter
carefully concealed. It was not, in fact, until after his
death, when the correspondence regarding it came to light,
that even his own brothers knew that at the age of forty this
great and dignified office might have been his.

These declinatures on Cairns’s part of philosophical posts,
or posts the occupation of which would give him time and
opportunity for doing original work in philosophy, are not on
the whole difficult to understand when we bear in mind his
point of view. He had, after careful deliberation, given
himself to the Christian ministry, and he meant to devote the
whole of his life to its work. He was not to be turned aside
from it by the attractions of any employment however
congenial, or of any leisure however splendid. His
speculative powers had been consecrated to this object, as
well as his active powers, and would find their natural
outlet in harmony with it. And so the hopes of his friends
and his own aspirations must be realised in his work, not in
the field of philosophy but in that of theology. Accordingly,
he decided to follow up his work in the periodicals by
writing a book. He took for his subject “The Difficulties of
Christianity,” and made some progress with it, getting on so
far as to write several chapters. Then he was interrupted and
the work was laid aside. The great book was never written,
nor did he ever write a book worthy of his powers. A
moderate-sized volume of lectures on “Unbelief in the
Eighteenth Century,” a volume of sermons, most of which were
written in the first fifteen years of his ministry, a Memoir
of Dr. Brown,—these, with the exception of a quantity
of pamphlets, prefaces, and magazine articles, were all that
he gave to the world after the time with which we are now
dealing. How are we to account for this? The time in which he
lived was a time of great intellectual activity and
unsettlement—time that, in the opinion of most, needed,
and would have welcomed, the guidance he could have given;
and yet he stayed his hand. Why did he do so? This is the
central problem which a study of his life presents, and it is
one of no ordinary complexity; but there are some
considerations relating to it which go far to solve it, and
these it may be worth while for us at this point to examine.

At the outset, something must be allowed for the special
character of the influence exerted on Cairns by Sir William
Hamilton. That influence was profound and far-reaching. In
the letter to Hamilton which was quoted at the end of the
preceding chapter, Cairns tells his master that he must
“bear, by the will of the Almighty, the impress of his hand
through any further stage of existence,” and, strong as the
expression is, it can scarcely be said to be an exaggeration.
But Hamilton’s influence, while it called out and stimulated
his pupil’s powers to a remarkable degree, was not one which
made for literary productiveness. He was a great upholder of
the doctrine that truth is to be sought for its own sake and
without reference to any ulterior end, and he had strong
ideas about the discredit—the shamefulness, as it
seemed to him—of speaking or writing on any subject
until it had been mastered down to its last detail. This
attitude prevented Hamilton himself from doing full justice
to his powers and learning, and its influence could be seen
in Cairns also—in his delight in studies the relevancy
of which was not always apparent, and in a certain
fastidiousness which often delayed, and sometimes even
prevented, his putting pen to paper.

But another and a much more important factor in the problem
is to be found in the old Seceder ideal of the ministry in
which he was trained and which he never lost. It has been
truly said of him that “he never all his life got away from
David Inglis and Stockbridge any more than Carlyle got away
from John Johnston and Ecclefechan.” According to the Seceder
view, there is no more sublime calling on earth than that of
the Christian ministry, and that calling is one which
concerns itself first and chiefly with the conversion of
sinners and the edifying of saints. This work is so awful in
its importance, and so beneficent in its results, that it
must take the chief place in a minister’s thoughts and in the
disposition of his time; and if it requires the sole place,
that too must be accorded to it. “To me,” wrote Cairns to
George Gilfillan in 1849, “love seems infinitely higher than
knowledge and the noblest distinction of humanity—the
humble minister who wears himself out in labours of Christian
love in an obscure retreat as a more exalted person than the
mere literary champion of Christianity, or the recondite
professor who is great at Fathers and Schoolmen. I really
cannot share those longings for intellectual giants to
confront the Goliath of scepticism—not that I do not
think such persons useful in their way, but because I think
Christianity far more impressive as a life than as a
speculation, and the West Port evangelism of Dr. Chalmers far
more effective than his Astronomical Discourses.”11

It was to the ministry, as thus understood, that Cairns had
devoted himself at the close of his University course and
again just before he took license as a probationer, when for
a short time, as we have seen, he had been drawn aside by the
attractions of “sacred literature.” He never thought of
becoming a minister and was putting his main strength into
philosophy and theology. Not that he now forswore all
interest in either, but from the moment of his final
decision, he had determined that the mid-current of his life
should run in a different direction.

Yet another important factor in the case is to be found in
the circumstances of his Berwick ministry. Had his lot been
cast in a quiet country place, with only a handful of people
to look after, the great book might yet have been written.
But he had to attend to a congregation whose membership was
at first nearly six hundred, and afterwards rose to seven
hundred and eighty and, with his standard of pastoral
efficiency, this left him little leisure. Indeed it is
wonderful that, under these conditions, he accomplished so
much as he did—that he wrote his North British
articles, maintained a reputation which won for him so many
offers of academic posts, and at the same time laid the
foundation of a vast and spacious learning in Patristic and
Reformation theology. Akin to his strictly ministerial work,
and flowing out of it, was the work he did for his Church as
a whole—the share he took in the Union negotiations
with the Free Church during the ten years that these
negotiations lasted, and the endless round of church openings
and platform work to which his growing fame as a preacher and
public speaker laid him open.

But there is one other consideration which, although it is to
some extent involved in what has already been said, deserves
separate and very special attention. Although his friends and
the public regretted his withdrawal from the speculative
field, it is not so clear that he regretted it himself. He
had, it is true, worked in it strenuously and with
conspicuous success, and had revealed a natural aptitude for
Christian apologetics of a very high order. But it does not
appear that either his heart or his conscience were ever
fully engaged in the work. He never seemed as if he were
fighting for his life, because he always seemed to have
another and an independent ground of certainty on which he
based his real defence. There is a passage in his Life of
Clark which bears upon this point so closely that it will be
well to quote it here:—

“The Christian student is as conscious of direct intercourse
with Jesus Christ as with the external world, or with other
minds. This is the very postulate of living Christianity. It
is a datum or revelation made to a spiritual faculty in the
soul, as real as the external senses or any of the mental or
moral faculties, and far more exalted. This living contact
with a living person by faith and prayer is, like all other
life, ultimate and mysterious, and must be accepted by him in
whom it exists as its own sufficient explanation and reason,
just as the principles of natural intelligence and
conscience, to which it is something superadded, and with
which, in this point of view, though in other respects
higher, it is co-ordinate. No one who is living in communion
with Jesus Christ, and exercising that series of affections
towards Him which Christianity at once prescribes and
creates, can doubt the reality of that supernatural system to
which he has been thus introduced; and nothing more is
necessary than to appeal to his own experience and belief,
which is here as valid and irresistible as in regard to the
existence of God, of moral distinctions, or of the material
world. He has no reason to trust the one class of beliefs
which he has not, to trust the other…. To minds thus
favoured, this forms a point d’appui which can never
be overturned—an aliquid inconcussum
corresponding to the ‘cogito ergo sum‘ of Descartes.
Their faith bears its own signature, and they have only to
look within to discover its authenticity. Philosophy must be
guided by experience, and must rank the characters inscribed
on the soul by grace at least as sacred as those inscribed by
nature. Such persons need not that any man should teach them,
for they have an unction from the Holy One; and to them
applies the highest of all congratulations: ‘Blessed art
thou; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but
My Father which is in heaven.'”12

These words contain the true explanation of Cairns’s life.
There was in it the “aliquid inconcussum“—the
“unshaken somewhat”—which made him independent of other
arguments, and which kept him untouched by all the
intellectual attacks on Christianity. Other people who had
not this inward testimony, or who, having it, could not
regard it as unshaken by the assaults of infidelity, he could
argue with and seek to meet them on their own intellectual
ground; but for himself, any victories gained here were
superfluous, any defects left him unmoved. Was it always so
with him? Or was there ever a time when he was carried off
his feet and had to struggle for dear life for his Christian
faith amid the dark waters of doubt?

There are indications that on at least one occasion he
subjected his beliefs to a careful scrutiny, and, referring
to this later, he spoke of himself as one who, in the words
of the Roman poet, had been “much tossed about on land and on
the deep ere he could build a city.” This, coming from one
who was habitually reticent about his religious experiences,
may be held as proving that there was no want of rigour in
the process, no withholding of any part of the structure from
the strain. But that that structure ever gave way, that it
ever came tumbling down in ruins about him so that it had to
be built again on new foundations, there is no evidence to
show. The “aliquid inconcussum” appears to have
remained with him all through the experience. This seems
clear from a passage in a letter written in 1848 to his
brother David, then a student in Sir William Hamilton’s
class, in which he says; “I never found my religious
susceptibilities injured by metaphysical speculations.
Whether this was a singular felicity I do not know, but I
have heard others complain.”13

This, taken in conjunction with the passage quoted above from
Clark’s Life, in which it is hard to believe that he is not
speaking of himself, seems decisive enough, and in a mind of
such speculative grasp and activity it is remarkable. “Right
down through the storm-zone of the nineteenth century,”
writes one who knew him well, “he comes untroubled by the
force of the ‘aliquid inconcussum.’ Edinburgh,
Germany, Berwick; Hamilton, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Renan, it
is all the same. The cause seems to me luminously plain.
Saints are never doubters. His religious intuitions were so
deep and clear that he was able always to find his way by
their aid. They gave him his independent certainty, his
‘aliquid inconcussum.'”

His influence on the religious life of his time was largely
due to the spiritual faculty in him that is here referred to.
He was the power he was, not so much because of his
intellectual strength as because of his
character,—because he was “a great Christian.” But in
this respect he had the defects of his qualities; and it is
open to question whether he ever truly appreciated the
formidable character of modern doubt, just because he himself
had never had full experience of its power, because the iron
of it had never really entered into his soul.

George Gilfillan, who, with all his defects, had often gleams
of real insight, wrote thus in his diary 14th January 1863:
“I got yesterday sent me, per post, a lecture by John Cairns
on ‘Rationalism, Ritualism, and Pure Religion,’ or some such
title, and have read it with interest, attention, and a good
deal of admiration of its ability and, on the whole, of its
spirit. But I can see from it that he is not the man to
grapple with the scepticism of the age. He has not sufficient
sympathy with it, he has not lived in its atmosphere, he has
not visited its profoundest or tossed in its stormiest
depths. Intellectually and logically he understands it as he
understands most other matters, but sympathetically and
experimentally he does not.”

There is a considerable amount of truth in this, although it
is lacking somewhat in the sympathy which the critic
desiderates in the man he is criticising. Cairns did not feel
that the battle with modern doubt was of absolutely
overwhelming importance, and this, along with the other
things to which reference has been made, kept him from giving
to the world that new statement of the Christian position
which his friends hoped to get from him, and which he at one
time hoped to be able to give.

CHAPTER VII

THE APOSTLE OF UNION

The close of the period dealt with in the last chapter was
made sadly memorable to Cairns by the death of some of his
closest friends. In October 1858 died the venerable Dr.
Brown, with whom, since he was a student, he had stood in the
closest relations, and whom he revered and habitually
addressed as a father. In November 1859 the bright spirit of
George Wilson, the dearest of all his friends, passed away;
and in the same year he had to mourn the loss of Miss
Darling, the correspondent and adviser of his student days.
His brave old mother died in the autumn of 1860, and in the
following year he lost another old and dear friend in Mrs.
Balmer, the widow of his predecessor in Golden Square, who
perhaps knew him better than his own mother, and had been
deeper in his confidence than anyone since he came to
Berwick. From this period he became more reserved. With all
his frankness there was always a characteristic reticence
about him, and this was less frequently broken now that those
to whom he had so freely poured out his soul had been taken
from him. But he drew closer to those who were still
left—especially to his own kindred, to his sisters, to
his brother William at Oldcambus, and to his brother David,
who had now been settled for some years as minister at
Stitchel, near Kelso.14

Dr. Brown had nominated him as one of his literary executors,
and his family were urgent in their request that he should
write their father’s Life. With great reluctance he
consented, and for eighteen months this task absorbed the
whole of his leisure, to the complete exclusion of the work
on “The Difficulties of Christianity,” with which he had
already made some progress. The undertaking was a labour of
love, but it cannot be said to have been congenial. Memoir
writing was not to his taste, and in this case he had made a
stipulation that still further hampered him and made success
very difficult. This was that he should omit, as far as
possible, all personal details, and leave these to be dealt
with in a separate chapter which Dr. Brown’s son John
undertook to furnish. This chapter was not forthcoming when
the volume had to go to press, and was separately issued some
months later. When the inspiration did at length come to “Dr.
John,” it came in such a way as to add a new masterpiece to
English literature, and one which, while it gave a
wonderfully living picture of the writer’s father, disclosed
to the world as nothing else has ever done the true
ethos and inner life of the Scottish Secession Church.
The Memoir itself, of which this “Letter to John Cairns,
D.D.” is the supplementary chapter, is a sound and solid bit
of work, giving an accurate and interesting account of the
public life of Dr. Brown and of the movements in which he
took part. It is, as William Graham said of it, “a
thoughtful, calm, conclusive book, perhaps too reticent and
colourless, but none the less like Dr. Brown because of
that.”

No sooner was this book off his hands than Cairns was urged
to undertake another biographical work—the Life of
George Wilson. But this, in view of his recent experience, he
steadfastly refused to do, and contented himself with writing
a sketch of his friend for the pages of Macmillan’s
Magazine. When, however, Wilson’s biography was taken in
hand by his sister, Cairns promised to help her in every
possible way with his advice and guidance, and this he did
from week to week till the book was published. This help on
his part was continued by his seeing through the press
Wilson’s posthumous book, Counsels of an Invalid,
which appeared in 1862. With the completion of this task he
seemed to be free to return to his theological work, and he
did return to it; but his release turned out to be only a
brief respite. In 1863 the ten years’ negotiations for Union
between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, in which
he felt impelled to take a prominent and laborious part, were
begun, and they absorbed nearly all of his leisure during
what might have been a productive period of his life. When he
emerged from them he was fifty-four years of age, he had
passed beyond the time of life when his creative powers were
at their freshest, and the general habits of his life and
lines of his activity had become settled and stereotyped.

This is not the place in which to enter into a detailed
account of the Union negotiations. That has been done with
admirable lucidity and skill by such writers as Dr. Norman
Walker in his Life of Dr. Robert Buchanan, and by Dr. MacEwen
in his Life of the subject of the present sketch, and it does
not need to be done over again. But something must be said at
this point to indicate the general lines which the
negotiations followed and to make Cairns’s relation to them
clear. That he should have taken a keen and sympathetic
interest in any great movement for ecclesiastical union was
quite what might have been expected. What interested him in
Christian truth, and what he had, ever since he had been a
student, set himself specially to expound and defend, were
the great catholic doctrines which are the heritage of the
one Church of Christ. Constitutionally, he was disposed to
make more of the things that unite Christians than of those
which divide them; and, while he was loyally attached to his
own Church, many of his favourite heroes, as well as many of
his warmest personal friends, belonged to other Churches.
Hence anything that made for Union was entirely in line with
his feelings and his convictions. Thus he had thrown himself
heartily into the work of the Evangelical Alliance, and at
its memorable Berlin Meeting of 1857 had created a deep
impression by an address which he delivered in German on the
probable results of a closer co-operation between German and
British Protestantism. In the same year he took part in a
Conference in Edinburgh which had been summoned by Sir George
Sinclair of Ulbster to discuss the possibility of Church
Union at home. And when in 1859 the Union took place in the
Australian Colonies of the Presbyterian Churches which bore
the names of the Scottish Churches from which they had
sprung, it was to a large extent through his influence that
the Australian United Presbyterians took part in the Union.

His ideal at first was of one great Presbyterian Communion
co-extensive with the English language, and separately
organised in the different countries and dependencies in
which its adherents were to be found, but having one creed
and one form of worship and complete freedom from all State
patronage and control. But, as the times did not seem ripe
for such a vast consummation, he made no attempt to give his
ideal a practical form, and concentrated his energies on the
lesser movement which was beginning to take shape for a union
of the Presbyterian Churches in England and the
non-Established Presbyterian Churches in Scotland. He was one
of those who brought this project before the Synod of the
United Presbyterian Church in May 1863, when he appeared in
support of an overture from the Berwick Presbytery in favour
of Union. The overture was adopted with enthusiasm, and the
Synod agreed by a majority of more than ten to one to appoint
a committee to confer with a view to Union with any committee
which might be appointed by the Free Church General Assembly.
The Free Church Assembly, which met a fortnight later, passed
a similar resolution unanimously, although not without a keen
discussion revealing elements of opposition which were
afterwards to gather strength.

It is quite possible that, as competent observers have
suggested, if the enthusiasm for the project which then
existed had been taken advantage of at once, Union might have
been carried with a rush. But the able men who were guiding
the proceedings thought it safer to advance more slowly; and,
when the Joint Union Committee met, they went on to consider
in detail the various points on which the two Churches
differed. These had reference almost entirely to the
relations between Church and State. The United Presbyterians
were, almost to a man, “Voluntaries,” i.e. they held
that the Church ought in all cases to support itself without
assistance from the State, and free from the interference
which, in their view, was the inevitable and justifiable
accompaniment of all State establishments. The Free
Churchmen, on the other hand, while maintaining as their
cardinal principle that the Church must be free from all
State interference, and while therefore protesting against
the existing Establishment, held that the Church, if its
freedom were adequately guaranteed, might lawfully accept
establishment and endowment from the State. An elaborate
statement was drawn up exhibiting first the points on which
the two Churches were agreed with regard to this question,
and then the points on which they differed. From this it
appeared that they were at one as to the duty of the
State—or, in the language of the Westminster
Confession, the “Civil Magistrate”—to make Christian
laws and to administer them in a Christian spirit. The Civil
Magistrate ought, it was agreed, to be a Christian, not
merely as a man but as a magistrate. The only vital point of
difference was with regard to the question of Church
establishments—as to whether it was part of the
Christian Civil Magistrate’s duty to establish and endow the
Church. But, as it seemed to be a vain hope that the Free
Church would ever get an Establishment to its mind, it was
urged that this was a mere matter of theory, and might be
safely left as an “open question” in a United Church. The
statement referred to, which is better known as the “Articles
of Agreement,” was not ready to be submitted in a final form
to the Synod and Assembly of 1864, and the Committee, which
was now reinforced by representatives from the Reformed
Presbyterian Church and from the Presbyterian Church in
England, was reappointed to carry on its labours.

But meanwhile clouds were beginning to appear on the horizon.
In the United Presbyterian Synod there was a small minority
of sturdy Voluntaries who, while not opposed to Union, were
apprehensive that the price to be paid for it would be the
partial surrender of their testimony in behalf of their
distinctive principle. They did not wish to impose their
beliefs on others, but they were anxious to reserve to
themselves full liberty to hold and propagate their views in
the United Church, and they were not sure that, by accepting
the Articles of Agreement, they were in fact doing this. The
efforts of Dr. Cairns and others were directed, not without
success, to meeting their difficulties. But in the Free
Church a more formidable opposition began to show itself.
There had always been a conservative element in that Church,
represented by men who held tenaciously to the more literal
interpretation of its ecclesiastical documents and
traditions; and, as the discussions went on, it became clear
that the hopelessness of a reconciliation with the
Establishment was not so universally felt as had been at
first supposed. The supporters of the Union movement included
almost all the trusted leaders of the Church—men like
Drs. Candlish, Buchanan, Duff, Fairbairn, Rainy, and Guthrie,
Sir Henry Moncreiff, Lord Dalhousie, and Mr. Murray Dunlop,
most of whom had got their ecclesiastical training in the
great controversy which had issued in the Disruption; but all
their eloquence and all their skill did not avail to allay
the misgivings or silence the objections of the other party.
At length in 1867 a crisis was reached. The Articles of
Agreement, after having been finally formulated by the
Committee, had been sent down to Presbyteries for their
consideration; and the reports of the Presbyteries were laid
on the table of the Assembly of that year. The question now
arose, Was it wise, in view of the opposition, to take
further steps towards Union? The Assembly by 346 votes to 120
decided to goon; whereupon the Anti-Union leaders resigned
the seats which up to this time they had retained on the
Union Committee.

It is true that, after the Committee had been relieved of
this hostile element, considerable and rapid progress was
made. Hopes were cherished for a time that the Union might
yet be consummated, and the determination was expressed to
carry it through at all hazards. But the Free Church
minority, ably led and knowing its own mind, stubbornly
maintained its ground. Its adherents, who included perhaps
one-third of the ministers and people of the Church, were
specially numerous in the Highlands, where United
Presbyterianism was practically unrepresented.

Here most distorted views were held of the Voluntaryism which
most of its ministers and members professed. It was
represented as equivalent to National Atheism, and from this
the transition was an easy one, especially in districts where
few of the people had even seen a United Presbyterian, to the
position that an upholder of National Atheism must himself be
an Atheist. It became increasingly clear, as the years
passed, that if the Union were to be forced through, there
must be a new Disruption, and a Disruption which would cost
the Free Church those Highland congregations which for thirty
years it had been its glory to maintain. Moreover, it was
currently reported that the Anti-Union party had taken the
opinion of eminent counsel, and that these had declared that,
in the event of a Disruption taking place on this question of
Union, the protesting minority would be legally entitled to
take with them the entire property of the Church. The
conviction was forced on the Free Church leaders (and in this
they were supported by their United Presbyterian brethren)
that the time was not yet ripe for that which they so greatly
desired to see, and that even for Union the price they would
have to pay was too great. And so with heavy hearts they
decided in 1873 to abandon the negotiations which had been
proceeding for ten years. All that they felt themselves
prepared to carry was a proposal that Free Church or United
Presbyterian ministers should be “mutually eligible” for
calls in the two Churches—a proposal that did not come
to much.

Three years later, the Reformed Presbyterian Church united
with the Free Church, and in the same year (1876) the United
Presbyterian Church gave up one hundred and ten of its
congregations, which united with the English Presbyterian
Church and thus formed the present Presbyterian Church of
England. The original idea, at least on the United
Presbyterian side, had been that all the negotiating bodies
should be welded into one comprehensive British Church; but
this, especially in view of the breakdown of the larger
Union, proved to be unworkable, and the final result for the
United Presbyterians was that they came out of the
negotiations a considerably smaller and weaker Church than
they had been when they went into them.

In all the labours and anxieties of these ten years Dr.
Cairns had borne a foremost part. At the meetings of the
Union Committee he took an eager interest and a leading share
in the discussions; and, while never compromising the
position of his Church, he did much to set it in a clear and
attractive light. In the United Presbyterian Synod, where it
fell to his lot year by year to deliver the leading speech in
support of the Committee’s report, his eloquence, his
sincerity, and his enthusiasm did not a little to reassure
those who feared that there was a tendency on the part of
their representatives to concede too much, and did a very
great deal to keep his Church as a whole steadily in favour
of Union in spite of many temptations to have done with it.
Dr. Hutton, one of those advanced Voluntaries who had never
been enthusiastic about the Union proposals, wrote to him at
the close of the negotiations: “We have reached this stage
through your vast personal influence more than through any
other cause.”

Outside of the Church Courts he delivered innumerable
speeches at public meetings which had been organised in all
parts of the country in aid of the Union cause. These more
than anything else led him to be identified in the public
mind with that cause, and gained for him the name of the
“Apostle of Union.” The meetings at which these speeches were
delivered were mostly got up on the Free Church side, where
there seemed to be more need of missionary work of this kind
than on his own, and his appearances on these occasions
increased the favour with which he was already regarded in
Free Church circles. “The chief attraction of Union for me,”
an eminent Free Church layman is reported to have said, “is
that it will bring me into the same Church with John Cairns.”

That he was deeply disappointed by the failure of the
enterprise on which his hopes had been so much set, he did
not conceal; but he never believed that the ten years’ work
had been lost, and he never doubted that Union would come. He
did not live to see it, but when, on October 31, 1900, the
two Churches at length became one, there were many in the
great gathering in the Waverley Market who thought of him,
and of his strenuous and noble labours into which they were
on that day entering. Dr. Maclaren of Manchester gave
expression to these thoughts in his speech in the evening of
the day of Union, when, after paying a worthy tribute to the
great leader to whose skill and patience the goodly
consummation was so largely due, he went on to say: “But all
during the proceedings of this day there has been one figure
and one name in my memory, and I have been saying to myself,
What would John Cairns, with his big heart and his sweet and
simple nature, have said if God had given him to see this
day! ‘These all died in faith, not having received the
promises… God having provided some better thing for us.'”

CHAPTER VIII

WALLACE GREEN

All the time occupied by the events described in the last two
chapters, Dr. Cairns was carrying on his ministry in Berwick
with unflagging diligence. True to his principle, he steadily
devoted to his pulpit and pastoral work the best of his
strength, and always let them have the chief place in his
thoughts. He gave to other things what he could spare, but he
never forgot that he had determined to be a minister first of
all. His congregation had prospered greatly under his care,
and in 1859 the old-fashioned meeting-house in Golden Square
was abandoned for a stately and spacious Gothic church with a
handsome spire which had been erected in Wallace Green, with
a frontage to the principal open square of the town. A few
years earlier a new manse had been secured for the minister.
This manse is the end house of a row of three called
Wellington Terrace. These stand just within the old town
walls, which are here pierced by wide embrasures. They are
separated from the walls by a broad walk and a row of
grass-plots, alternating with paved spaces opposite the
embrasures, on which cannon were once planted. The manse
faces south, and is roomy and commodious. When Dr. Cairns
moved into it, he had an elderly servant as his housekeeper,
of whom he is said to have been not a little afraid; but,
after a couple of years or so, his sister Janet was installed
as mistress of his house; and during the remaining thirty-six
years of his life she attended to his wants, looked after his
health, and in a hundred prudent and quiet ways helped him in
his work.

The study at Wellington Terrace is upstairs, and is a large
room lighted by two windows. One of these looks across the
river, which at this point washes the base of the town walls,
to the dingy village of Tweedmouth, rising towards the
sidings and sheds of a busy railway-station and the
Northumberland uplands beyond. The other looks right out to
sea, and when it is open, and sometimes when it is shut, “the
rush and thunder of the surge” on Berwick bar or Spittal
sands can be distinctly heard. In front, the Tweed pours its
waters into the North Sea under the lee of the long pier,
which acts as a breakwater and shelters the entrance to the
harbour. Far away to the right, Holy Island, with the
castle-crowned rock of Bamborough beyond it, are prominent
objects; and at night, the Longstone light on the Outer Farne
recalls the heroic rescue by Grace Darling of the shipwrecked
crew of the Forfarshire.

Opposite this window stood the large bookcase in which Dr.
Cairns’s library was housed. The books composing the library
were neither very numerous, very select, nor in very good
condition. Although he was a voracious reader, it must be
admitted that Dr. Cairns took little pride in his books. It
was a matter of utter indifference to him whether he read a
favourite author in a good edition or in a cheap one. The
volumes of German philosophy and theology, of which he had a
fair stock, remained unbound in their original sober livery,
and when any of them threatened to fall to pieces he was
content to tie them together with string or to get his sister
to fasten them with paste. One or two treasures he had, such
as a first edition of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, a
first edition of Butler’s Analogy, and a Stephens
Greek Testament; also a complete set of the Delphin Classics,
handsomely bound, and some College prizes. These, with the
Benedictine edition of Augustine, folio editions of
Athanasius, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, some odd volumes
of Migne, and a considerable number of books on Reformation
and Secession theology, formed the most noteworthy elements
in his collection. He added later a very complete set of the
writings of the English Deists, and the works of Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Renan. Side by side with these was what came to
be a vast accumulation of rubbish, consisting of presentation
copies of books on all subjects which his anxious conscience
persuaded him that he was bound to keep on his shelves, since
publishers and authors had been kind enough to send them to
him. Nearly all the books that belonged to his real library
he had read with care. Most of them were copiously annotated,
and his annotations were, as a rule, characterised by a
refreshing trenchancy,—in the case of some, as of
Gibbon, tempered with respect; in the case of others, as of
F.W. Newman and W.R. Greg, bordering on truculence. The only
other noteworthy objects in the study were two splendid
engravings of Raphael’s “Transfiguration” and “Spasimo” (the
former bearing the signature of Raphael Morghen), which had
been a gift to him from Mrs. Balmer.

The greater part of each day was spent in this room. He could
get along with less sleep than most men; and however late he
might have sat over his books at night, he was frequently in
his study again long before breakfast. After breakfast came
family worship, each item of which was noteworthy. Although
passionately fond of sacred music, he had a wild,
uncontrollable kind of voice in singing. He seemed to have
always a perfectly definite conception of what the tune ought
to be, but he was seldom able to give this idea an accurate,
much less a melodious, expression. Yet he never omitted the
customary portion of psalm or hymn, but tackled it with the
utmost gallantry, fervour, and enthusiasm, although he
scarcely ever got through a verse without going off the tune.

His reading of Scripture had no elocutionary pretensions
about it; it was quiet, and to a large extent gone through in
a monotone; but two things about it made it very impressive.
One of these was the deep reverence that characterised it,
and the other was a note of subdued enthusiasm that ran all
through it. It was clear to the listener that behind every
passage read, whether it was history, psalm, or prophecy, or
even the driest detail of ritual, there was visible to him a
great world-process going on that appealed to his imagination
and influenced even the tones of his voice. And his prayers,
quite unstudied as they of course were, brought the whole
company right into the presence of the Unseen. They were
usually full of detail,—he seemed to remember everybody
and everything,—but each petition was absolutely
appropriate to the special case with which it dealt, and all
were fused into a unity by the spirit of devotion that welled
up through all. After prayers he went back to his study, and
nothing was heard or seen of him for some hours, except when
his heavy tread was heard upstairs as he walked backwards and
forwards, or when the strains of what was meant to be a
German choral were wafted down from above.

The afternoon he usually spent in visiting, and, so long as
he remained in Berwick, there was no more familiar figure in
its streets than his. The tall, stalwart form, already a
little bent,—but bent, one thought, not so much by the
weight of advancing years as by way of making an apology for
its height,—the hair already white, the mild and kindly
blue eye, the tall hat worn well back on the head, the
swallow-tail coat, the swathes within swathes of broad white
neckcloth, the umbrella carried, even in the finest weather,
under the arm with the handle downward, the gloves in the
hands but never on them, the rapid eager stride,—all
these come back vividly to those who can remember Berwick in
the Sixties and early Seventies of last century. His
visitations were still carried out with the method and
punctuality which had characterised them in the early days of
his ministry, and he usually arranged to make a brief pause
for tea with one of the families visited. On these occasions
he would frequently be in high spirits, and his hearty and
resounding laughter would break out on the smallest
provocation. That laugh of his was eminently characteristic
of the man. There was nothing smothered or furtive about it;
there was not even the vestige of a chuckle in it. Its deep
“Ah! hah! hah!” came with a staccato, quacking sound from
somewhere low down in the chest, and set his huge shoulders
moving in unison with its peals. The whole closed with a long
breath of purest enjoyment—a kind of final licking of
the lips after the feast was over.

Returning to his house, he always entered it by the back
door, apparently because he did not wish to put the servant
to the trouble of going upstairs to open the front door for
him. It does not seem to have occurred to him to use a
latch-key. In the evening there was generally some meeting to
go to, but after his return, when evening worship and the
invariable supper of porridge and milk were over, he always
went back to his study, and its lights were seldom put out
until long past midnight.

Although his reading in these solitary hours was of course
mainly theological, he always kept fresh his interest in the
classical studies of his youth. He did not depend on his
communings with Origen and Eusebius for keeping up his Greek,
but went back as often as he could find time to Plato and to
the Tragedians. Macaulay has defined a Greek scholar as one
who can read Plato with his feet on the fender. Dr. Cairns
could fully satisfy this condition; indeed he went beyond it,
for when he went from home he was in the habit of taking a
volume of Plato or Aeschylus with him to read in the train.
One of his nephews, at that time a schoolboy, remembers
reading with him, when on a holiday visit to Berwick, through
the Alcestis of Euripides. It may have been because he
found it necessary to frighten his young relative into habits
of accuracy, or possibly because an outrage committed against
a Greek poet was to him the most horrid of all outrages; but
anyhow, during these studies, he altogether laid aside that
restraint which he was usually so jealous to maintain over
his powers of sarcasm and invective. He lay on the study sofa
while the lesson was going on, with a Tauchnitz Euripides in
his hand; but sometimes, when a false quantity or a more than
usually stupid grammatical blunder was made, he would spring
to his feet and fairly shout with wrath. Only once had he to
consult a Greek lexicon for the meaning of a word; and then
it turned out that the meaning he had assigned to it
provisionally was the right one. A Latin lexicon he did not
possess.

On Sunday, Wallace Green Church was a goodly sight. Forenoon
and afternoon, streams of worshippers came pouring by
Ravensdowne, Church Street, and Walkergate Lane across the
square and into the large building, which was soon filled to
overflowing. Then “the Books” were brought in by the stately
beadle, and last of all “the Doctor” came hurriedly in,
scrambled awkwardly up the pulpit stair, and covered his face
with his black gloved hands.15 Then he
rose, and in slow monotone gave out the opening psalm, during
the singing of which his strong but wandering voice could now
and again be distinctly heard above the more artistic strains
of the choir and congregation rendering its tribute of
praise. The Scripture lessons were read in the same subdued
but reverent tones, and the prayers were simple and direct in
their language, the emotion that throbbed through them being
kept under due restraint. The opening periods of the sermon
were pitched in the same note, but when the preacher got
fairly into his subject he broke loose from such restraints,
and his argument was unfolded, and then massed, and finally
pressed home with all the strength of his intellect,
reinforced at every stage by the play of his imagination and
the glow of a passionate conviction. His “manner” in the
pulpit was, it is true, far from graceful. His principal
gesture was a jerking of the right arm towards the left
shoulder, accompanied sometimes by a bending forward of the
upper part of the body; and when he came to his peroration,
which he usually delivered with his eyes closed and in
lowered tones, he would clasp his hands and move them up and
down in front of him. But all these things seemed to fit in
naturally to his style of oratory; there was not the faintest
trace of affectation in any of them, and, as a matter of
fact, they added to the effectiveness of his preaching.

In Wallace Green Dr. Cairns was surrounded by a devoted band
of office-bearers and others, who carried on very successful
Home Mission work in the town, and kept the various
organisations of the church in a vigorous and flourishing
state. He had himself no faculty for business details, and he
left these mostly to others; but his influence was felt at
every point, and operated in a remarkable degree towards the
keeping up of the spiritual tone of the church’s work. With
his elders, who were not merely in regard to ecclesiastical
rank, but also in regard to character and ability, the
leaders of the congregation, he was always on the most
cordial and intimate terms. In numerical strength they
usually approximated to the apostolic figure of twelve, and
Dr. Cairns used to remark that their Christian names included
a surprisingly large number of apostolic pairs. Thus there
were amongst them not merely James and John, Matthew and
Thomas, but even Philip and Bartholomew.

The Philip here referred to was Dr. Philip Whiteside
Maclagan, a brother of the present Archbishop of York and of
the late Professor Sir Douglas Maclagan. Dr. Maclagan had
been originally an army surgeon, but had been long settled in
general practice in Berwick in succession to his
father-in-law, the eminent naturalist, Dr. George Johnstone.
It was truly said of him that he combined in himself the
labours and the graces of Luke the beloved physician and
Philip the evangelist. When occasion offered, he would not
only diagnose and prescribe but pray at the bedsides of his
patients, and his influence was exerted in behalf of
everything that was pure and lovely and of good report in the
town of Berwick. His delicately chiselled features and fine
expression were the true index of a devout and beautiful soul
within. Dr. Cairns and he were warmly attached to one
another, and he was his minister’s right-hand man in
everything that concerned the good of the congregation.

It will readily be believed that Dr. Cairns had not been
suffered to remain in Berwick during all these years without
strong efforts being made to induce him to remove to larger
spheres of labour. As a matter of fact, he received in all
some half-dozen calls during the course of his ministry from
congregations in Edinburgh and Glasgow; while at one period
of his life scarcely a year passed without private overtures
being made to him which, if he had given any encouragement to
them, would have issued in calls. These overtures he in every
case declined at once; but when congregations, in spite of
him or without having previously consulted him, took the
responsibility of proceeding to a formal call, he never
intervened to arrest their action. He had a curious respect
for the somewhat cumbrous and slow-moving Presbyterian
procedure, and when it had been set in motion he felt that it
was his duty to let it take its course.

Once when a call to him was in process which he had in its
initial stages discouraged, and which he knew that he could
not accept, his sister, who had set her heart on furnishing
an empty bedroom in the manse at Berwick, was peremptorily
bidden to stay her hand lest he might thereby seem to be
prejudging that which was not yet before him. Two of the
calls he received deserve separate mention. One was in 1855
from Greyfriars Church, Glasgow, at that time the principal
United Presbyterian congregation in the city. All sorts of
influences were brought to bear upon him to accept it, and
for a time he was in grave doubt as to whether it might not
be his duty to do so. But two considerations especially
decided him to remain in Berwick. One was the state of his
health, which was not at that time very good; and the other
was the pathetic one, that he wanted to write that book which
was never to be written.

Nine years later, in 1864, a yet more determined attempt was
made to secure him for Edinburgh. A new congregation had been
formed at Morningside, one of the southern suburbs of the
city, and it was thought that this would offer a sphere of
work and of influence worthy of his powers. A call was
accordingly addressed to him, and it was backed up by
representations of an almost unique character and weight. The
Free Church leaders, with whom he was then brought into close
touch by the Union negotiations, urged him to come to
Edinburgh. A memorial, signed by one hundred and sixty-seven
United Presbyterian elders in the city, told him that, in the
interests of their Church, it was of the utmost importance
that he should do so. Another memorial, signed by several
hundred students at the University, put the matter from their
point of view. A still more remarkable document was the
following:—

“The subscribers, understanding that the Rev. Dr. Cairns has
received a call to the congregation of Morningside, desire to
express their earnest and strong conviction that his removal
to Edinburgh would be a signal benefit to vital religion
throughout Scotland, and more especially in the metropolis,
where his great intellectual powers, his deep and wide
scholarship, his mastery of the literature of modern
unbelief, and the commanding simplicity and godly sincerity
of his personal character and public teaching, would find an
ample field for their full and immediate exercise.”

This was signed (amongst others) by three Judges of the Court
of Session, by the Lord Advocate, by the Principal and seven
of the Professors of the University, and by such
distinguished ministers and citizens as Dr. Candlish, Dr.
Hanna, Dr. Lindsay Alexander, Adam Black, Dr. John Brown, and
Charles Cowan. It was a remarkable tribute (Adam Black in
giving his name said, “This is more than ever was done for
Dr. Chalmers”), and it made a deep impression on Dr. Cairns.
The Wallace Green congregation, however, sought to counteract
it by an argument which amusingly shows how well they knew
their man. They appealed to that strain of anxious
conscientiousness in him which he had inherited from his
father, by urging that all these memorials were “irregular,”
and that therefore he had no right to consider them in coming
to his decision. They also undertook to furnish him with the
means of devoting more time to theological study than had
hitherto been at his disposal. After a period of hesitation,
more painful and prolonged than he had ever passed through on
any similar occasion, he decided to remain in Berwick. He was
moved to this decision, partly by his attachment to his
congregation; partly by a feeling that he could do more for
the cause of Union by remaining its minister than would be
possible amid the labours of a new city charge; and partly by
the hope, which was becoming perceptibly fainter and more
wistful, that he might at last find leisure in Berwick to
write his book.

But, although he did not become a city minister, he preached
very frequently in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and indeed all over
the country. His services were in constant request for the
opening of churches and on anniversary occasions. He records
that in the course of a single year he preached or spoke away
from home (of course mostly on week days) some forty or fifty
times. Wherever he went he attracted large crowds, on whom
his rugged natural eloquence produced a deep impression. It
has been recorded that on one occasion, while a vast audience
to which he had been preaching in an Edinburgh church was
dispersing, a man was overheard expressing his admiration to
his neighbour in language more enthusiastic than proper:
“He’s a deevil o’ a preacher!”

With all this burden of work pressing on him, it was a relief
when the annual holiday came round and he could get away from
it. But this holiday, too, was usually of a more or less
strenuous character, and embraced large tracts of country
either at home or, more frequently, on the Continent. On
these tours his keen human interest asserted itself. He loved
to visit places associated with great historic events, or
that suggested to him reminiscences of famous men and women.
And the actual condition of the people, how they lived, and
what they were thinking about, interested him deeply. He
spoke to everybody he met, in the train, in the steamboat, or
in hotels, in fluent if rather “bookish” German, in correct
but somewhat halting French, or, if it was a Roman Catholic
priest he had to deal with, in sonorous Latin. And, without
anything approaching cant or officiousness, he always tried
to bring the conversation round to the subject of
religion—to the state of religion in the country in
which he was travelling, about which he was always anxious to
gain first-hand information, and, if possible and he could do
it without offence, to the personal views and experiences of
those with whom he conversed. He rarely or never did give
offence in this respect, for there was never anything
aggressive or clamorous or prying in his treatment of the
subject.

On his return to Berwick his congregation usually expected
him to give them a lecture on what he had seen, and the MSS.
of several of these lectures, abounding in graphic
description and in shrewd and often humorous observation of
men and things, have been preserved. It must suffice here to
give an extract from one of them on a tour in the West of
Ireland in 1864, illustrating as it does a curious phase of
Irish social life at that time. Dr. Cairns and a small party
of friends had embarked in a little steamer on one of the
Irish lakes, and were taking note of the gentlemen’s seats,
varied with occasional ruins, which were coming in view on
both sides.

“A fine ancient castle,” he goes on to say, “surrounded by
trees and almost overhanging the lough, attracted our gaze
for some time ere we passed it. The owner’s name and
character were naturally brought under review. ‘Is not Sir
—— a Sunday man?’ says one of the company to
another. ‘He is.’ The distinction was new to me, and I
inferred something good, perhaps some unusual zeal for
Sabbath observance or similar virtue. But, alas! for the
vanity of human judgments. A ‘Sunday man’ in the West of
Ireland is one who only appears on the Sunday outside his own
dwelling, because on any other day he would be arrested for
debt. Even on a week day he is safe if he keeps to his own
house, where in Ireland, as in England, no writ can force its
way. Sir —— was also invulnerable while sitting
on the grand jury, where quite lately he had protracted the
business to an inordinate length in order to extend his own
liberty. As the boat passed close beside his castle, a
handsome elderly gentleman appeared at an open window, and
with hat in hand and a charming smile on his face made us a
most profound and graceful salutation. We could not be
insensible to so much courtesy—since it was Sir
—— himself who thus welcomed us; but as we waved
our hats in reply, one of our party, who had actually a writ
out against the fine old Irish gentleman at the very time,
with very little prospect of execution, muttered something
between his teeth and pressed his hat firmer down on his head
than usual. Such landlordism is still not uncommon. The same
friend is familiar with writs against other gentlemen whose
house is their castle, and to whom Sunday is ‘the light of
the week.'”

The closing period of Dr. Cairns’s ministry at Berwick was
made memorable by a remarkable religious revival in the town.
Following on a brief visit in January 1874 from Messrs. Moody
and Sankey, who had then just closed their first mission in
Edinburgh, a movement began which lasted nearly two years.
With some help from outside it was carried on during that
time mostly by the ministers of the town, assisted by laymen
from the various churches, among whom Dr. Maclagan occupied a
foremost place. Dr. Cairns threw himself into this movement
with ardour, and although he did not intend it, and probably
was not aware of it, he was its real leader, giving it at
once the impetus and the guidance which it needed. Besides
being present, and taking some part whenever he was at home
in the crowded evangelistic meetings that for a while were
held nightly, and in the prayer-meeting, attended by from one
hundred and fifty to two hundred, which met every day at
noon, he must have conversed with hundreds of people seeking
direction on religious matters during the early months of
1874. And, knowing that many would shrink from the publicity
of an Inquiry Meeting, he made a complete canvass of his own
congregation, in the course of which by gentle and tactful
means he found out those who really desired to be spoken to,
and spoke to them. The results of the movement proved to be
lasting, and were, in his opinion, wholly good. His own
congregation profited greatly by it, and on the Sunday before
one of the Wallace Green Communions, in 1874, a great company
of young men and women were received into the fellowship of
the Church. The catechumens filled several rows of pews in
the front of the spacious area of the building, and, when
they rose in a body to make profession of their faith, the
scene is described as having been most impressive. Specially
impressive also must have sounded the words which he always
used on such occasions: “You have to-day fulfilled your
baptism vow by taking upon yourselves the responsibilities
hitherto discharged by your parents. It is an act second only
in importance to the private surrender of your souls to God,
and not inferior in result to your final enrolment among the
saints…. Nothing must separate you from the Church militant
till you reach the Church triumphant.”

CHAPTER IX

THE PROFESSOR

It had all along been felt that Dr. Cairns must sooner or
later find scope for his special powers and acquirements in a
professor’s chair. In the early years of his ministry he
received no fewer than four offers of philosophical
professorships, which his views of the ministry and of his
consecration to it constrained him to set aside. Three
similar offers of theological chairs, the acceptance of which
did not involve the same interference with the plan of his
life, came to him later, but were declined on other grounds.
When, however, a vacancy in the Theological Hall of his own
Church occurred by the death of Professor Lindsay, in 1866,
the universal opinion in the Church was that it must be
filled by him and by nobody else. Dr. Lindsay had been
Professor of Exegesis, but the United Presbyterian Synod in
May 1867 provided for this subject being dealt with
otherwise, and instituted a new chair of Apologetics with a
special view to Dr. Cairns’s recognised field of study. To
this chair the Synod summoned him by acclamation, and, having
accepted its call, he began his new work in the following
August.

As in his own student days, the Hall met for only two months
in each year, and the professors therefore did not need to
give up their ministerial charges. So he remained in Berwick,
where his congregation were very proud of the new honour that
had come to their minister, and that was in some degree
reflected on them. Instead of “the Doctor” they now spoke of
him habitually as “the Professor,” and presented him with a
finely befrogged but somewhat irrelevant professor’s gown for
use in the pulpit at Wallace Green.

Dr. Cairns prepared two courses of lectures for his
students—one on the History of Apologetics, and the
other on Apologetics proper, or Christian Evidences. For the
former, his desire to go to the sources and to take nothing
at second-hand led him to make a renewed and laborious study
of the Fathers, who were already, to a far greater extent
than with most theologians, his familiar friends. His
knowledge of later controversies, such as that with the
Deists, which afterwards bore fruit in his work on “Unbelief
in the Eighteenth Century,” was also widened and deepened at
this time. These historical lectures were almost overweighted
by the learning which he thus accumulated; but they were at
once massive in their structure and orderly and lucid in
their arrangement.

In the other course, on Christian Evidences, he did not
include any discussion on Theism which—probably because
of his special familiarity with the Deistical and kindred
controversies, and also because the modern assaults on
supernatural Christianity from the Evolutionary and Agnostic
standpoint had not yet become pressing—he postulated.
And, discarding the traditional division of the Evidences
into Internal and External, he classified them according to
their relation to the different Attributes of God, as
manifesting His Power, Knowledge, Wisdom, Holiness, and
Benignity. With this course he incorporated large parts of
his unfinished treatise on “The Difficulties of
Christianity,” which, after he had thus broken it up, passed
finally out of sight.

The impression which he produced on his students by these
lectures, and still more by his personality, was very great.
“I suppose,” writes one of them, “no men are so hypercritical
as students after they have been four or five years at the
University. To those who are aware of this, it will give the
most accurate impression of our feeling towards Dr. Cairns
when I say that, with regard to him, criticism could not be
said to exist. We all had for him an appreciation which was
far deeper than ordinary admiration; it was admiration
blended with loyalty and veneration.”16 Specially impressive were the humility
which went along with his gifts and learning, and the wide
charity which made him see good in everything. One student’s
appreciation of this latter quality found whimsical
expression in a cartoon which was delightedly passed from
hand to hand in the class, and which represented Dr. Cairns
cordially shaking hands with the Devil. A “balloon” issuing
from his mouth enclosed some such legend as this: “I hope you
are very well, sir. I am delighted to make your acquaintance,
and to find that you are not nearly so black as you are
painted.”

During the ten years’ negotiations for Union a considerable
number of pressing reforms in the United Presbyterian Church
were kept back from fear of hampering the negotiations, and
because it was felt that such matters might well be postponed
to be dealt with in a United Church. But, when the
negotiations were broken off, the United Presbyterians,
having recovered their liberty of action, at once began to
set their house in order. One of the first matters thus taken
up was the question of Theological Education. As has been
already mentioned, the theological curriculum extended over
five sessions of two months. It was now proposed to
substitute for this a curriculum extending over three
sessions of five months, as being more in accordance with the
requirements of the times and as bringing the Hall into line
with the Universities and the Free Church Colleges. A scheme,
of which this was the leading feature, was finally adopted by
the Synod in May 1875. It necessarily involved the separation
of the professors from their charges, and accordingly the
Synod addressed a call to Dr. Cairns to leave Berwick and
become Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics in
the newly constituted Hall, or, as it was henceforth to be
designated—”College.” In this chair it was proposed
that he should have as his colleague the venerable Dr.
Harper, who was the senior professor in the old Hall, and who
was now appointed the first Principal of the new College.

Dr. Cairns had thus to make his choice between his
congregation and his professorship, and, with many natural
regrets, he decided in favour of the latter. This decision,
which he announced to his people towards the close of the
summer, had the incidental effect of keeping him in the
United Presbyterian Church, for in the following year the
English congregations of that Church were severed from the
parent body to form part of the new Presbyterian Church of
England; and Wallace Green congregation, somewhat against its
will, and largely in response to Dr. Cairns’s wishes, went
with the rest. He had still a year to spend in Berwick,
broken only by the last session of the old Hall in August and
September, and that year he spent in quiet, steady, and happy
work. In June 1876 he preached his farewell sermon to an
immense and deeply moved congregation from the words (Rom. i.
16), “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the
power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth.”
“For more than thirty years,” he concluded, “I have preached
this gospel among you, and I bless His name this day that to
not a few it has by His grace proved the power of God unto
salvation. To Him I ascribe all the praise; and I would
rather on such an occasion remember defects and shortcomings
than dwell even upon what He has wrought for us. The sadness
of parting from people to whom I have been bound by such
close and tender ties, from whom I have received every mark
of respect, affection, and encouragement, and in regard to
whom I feel moved to say, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let
my right hand forget her cunning,’ inclines me rather to
self-examination and to serious fear lest any among you
should have suffered through my failure to set forth and urge
home this gospel of salvation. If then any of you should be
in this case, through my fault or your own, that you have not
yet obeyed the gospel of Christ, I address to you in Christ’s
name one parting call that you may at length receive the
truth.”

A few weeks later he and his sister removed to Edinburgh,
where they were joined in the autumn by their brother
William. William Cairns, who had been schoolmaster at
Oldcambus for thirty-two years, was in many respects a
notable man. Deprived, as we have seen, in early manhood of
the power of walking, he had set himself to improve his mind
and had acquired a great store of general information. He was
shrewd, humorous, genial, and intensely human, and had made
himself the centre of a large circle of friends, many of whom
were to be found far beyond the bounds of his native parish
and county. Since his mother’s death an elder sister had kept
house for him, but she had died in the previous winter, and
at his brother’s urgent request he had consented to give up
his school al Oldcambus and make his home for the future with
him in Edinburgh. The house No. 10 Spence Street, in which
for sixteen years the brothers and sister lived together, is
a modest semi-detached villa in a short street running off
the Dalkeith Road, in one of the southern suburbs of the
city. It had two great advantages in Dr. Cairns’s
eyes—one being that it was far enough away from the
College to ensure that he would have a good walk every day in
going there and back; and the other, that its internal
arrangements were very convenient for his brother finding his
way in his wheel-chair about it, and out of it when he so
desired.

The study, as at Berwick, was upstairs, and was a large
lightsome room, from which a view of the Craigmillar woods,
North Berwick Law, and even the distant Lammermoors, could be
obtained—a view which was, alas! soon blocked up by the
erection of tall buildings. At the back of the house,
downstairs, was the sitting-room, where the family meals were
taken and where William sat working at his desk. He had been
fortunate enough to secure, almost immediately after his
arrival in Edinburgh, a commission from Messrs. A. & C.
Black to prepare the Index to the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, then in course of
publication. During the twelve years that the work lasted he
performed the possibly unique feat of reading through the
whole of the twenty-five volumes of the Encyclopaedia, and
thus added considerably to his already encyclopaedic stock of
miscellaneous information. Opening off the sitting-room was a
smaller room, or rather a large closet, commanding one of the
finest views in Edinburgh of the lion-shaped Arthur’s Seat;
and here of an evening he would sit in his chair alone, or
surrounded by the friends who soon began to gather about him,

Sometimes a more than usually resounding peal of laughter
would bring the professor down from his study to find out
what was the matter, and to join in the merriment; and then,
after a few hearty words of greeting to the visitors, he
would plead the pressure of his work and return to the
company of Justin or Evagrius.

His three nephews, who during the Edinburgh period were
staying in town studying for the ministry, always spent
Saturday afternoon at Spence Street, and sometimes a student
friend would come with them. Dr. Cairns was usually free on
such occasions to devote an hour or two to his young friends.
He was always ready to enter into discussions on
philosophical problems that happened to be interesting them,
and the power and ease with which he dealt with these gave an
impression as of one heaving up and pitching about huge
masses of rock. His part in these discussions commonly in the
end became a monologue, which he delivered lying back in his
chair, with his shoulders resting on the top bar of it, and
which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar jerk of his
right arm habitual to him in preaching. A snell remark
of his brother William suggesting some new and comic
association with a philosophic term dropped in the course of
the discussion, would bring him back with a roar of laughter
to the actual world and to more sublunary themes. When the
young men rose to leave he always accompanied them to the
front door, and bade each of them good-bye with a hearty
“Πáντα τà
καλá σοι
γéνοιτο,”
17 [Greek: Panta ta kala soi
genoito] and an invariable injunction to “put your foot on
it,”—”it” being the spring catch by which the gate
was opened.

Once a week during the session a party of six or eight
students came to tea at Spence Street, until the whole of his
two classes had been gone over. After tea in the otherwise
seldom used dining-room of the house, some of the party
accompanied the professor to the study. Here he would show
them his more treasured volumes, such as his first edition of
Butler, which he would tell them he made a point of reading
through once a year. Others, who preferred a less unclouded
atmosphere, withdrew with his brother into his sanctum. Soon
all reassembled in the dining-room, and a number of hymns
were sung—some of Sankey’s, which were then in
everybody’s mouth, some of his favourite German hymns with
their chorals, which might suggest references to his student
days in Berlin or to later experiences in the Fatherland, and
some by the great English hymn-writers. At last came family
worship, always impressive as conducted by him, but often the
most memorable feature by far in these gatherings. It was a
very simple, and may seem a very humdrum, way of spending an
evening; but the homely hospitality of the
household—the conversational gifts, very different in
kind as these were, of himself and his brother—and,
above all, his genial and benignant presence, made everything
go off well, and the students went away with a deepened
veneration for their professor now that they had seen him in
his own house.

During his first two years in Edinburgh he was busily engaged
in writing lectures and in adapting his existing stock to the
requirements of the new curriculum. Of these lectures, and of
others which he wrote in later years, it must be said that,
while all of them were the fruit of conscientious and
strenuous toil, they were of unequal merit, or at least of
unequal effectiveness. Some of them, particularly in his
Apologetic courses, were brilliant and stimulating. Whenever
he had a great personality to deal with, such as Origen,
Grotius, or Pascal, or, in a quite different way, Voltaire,
he rose to the full height of his powers. His criticisms of
Hume, of Strauss, and of Renan, were also in their own way
masterly. But a course which he had on Biblical Theology
seemed to be hampered by a too rigid view of Inspiration,
which did not allow him to lay sufficient stress on the
different types of doctrine corresponding to the different
individualities of the writers. And when, after the death of
Principal Harper, he took over the entire department of
Systematic Theology, his lectures on this, the “Queen of
sciences,” while full of learning and sometimes rising to
grandeur, gave one on the whole a sense of incompleteness,
even of fragmentariness. This impression was deepened by the
oral examinations which he was in the habit of holding every
week on his lectures.

For these examinations he prepared most carefully, sitting up
sometimes till two o’clock in the morning collecting material
and verifying references which he deemed necessary to make
them complete. His aim in them was not only to test the
students’ attention and progress, but to communicate
information of a supplementary and miscellaneous character
which he had been unable to work into his lectures. And so he
would bring down to the class a tattered Father or two, and
would regale its members with long Greek quotations and with
a mass of details that were pure gold to him but were hid
treasure to them. His examination of individual students was
lenient in the extreme. It used to be said of him that if he
asked a question to which the correct answer was Yes, while
the answer he got was No, he would exert his ingenuity to
show that in a certain subtle and hitherto unsuspected sense
the real answer was No, and that Mr. So-and-so
deserved credit for having discovered this, and for having
boldly dared to say No at the risk of being
misunderstood. This, of course, is caricature; but it
nevertheless sufficiently indicates his general attitude to
his students.

It was the same with the written as with the oral
examinations. In these he assigned full marks to a large
proportion of the papers sent in. Once it was represented to
him that this method of valuation prevented his examination
results from having any influence on the adjudication of a
prize that was given every year to the student who had the
highest aggregate of marks in all the classes. He admitted
the justice of this contention, and promised to make a
change. When he announced the results of his next examination
it was found that he had been as good as his word; but the
change consisted in this: that whereas formerly two-thirds of
the class had received full marks, now two-thirds of the
class received ninety per cent.!

And yet the popular idea of his inability to distinguish
between a good student and a bad one was quite wrong. He was
not so simple as he seemed. All who have sat in his classroom
remember times when a sudden keen look from him showed that
he knew quite well when liberties were being attempted with
him, and gave rise to the uncomfortable suspicion that, as it
was put, “he could see more things with his eyes shut than
most men could see with theirs wide open.” The fact is, that
all his leniency with his students, and all his apparent
ascription to them of a high degree of diligence,
scholarship, and mental grasp, had their roots not in
credulity but in charity—the charity which “believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” His very
defects came from an excess of charity, and one loved him all
the better because of them. Hence it came about that his
students got far more from contact with his personality than
they got from his teaching. It is not so much his lectures as
his influence that they look back to and that they feel is
affecting them still.

When Dr. Cairns came to Edinburgh from Berwick, it was only
to a limited extent that he allowed himself to take part in
public work outside that which came to him as a minister and
Professor of Theology. There were, however, two public
questions which interested him deeply, and the solution of
which he did what he could by speech and influence to
further. One of these was the question of Temperance. During
the first twenty years of his ministry he had not felt called
upon to take up any strong position on this question,
although personally he had always been one of the most
abstemious of men. But about the year 1864 he had, without
taking any pledge or enrolling himself on the books of any
society, given up the use of alcohol. He had done so largely
as an experiment—to see whether his influence would
thereby be strengthened with those in his own congregation
and beyond it whom he wished to reclaim from intemperance.

When he became a professor he was invited to succeed Dr.
Lindsay as President of the Students’ Total Abstinence
Society, and, as no absolute pledge was exacted from the
members, he willingly agreed to do so. From this time his
influence was more and more definitely enlisted on behalf of
Total Abstinence, and in 1874 he took a further step. In
trying to save from intemperance a friend in Berwick who was
not a member of his own congregation, he urged him to join
the Good Templars, at that time the only available society of
total abstainers in the town. In order to strengthen his
friend’s hands, he agreed to join along with him. This step
happily proved to be successful as regarded its original
purpose, and Dr. Cairns remained a Good Templar during the
rest of his life.

While there were some things about the Order that did not
appeal to him, such as the ritual, the “regalia,” and the
various grades of membership and of office, with their
mysterious initials, he looked upon these things as
non-essentials, and was in hearty sympathy with its general
principles and work. But, although he was often urged to do
so, he never would accept office nor advance beyond the
initiatory stage of membership represented by the simple
white “bib” of infancy. On coming to Edinburgh, he looked
about for a Lodge to connect himself with, and ultimately
chose one of the smallest and most obscure in the city. The
members consisted chiefly of men and women who had to work so
late that the hour of meeting could not be fixed earlier than
9 p.m. He was present at these meetings as often as he could,
and only lamented that he could not attend more frequently.

While fully recognising the right of others to come to a
different conclusion from his own, and while uniformly basing
his total abstinence on the ground of Christian expediency
and not on that of absolute Divine law, his view of it as a
Christian duty grew clearer every year. And he carried his
principles out rigidly wherever he went. He perplexed German
waiters by his elaborate explanations as to why he drank no
beer; and once, as he came down the Rhine, he had a
characteristically sanguine vision of the time when the
vineyards on its banks would only be used for the production
of raisins. At the same time his interest in Temperance work,
alike in its religious, social, and political aspects, was
always becoming keener. He was frequently to be found on
Temperance platforms, and was in constant request for the
preaching of Temperance sermons. Some of his speeches and
sermons on the question have been reprinted and widely read,
and one New Year’s tract which he wrote has had a circulation
of one hundred and eighty thousand.

The other question in which he took a special interest was
that of Disestablishment. To those who adopted the “short and
easy method” of accounting for the Disestablishment movement
in Scotland by saying that it was all due to jealousy and
spite on the part of its promoters, his adhesion to that
movement presented a serious difficulty. For no one could
accuse him of jealousy or spite. Hence it was a favourite
expedient to represent him as the tool of more designing
men—as one whose simplicity had been imposed upon, and
who had been thrust forward against his better judgment to do
work in which he had no heart. This theory is not only
entirely groundless, but entirely unnecessary; because the
action which he took on this question can readily be
explained by a reference to convictions he had held all his
life, and to circumstances which seemed to him to call for
their assertion.

He had been a Voluntary ever since he had begun to think on
such questions. His father, in the days of his boyhood, had
subscribed, along with a neighbour, for the Voluntary
Church Magazine, and the subject had often been discussed
in the cottage at Dunglass. It will be remembered that during
his first session at the University he was an eager disputant
with his classmates on the Voluntary side, and that towards
the close of his course, after a memorable debate in the
Diagnostic Society, he secured a victory for the policy of
severing the connection between Church and State. These views
he had never abandoned, and in a lecture on Disestablishment
delivered in Edinburgh in 1872 he re-stated them. While
admitting, as the United Presbyterian Synod had done in
adopting the “Articles of Agreement,” that the State ought to
frame its policy on Christian lines, he denied that it was
its duty or within its competence to establish and endow the
Church. This is, to quote his own words, “an overstraining of
its province,—a forgetfulness that its great work is
civil and not spiritual,—and an encroachment without
necessity or call, and indeed, as I believe, in the face of
direct Divine arrangements, on the work of the Christian
Church.”

These, then, being his views, what led him to seek to make
them operative by taking part in a Disestablishment campaign?
Two things especially. One of these was the activity at that
time of a Broad Church party within the Established Church.
He maintained that this was no mere domestic concern of that
Church, and claimed the right as a citizen to deal with it.
In a national institution views were held and taught of which
he could not approve, and which he considered compromised him
as a member of the nation. He felt he must protest, and he
protested thus.

The other ground of his action was the conviction, which
recent events had very much strengthened, that the continued
existence of an Established Church was the great obstacle to
Presbyterian Union in Scotland. It is true that there was
nothing in the nature of things to prevent the Free and
United Presbyterian Churches coming together in presence of
an Established Church. As a matter of fact, they have done so
since Dr. Cairns’s death, though not without secessions,
collective and individual. But experience had shown that it
was the existence of an Established Church, towards which the
Anti-Union party had turned longing eyes, which was the
determining factor in the wrecking of the Union negotiations.
Besides, Dr. Cairns looked forward to a wider Union than one
merely between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, and
he was convinced that only on the basis of Disestablishment
could such a Union take place. To the argument that, if the
Church of Scotland were to be disestablished, its members
would be so embittered against those who had brought this
about that they would decline to unite with them, he was
content to reply that that might safely be left to the
healing power of time. The petulant threat of some, that in
the event of Disestablishment they would abandon
Presbyterianism, he absolutely declined to notice.

The Disestablishment movement had been begun before Dr.
Cairns left Berwick, and he supported it with voice and pen
till the close of his life. He did so, it need not be said,
without bitterness, endeavouring to make it clear that his
quarrel was with the adjective and not with the
substantive—with the “Established” and not with the
“Church,” and under the strong conviction that he was engaged
“in a great Christian enterprise.”

CHAPTER X

THE PRINCIPAL

During 1877 and 1878 the United Presbyterian Church was much
occupied with a discussion that had arisen in regard to its
relation to the “Subordinate Standards,” i.e. to the
Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and
Shorter Catechisms. These formed the official creed of
the Church, and assent to them was exacted from all its
ministers, probationers, and elders. A change of opinion,
perhaps not so much regarding the doctrines set forth in
these documents as regarding the perspective in which they
were to be viewed, had been manifesting itself with the
changing times. It was felt that standards of belief drawn up
in view of the needs, reflecting the thought, and couched in
the language of the seventeenth century, were not an adequate
expression of the faith of the Church in the nineteenth
century. The points with regard to which this difficulty was
more acutely felt were chiefly in the region of the
“Doctrines of Grace”—the Divine Decrees, the Freedom of
the Human Will, and the Extent of the Atonement. Accordingly,
a movement for greater liberty was set on foot.

There were many, of course, in the Church who had no sympathy
with this movement, and who, if they had been properly
organised and led, might have been able to defeat it. But the
recognised and trusted leaders of the Church were of opinion
that the matter must be sympathetically dealt with, and, on
the motion of Principal Harper, the Synod of 1877 appointed a
Committee to consider it, and to bring up a report. This
Committee, of which Dr. Cairns was one of the conveners, soon
found that, if relief were to be granted, they had only two
alternatives before them. They must deal either with the
Creed or with the terms of subscription to it. There were
some who urged that an entirely new and much shorter Creed
should be drawn up. Dr. Cairns was decidedly opposed to this
proposal. The subject of the Creeds of the Reformed Churches
was one of his many specialties in the field of Church
History, and he had a reverence for those venerable
documents, whose articles—so dry and formal to
others—suggested to his imagination the centuries of
momentous controversy which they summed up, and the great
champions of the faith who had borne their part therein.
Besides, he was very much alive to the danger of falling out
of line with the other Presbyterian Churches in Great Britain
and America, who still maintained, in some form or other,
their allegiance to the Westminster Standards.

His influence prevailed, and the second alternative was
adopted. A “Declaratory Statement” was drawn up of the sense
in which, while retaining the Standards, the Church
understood them. This Statement dealt with the points above
referred to in a way that would, it was thought, give
sufficient relief to consciences that had shrunk from the
naked rigour of the words of the Confession, It also
contained a paragraph which secured liberty of opinion on
matters “not entering into the substance of the faith,” the
right of the Church to guard against abuse of this liberty
being expressly reserved. Dr. Cairns submitted this
“Declaratory Statement” to the Synods of 1878 and 1879, in
speeches of notable power and wealth of historic
illustration, and, in the latter year, it was unanimously
adopted and became a “Declaratory Act.” The precedent thus
set has been followed by nearly all the Presbyterian Churches
which have since then had occasion to deal with the same
problem.

Except when he had to expound and recommend some scheme for
which he had become responsible, or when he had been laid
hold of by others to speak in behalf of a “Report” or a
proposal in which they were interested, Dr. Cairns did not
intervene often in the debates of the United Presbyterian
Synod. He preferred, to the disappointment of many of his
friends, to listen rather than to speak, and shrank from
putting himself in any way forward. He had been Moderator of
the Synod in 1872, and as an ex-Moderator he had the
privilege, accorded by custom, of sitting on the platform of
the Synod Hall on the benches to the right and left of the
chair. But he never seemed comfortable up there. He would sit
with his hands pressed together, and in a stooping posture,
as if he wanted to make his big body as small and
inconspicuous as possible; and, as often as he could, he
would go down and take his place among the rank and file of
the members far back in the hall. But he had all a true
United Presbyterian’s loyal affection for the Synod, and a
peculiar delight in those reunions of old friends which its
meetings afforded. Amongst his oldest friends was William
Graham, who although, since the English Union, no longer a
United Presbyterian, simply could not keep away from the
haunts of his youth when the month of May came round. On such
occasions he was always Dr. Cairns’s guest at Spence Street.
He kept things lively there with his nimble wit, and in
particular subjected his host to a perpetual and merciless
fire of “chaff.” No one else ventured to assail him as Graham
thus did; for, with all his geniality and unaffected
humility, there was a certain personal dignity about him
which few ventured to invade. But he took all his friend’s
banter with a smile of quiet enjoyment, and sometimes a more
than usually outrageous sally would send him into convulsions
of laughter, whose resounding peals filled the house with
their echoes.

In the spring of 1879 died the venerable Principal Harper.
Dr. Cairns felt the loss very keenly, for Dr. Harper had been
a loyal and generous friend and colleague, on whose clear and
firm judgment he had been wont to rely in many a difficult
emergency. Besides, as his biographer has truly said, “he was
habitually thankful to have someone near him whom he could
fairly ask to take the foremost place.”18 Now that Dr. Harper was gone, there seemed
to be no doubt that that foremost place would be thrust upon
him. These expectations were fulfilled by the Synod of that
year, which unanimously and enthusiastically appointed him
Principal of the College. His friend Dr. Graham, who, as a
corresponding member from the Synod of the Presbyterian
Church of England, supported the appointment, gave voice to
the universal feeling when he described him as “a man of
thought and labour and love and God, who had one defect which
endeared him to them all—that he was the only man who
did not know what a rare and noble man he was.”

In the following year (1880) Principal Cairns delivered the
Cunningham Lectures. These lectures were given on a Free
Church foundation, instituted in memory of the distinguished
theologian whose name it bears; and now for the first time
the lecturer was chosen from beyond the borders of the Free
Church. Dr. Cairns highly appreciated the compliment that was
thus paid him, regarding it as a happy augury of the Union
which he was sure was coming. He had chosen as his subject
“Unbelief in the eighteenth century as contrasted with its
earlier and later history”; and, although it was one in which
he was already at home, he had again worked over the familiar
ground with characteristic diligence and thoroughness. Thus,
in preparing for one of the lectures, he read through twenty
volumes of Voltaire, out of a set of fifty which had been put
at his disposal by a friend. The first lecture dealt with
Unbelief in the first four centuries, which he contrasted in
several respects with that of the eighteenth. Then followed
one on the Unbelief of the seventeenth century, then three on
the Unbelief of the eighteenth century, in England, France,
and Germany respectively; and, finally, one on the Unbelief
of the nineteenth century, from whose representatives he
selected three for special criticism as typical, viz.
Strauss, Renan, and John Stuart Mill. These lectures, while
not rising to the level of greatness, impress one with his
mastery of the immense literature of the subject, and are
characterised throughout by lucidity of arrangement and by
sobriety and fairness of judgment. They were very well
received when they were delivered, and were favourably
reviewed when they were published a year later.19

Between the delivery and the publication of the Cunningham
Lectures Dr. Cairns spent five months in the United States
and Canada. The immediate object of this American tour was to
fulfil an engagement to be present at the Philadelphia
meeting of the General Council of the Presbyterian
Alliance—an organisation in which he took the deepest
interest, as it was in the line of his early aspirations
after a great comprehensive Presbyterian Union. But he
arranged his tour so as to enable him also to be present at
the General Assembly of the American Presbyterian Church at
Madison, and at that of the Presbyterian Church of Canada at
Montreal. The rest of the time at his disposal he spent in
lengthened excursions to various scenes of interest. He
visited the historic localities of New England and crossed
the continent to San Francisco, stopping on the way at Salt
Lake City, and extending his journey to the Yo-Semite Valley.
More than once he went far out of his way to seek out an old
friend or the relative of some member of his Berwick
congregation. Wherever he went he preached,—in fact
every Sunday of these five months, including those he spent
on the Atlantic, was thus occupied,—and everywhere his
preaching and his personality made a deep impression. As
regarded himself, he used to say that this American visit
“lifted him out of many ruts” and gave him new views of the
vitality of Christianity and new hopes for its future
developments.

After the publication of the Cunningham Lectures there was a
widely cherished hope that Dr. Cairns would produce something
still more worthy of his powers and his reputation. He was
now free from the incessant engagements of an active
ministry, and he had by this time got his class lectures well
in hand. But, although the opportunity had come, the interest
in speculative questions had sensibly declined. There is an
indication of this in the Cunningham Lectures themselves. In
the last of these, as we have seen, he had selected Mill as
the representative of English nineteenth-century Unbelief.
Even then Mill was out of date; but Mill was the last British
thinker whose system he had thoroughly mastered. In the index
to his Life and Letters the names of Darwin and
Herbert Spencer do not occur, and even in an Apologetic tract
entitled Is the Evolution of Christianity from mere
Natural Sources Credible? which he wrote in 1887 for the
Religious Tract Society, there is no reference whatever to
any writer of the Evolutionary School. With his attitude to
later German theological literature it is somewhat different,
for here he tried to keep himself abreast of the times. Yet
even here the books that interested him most were mainly
historical, such as the first volume of Ritschl’s great work
on Justification (almost the only German book he read in a
translation), and the three volumes of Harnack’s History
of Dogma.

This decay of interest in speculative thought might be
attributed to the decline of mental freshness and of
hospitality to new ideas which often comes with advancing
years, were it not that, in his case, there was no such
decline. On the contrary, as his interest in speculative
thought gradually withered, his interest on the side of
scholarship and linguistics became greater than ever, and his
energy here was always seeking new outlets for itself. When
he was nearly sixty he began the study of Assyrian. He did so
in connection with his lectures on Apologetics,—because
he wanted to give his class some idea of the confirmation of
the Scripture records, which he believed were to be found in
the cuneiform inscriptions. But ere long the study took
possession of him. His letters, and the little time-table
diary of his daily studies, record the hours he devoted to
it. When he went to America he took his Assyrian books with
him, and pored over them on the voyage whenever the Atlantic
would allow him to do so. And he was fully convinced that
what interested him so intensely must interest his students
too. One of them, the Rev. J.H. Leckie, thus describes how he
sought to make them share in his enthusiasm:—

“One day when we came down to the class, we found the
blackboard covered with an Assyrian inscription written out
by himself before lecture hour, and the zest, the joy with
which he discoursed upon the strange figures and signs showed
that, though white of hair and bent in frame, he was in the
real nature of him very young. For two days he lectured on
this inscription with the most assured belief that we were
following every word, and there was deep regret in his face
and in his voice when he said, ‘And now, gentlemen, I am
afraid we must return to our theology.'”20

Another of his students, referring to the same lectures,
writes as follows:—

“It was fine, and one loves him all the more for it, but it
was exasperating too, with such tremendous issues at stake in
the world of living thought, to see him pounding away at
those truculent old Red Indians in their barbarian original
tongue. Yet I would not for much forget those days when we
saw him escaping utterly from all worries and troubles and
perfectly happy before a blackboard covered with amazing
characters. It was pure innocent delight in a new world of
knowledge, like a child’s in a new story-book.”

When he was sixty-three he added Arabic to his other
acquirements. It is not quite clear whether he had in view
any purpose in connection with his professional work beyond
the desire to know the originals of all the authorities
quoted in his lectures. But, when he had sufficiently
mastered the language to be able to read the Koran, he knew
that he had two grounds for self-congratulation, and these
were sufficiently characteristic. One was that he had his
revenge on Gibbon, who had described so triumphantly the
career of the Saracens and who yet had not known a word of
their language. The other was that he was now able to pray in
Arabic for the conversion of the Mohammedans.

About the same time he began to learn Dutch. He assigned as
one reason for this that he wanted to read Kuenen’s works.
But as the only one of these that he had was in his library
already, having come to him from the effects of a deceased
friend, it is possible that this was just an unconscious
excuse on his part for indulging in the luxury of learning a
new language—that he read Kuenen in order to learn
Dutch, instead of learning Dutch in order to read Kuenen.
However, his knowledge of the language enabled him to follow
closely a movement which excited his interest in no common
degree, viz. the secession of a large evangelical party from
the rationalistic State Church of Holland, under Abraham
Kuyper, the present Prime Minister of that country, and their
organisation into a Free Presbyterian Church.

Other languages at which he worked during this period were
Spanish, of which he acquired the rudiments during his tour
in California; and Dano-Norwegian, which he picked up during
a month’s residence at Christiania in 1877, and furbished for
a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Copenhagen in 1884.
All this time he was pursuing his Patristic and other
historical studies with unflagging vigour, always writing new
lectures, always maintaining his love of abstract knowledge
and his eager desire to add to his already vast stores of
learning. When, a year and a half before his death, a vacancy
occurred in the Church History chair in the College, he
stepped into the breach and delivered a course of lectures on
the Fathers, which took his class by storm.

“His manner,” says one who heard these lectures, “was quite
different in the Church History classroom from what it was in
that of Systematic Theology. In the latter he taught like a
man who felt wearied and old; but in the former he showed a
surprising freshness and enthusiasm. It was delightful to see
him in the Church History class forgetting age and care, and
away back in spirit with Origen and his other old friends.”

These lectures, while abounding in searching and masterly
criticism of doctrinal views, are specially noticeable for
their delineation of the living power of Christianity as
exhibited in the men and the times with which they deal. This
was the aspect of Christian truth which had all along
attracted him. It was what had determined his choice of the
ministry as the main work of his life, and in his later years
it still asserted its power over him. Although he had now no
longer a ministerial charge of his own, he could not separate
himself from the active work of the Church—he could not
withdraw from contact with the Christian life which it
manifested.

During the winter months he preached a good deal in
Edinburgh, especially by way of helping young or weak
congregations, more than one of which he had at different
times under his immediate care until they had been lifted out
of the worst of their difficulties. In summer he ranged over
the whole United Presbyterian Church from Shetland to
Galloway, preaching to great gatherings wherever he went. In
arranging these expeditions, he always gave the preference to
those applications which came to him from poor, outlying, and
sparsely peopled districts, where discouragements were
greatest and the struggle to “maintain ordinances” was most
severe. His visits helped to lift the burden from many a
weary back, and never failed to leave happy and inspiring
memories behind them. Among these summer engagements he
always kept a place for his old congregation at Berwick,
which he regularly visited in the month of June, preaching
twice in the church on Sunday, and finishing the day’s work
by preaching again from the steps of the Town Hall in the
evening. On these occasions the broad High Street, at the
foot of which the Town Hall stands, was always crowded from
side to side and a long way up its course, while all the
windows within earshot were thrown open and filled with eager
listeners.

In this continual pursuit of knowledge, and in the
contemplation, whether in history or in the world around him,
of Christianity as a Life, his main interests more and more
lay. In the one we can trace the influence of Hamilton, in
the other perhaps that of Neander—the two teachers of
his youth who had most deeply impressed him. Relatively to
these, Systematic Theology, and even Apologetics, receded
into the background. Secure in his “aliquid
inconcussum,” he came increasingly to regard the life of
the individual Christian and the collective life of the
Church as the most convincing of all witnesses to the Unseen
and the Supernatural.

Meanwhile the apologetic of his own life was becoming ever
more impressive. In the years 1886 and 1887 he lost by death
several of his dearest friends. In the former year died Dr.
W.B. Robertson of Irvine; and, later, Dr. John Ker, who had
been his fellow-student at the University and at the Divinity
Hall, his neighbour at Alnwick in the early Berwick days, and
at last his colleague as a professor in the United
Presbyterian College. In the early part of the following year
his youngest sister, Agnes, who with her husband, the Rev.
J.C. Meiklejohn, had come to live in Edinburgh two years
before for the better treatment of what proved to be a mortal
disease, passed away. And in the autumn he lost the last and
the dearest of the friends that had been left to him in these
later years, William Graham. These losses brought him yet
closer than he had been before to the unseen and eternal
world.

He was habitually reticent about his inner life and his
habits of devotion. No one knew his times of prayer or how
long they lasted. Once, indeed, his simplicity of character
betrayed him in regard to this matter. The door of his
retiring-room at the College was without a key, and he would
not give so much trouble as to ask for one. So, in order that
he might be quite undisturbed, he piled up some forms and
chairs against the door on the inside, forgetting entirely
that the upper part of it was obscure glass and that his
barricade was perfectly visible from without. It need not be
said that no one interrupted him or interfered with his
belief that he had been unobserved by any human eye. But it
did not require an accidental disclosure like this to reveal
the fact that he spent much time in prayer. No one who knew
him ever so little could doubt this, and no one could hear
him praying in public without feeling sure that he had
learned how to do it by long experience in the school of
private devotion.

Purified thus by trial and nourished by prayer, his character
went on developing and deepening. His humility, utterly
unaffected, like everything else about him, became if
possible more marked. He was not merely willing to take the
lowest room, but far happiest when he was allowed to take it.
In one of his classes there was a blind student, and, when a
written examination came on, the question arose, How was he
to take part in it? Principal Cairns offered to write down
the answers to the examination questions to his student’s
dictation, and it was only after lengthened argument and
extreme reluctance on his part that he was led to see that
the authorities would not consent to this arrangement.

It was the same with his charity. He was always putting
favourable constructions on people’s motives and believing
good things of them, even when other people could find very
little ground for doing so. In all sincerity he would carry
this sometimes to amusing lengths. Reference has been made to
this already, but the following further illustration of it
may be added here. One day, when in company with a friend,
the conversation turned on a meeting at which Dr. Cairns had
recently been present. At this meeting there was a large
array of speakers, and a time limit had to be imposed to
allow all of them to be heard. One of the speakers, however,
when arrested by the chairman’s bell, appealed to the
audience, with whom he was getting on extremely well, for
more time. Encouraged by their applause, he went on and
finished his speech, with the result that some of his
fellow-speakers who had come long distances to address the
meeting were crushed into a corner, if not crowded out. Dr.
Cairns somehow suspected that his friend was going to say
something strong about this speaker’s conduct, and, before a
word could be spoken, rushed to his defence. “He couldn’t
help himself. He was at the mercy of that shouting
audience—a most unmannerly mob!” And then, feeling that
he had rather overshot the mark, he added in a parenthetic
murmur, “Excellent Christian people they were, no doubt!”

But not the least noticeable thing about him remains to be
mentioned—the persistent hopefulness of his outlook.
This became always more pronounced as he grew older. Others,
when they saw the advancing forces of evil, might tremble for
the Ark of God; but he saw no occasion for trembling, and he
declined to do so. He was sure that the great struggle that
was going on was bound sooner or later, and rather sooner
than later, to issue in victory for the cause he loved. And
although his great knowledge of the past, and his enthusiasm
for the great men who had lived in it, might have been
expected to draw his eyes to it with regretful longing, he
liked much better to look forward than to look back, using as
he did so the words of a favourite motto; “The best is yet to
be.”

All these qualities found expression in a speech he delivered
on the occasion of the presentation of his portrait to the
United Presbyterian Synod in May 1888. This portrait had been
subscribed for by the ministers and laymen of the Church, and
painted by Mr. W.E. Lockhart, R.S.A. The presentation took
place in a crowded house, and amid a scene of enthusiasm
which no one who witnessed it can ever forget. Principal
Cairns concluded a brief address thus: “I have now preached
for forty-three years and have been a Professor of Theology
for more than twenty, and I find every year how much grander
the gospel of the grace of God becomes, and how much deeper,
vaster, and more unsearchable the riches of Christ, which it
is the function of theology to explore. I have had in this
and in other churches a band of ministerial brethren, older
and younger, with whom it has been a life-long privilege to
be associated; and in the professors a body of colleagues so
generous and loving that greater harmony could not be
conceived. The congregations to which I have preached have
far overpaid my labours; and the students whom I have taught
have given me more lessons than many books. I have been
allowed many opportunities of mingling with Christians of
other lands, and have learned, I trust, something more of the
unity in diversity of the creed, ‘I believe in the Holy
Catholic Church.’ In that true Church, founded on Christ’s
sacrifice and washed in His blood, cheered by its glorious
memories and filled with its immortal hopes, I desire to live
and die. Life and labour cannot last long with me; but I
would seek to work to the end for Christian truth, for
Christian missions, and for Christian union. Amidst so many
undeserved favours, I would still thank God and take courage,
and under the weight of all anxieties and failures, and the
shadows of separation from loved friends, I would repeat the
confession, which, by the grace of God, time only confirms:
‘In Te, Domine, speravi; non confundar in aeternum.'”

CHAPTER XI

THE END OF THE DAY

In May 1891 the report of an inquiry which had been
instituted in the previous year into the working of the
United Presbyterian College was submitted to the Synod. The
portion of it which referred to Principal Cairns’s
department, and which was enthusiastically approved,
concluded as follows: “The Committee would only add that the
whole present inquiry has deepened its sense of the immense
value of the services of Dr. Cairns to the College, both as
Professor and as Principal, and expresses the hope that he
may be long spared to adorn the institution of which he is
the honoured head, and the Church of which he is so
distinguished a representative.” The hope thus expressed was
not to be fulfilled.

The specially heavy work of the preceding session—the
session in which, as already described, he had undertaken
part of the work of the Church History class in addition to
the full tale of his own—had overtaxed his strength,
and, acting on the advice of Dr. Maclagan and his Edinburgh
medical adviser, he had cancelled all his engagements for the
summer. Almost immediately after the close of the Synod an
old ailment which he had contracted by over-exertion during a
holiday tour in Wales reappeared, and yielded only partially
to surgical treatment. But he maintained his cheerfulness,
and neither he nor his friends had any thought that his work
was done. In the month of July he paid a visit to his brother
David at Stitchel. He had opened his brother’s new church
there thirteen years before, and it had come to be a standing
engagement, looked forward to by very many in the district,
that he should conduct special services every year on the
anniversary of that occasion. But these annual visits were
very brief, and they were broken into not only by the duties
of the Sunday, but by the hospitalities usual in country
manses at such times. This time, however, there were no
anniversary sermons to be preached; he had come for rest, and
there was no need for him to hasten his departure. The
weather was lovely, and so were the views over the wide
valley of the Tweed to the distant Cheviots. He would sit for
hours reading under the great elm-tree in the garden amid the
scents of the summer flowers. “I have come in to tell you,”
he said one day to his sister-in-law, “that this is a day
which has wandered out of Paradise.” “We younger people,”
wrote his niece, “came nearer to him than ever before. He was
as happy as a child, rejoicing with every increase of
strength. He greatly enjoyed my brother Willie’s singing,
especially songs like Sheriff Nicolson’s ‘Skye’ and Shairp’s
‘Bush aboon Traquair.’ We were astonished to find how
familiar he was with all sorts of queer out-of-the-way
ballads. Never had we seen him so free from care, so genial
and even jubilant.”21 The summer
Sacrament took place while he was at Stitchel, and he was
able to give a brief address to the communicants from the
words, “Ye do shew forth the Lord’s death till He come,” in a
voice that was weak and tremulous, but all the more
impressive on that account. One of his brother’s elders, a
farmer in the neighbourhood whom he had known since his
schooldays, had arranged that he should address his
work-people in the farmhouse, and to this quiet rural
gathering he preached what proved to be his last sermon.

He himself, however, had no idea that this was the case; and
when he left Stitchel he did so with the purpose of preparing
for the work of another session. But as the autumn advanced
and his health did not greatly improve, another consultation
of his doctors was held, the result of which was that he was
pronounced to be suffering from cardiac weakness, and quite
unfit for the work of the coming winter. He at once
acquiesced in this verdict, and, with unabated cheerfulness,
set himself to bring his lectures into a state that would
admit of their being easily read to his classes by two
friends who had undertaken this duty. This done, he wrote out
in full the Greek texts—some five hundred in
all—quoted in his lectures on Biblical Theology. These
two tasks kept him busy until about the end of the year 1891,
when he began an undertaking which many of his friends had
long been urging upon him—the preparation of a volume
of his sermons for the press. He selected for this purpose
those sermons which he had preached most frequently, and
which he had, with few exceptions, originally written for
sacramental occasions at Berwick—some of them far back
in the old Golden Square days. These he carefully
transcribed, altering them where he thought this necessary,
and not always, in the opinion of many, improving them in the
process.

He found that his strength was not unduly strained when he
worked thus six or seven hours a day. But he always, as
hitherto, spent one hour daily in reading the Scriptures in
the original tongues, in which time he could get through
three pages of Hebrew and an indefinite quantity of Greek.
There was, however, one change in his habits which had become
necessary. He was forbidden by the doctors to study at night.
And so, instead of going upstairs in the evening, he remained
in the comfortable parlour, where he wrote his letters,
talked to his brother and sister, or to visitors as they came
in, and regaled himself with light literature. This last
consisted sometimes of volumes of the Fathers, but more
frequently of the Koran in the original. He would frequently
read aloud extracts, translating from the Greek and Latin
without ever pausing for a word; as regards the Arabic, he
had Sale’s translation at hand to help him through a tough
passage, but he was always a very proud man when he could
find his way out of a difficulty without its aid.

As the winter advanced he felt that it was desirable that he
should have another medical opinion, so that, in the event of
his further incapacity, the Synod at its approaching meeting
might make permanent arrangements for carrying on the work of
his chair. On the 19th of February he was examined by Drs.
Maclagan, Webster, and G.W. Balfour, who certified that he
was “unfit for the discharge of any professional duty.” After
consulting his relatives, he decided to resign his
Professorship and the Principalship of the College, and on
the 23rd a letter intimating this intention was drafted and
despatched. The committee to which it was sent received it
with great regret, and a unanimous feeling found expression
that, at anyrate, he should retain the office of Principal.
This was echoed from every part of the United Presbyterian
Church as soon as the news of his contemplated resignation
became known; and in a wider circle adequate utterance was
given to the public sympathy and regard.

On the 3rd of March he was able to preside at the annual
conversazione of his students, when he was in such genial
spirits, and seemed to be so well, that humorous references
were made by more than one speaker to his approaching
resignation as clearly unnecessary, and indeed preposterous.
On the following Saturday he travelled to Galashiels to
attend the funeral of his cousin John Murray, whose room he
had shared during his first session at the University, and in
his prayer at the funeral service he referred in touching
terms to the close of their life-long friendship. Returning
to Edinburgh, he went to stay till Monday with an old friend,
whose house afforded him facilities for attending the
communion service at Broughton Place Church next day. For
although this church, which he had attended as a student, and
of which he had been a member since he came to live in
Edinburgh, was more than two miles distant from Spence
Street, his Puritan training and convictions with regard to
the Sabbath would never allow him to go to it in a cab.

On reaching home next week he resumed his work of
transcription, and went on with it till Thursday, when, after
taking a short walk, he became somewhat unwell. Next day he
felt better, and did some writing in the forenoon; but in the
afternoon the illness returned, and he went to bed. In the
early hours of next morning, Saturday 12th March, his sister,
who was watching beside him, saw that a change was coming,
and summoned Mr. and Mrs. David Cairns, who had fortunately
arrived the evening before. His brother William, on account
of his bodily infirmity, remained below. The end was
evidently near, but he was conscious at intervals, and his
voice when he spoke was clear and firm. “You are very ill,
John,” said his brother. “Oh no,” he replied, “I feel much
better.” “But you are in good hands?” “Yes, in the best of
hands.” Then his mind began to wander, and he spoke more
brokenly: “There is a great battle to fight, but the victory
is sure … God in Christ … Good men must unite and
identify themselves with the cause.” “What cause?” asked his
brother. “The cause of God,” he replied. “If they do so, the
victory is sure; otherwise, all is confusion … I have
stated the matter; I leave it with you.” Then, after a short
pause, he suddenly said, “You go first, I follow.” These
eminently characteristic words were the last he spoke, and as
David knelt and prayed at his bedside death came.

The impression produced on the public mind by his life and
character, and called into vivid consciousness by the news of
his death, found memorable expression on his funeral day,
Thursday 17th March. It had been the original intention of
his relatives that the funeral arrangements should be carried
out as simply as possible, with a service in Rosehall Church,
which was close at hand, for those who desired to attend it,
and thereafter a quiet walk down to Echo Bank Cemetery, where
he was to rest beside his sister Agnes. It was thought that
this would be most in accordance with his characteristic
humility and shrinking from all that savoured of display. But
the public feeling refused to be satisfied with this idea,
and the relatives gave way.

The Synod Hall of the United Presbyterian Church, to which
the coffin had been removed in the early part of the day, and
which holds three thousand, was crowded to its utmost
capacity. The Moderator of Synod presided, and beside him on
the platform were the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council
of the city, the Principal and Professors of the University,
the Principal and Professors of the New College, and many
other dignitaries. In the body of the hall were seated, row
behind row, the members of the United Presbyterian Synod, who
had come from all parts of the country, drawn by affection as
well as veneration for him of whom their Church had been so
proud. Along with them was a very large number of ministers
of the other Scottish Churches, and representatives of public
bodies. The galleries were thronged with the general public.
The brief service was of that simple and moving kind with
which Presbyterian Scotland is wont to commemorate her dead.
There was no funeral oration, and the prayers, which were led
by Dr. Macgregor, the Moderator of the Established Church
General Assembly, by Principal Rainy, and by Dr. Andrew
Thomson, while full of the sense of personal loss, gave
expression to the deep thankfulness felt by all present that
such a life had been lived, and lived for so long, among
them. One incident created a deep impression. After the
coffin had been removed, the various representative bodies
successively left the hall to take their places in the
procession that was being marshalled without. “Wallace Green
Church, Berwick” was called. Then a great company of men rose
to their feet, showing that, after an absence of sixteen
years, their old minister still retained his hold on the
affections of the people among whom he had lived and worked
so long.

Outside the hall the scenes were even more impressive, and
were declared by those whose memories went back for half a
century to have been unparalleled in Edinburgh since the
funeral of Dr. Chalmers, in 1847. Along the whole of the
three miles between the Synod Hall and Echo Bank Cemetery
traffic was suspended, flags were at half-mast, and all the
shops were closed. As the procession, which was itself fully
a mile in length, made its slow way along, the crowds which
lined the pavements, filled the windows, and covered the tops
of the arrested tramway cars, reverently saluted the coffin.
When the gates of the University were passed, not a few
thought of the time, more than fifty-seven years before, when
he who was now being borne to his grave amid such great
demonstrations of public homage, came up a shy, awkward
country lad to begin within these walls the life of strenuous
toil that had now closed. How much had passed since then! How
great was the contrast between the two scenes! A little
later, when the procession passed down the Dalkeith Road,
everyone turned instinctively to the house in Spence Street,
where he had lived his simple and godly life, unconscious
that the eyes of men were upon him. As the afternoon shadows
were lengthening he was laid in his grave; and many of those
who stood near felt that a great blank had come into their
lives, and that Scotland and the Church were the poorer for
the loss of him who had followed his Master in simplicity of
heart and had counted cheap those honours which the world so
greatly desires.22

It is difficult to count up the gains and losses of a life.
He had great gifts,—gifts of abstract thinking and
writing, powers of scholarly research and continuous
labour,—but his life had followed another path
determined by his early choice. Was this choice a wise one?
It is difficult to say. But two things seem clear. One is
that he never appears to have regretted it. At the public
service in the Synod Hall, Principal Rainy gave thanks for
“those seventy-four years of happy life.” These words are
entirely true. His life was an exceptionally happy one. This
surely means a great deal. If he had missed his true
vocation, he could not have had this happiness.

The second noticeable point is, that his choice made the
influence of his personality strong throughout Scotland. He
seems to have recognised that his true home lay in the region
of Christian faith and works, in the great common life of the
Church; and so he made his appeal, not to the limited number
of those who could read a learned theological treatise which
the changing fortunes of the battle with Unbelief might soon
have put out of date, but to the common heart of the whole
Church. That great assemblage from all parts of the country
on his funeral day was the response to this appeal, and the
best answer to the question as to whether he had erred in the
choice of a calling and wasted his powers. Waste there
undoubtedly was. In every life this cannot but be so, for a
man must limit himself; but, if it be for a high end, the
renunciation will be blessed with some fruit of good. And so,
although the memory and the name of John Cairns may become
fainter as the years and generations pass, his influence will
live on in the Christian Church, to whose ideal of goodness
he brought the contribution of his character.

Footnotes

1 Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton, p. 231.

2 Fragments of College and Pastoral Life, pp.
24-25.

3 Life and Letters, pp. 94-95.

4 It would appear that it was not an uncommon custom
in Scotland in former times to have family worship
immediately after a death. Perhaps, too, this verse from the
107th Psalm was the one usually sung on such occasions. There
may be a reminiscence of this, due to its author’s Seceder
training, in a passage in Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell,
where, after describing the Protector’s death, and the grief
of his daughter Lady Fauconberg, he goes on to say, “Husht
poor weeping Mary! Here is a Life-battle right nobly done.
Seest thou not

5 Afterwards author of a learned but fantastic
Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. Biesenthal had an
enthusiastic reverence for what in the hands of others were
the dry details of Hebrew Grammar. “Herr Doctor,” a dense
pupil once asked him, “ought there not to be a Daghesh in
that Tau?” “God forbid!” was the horrified reply.

6 Some words are very hard to pronounce with a burr in
one’s throat. Dr. Cairns used to tell that on one occasion,
long after he had got well used to the sound of the Berwick
speech, he was under the belief that a man with whom he was
conversing was talking about a boy until he discovered
from the context that his theme was a brewery.

7 Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton, pp. 299-301.

8 Macmillan’s Magazine, December 1864, p. 139.

9 Recent British Philosophy, pp. 265-66.

10 See above, pp. 44-45.

11 Life and Letters, p. 307.

12 Fragments of College and Pastoral Life, pp.
38-40.

13 Life and Letters, p. 295.

14 His eldest brother, Thomas, had died from the
effects of an accident in 1856.

15 In accordance with the old Scottish custom, Dr.
Cairns wore gloves during the “preliminary exercises,” but
took them off before beginning the sermon. On the Sunday
after a funeral he discarded his Geneva gown in the forenoon,
and, as a mark of respect to the deceased, wore over his
swallow-tail coat the huge black silk sash which it was then
customary in Berwick to send to the minister on such
occasions.

16 Life and Letters, p. 560.

17 “All fair things be thine.”

18 Life and Letters, p. 661.

19 In the following year (1882) he received the degree
of LL.D. from Edinburgh University.

20 Life and Letters, p. 743.

21 Life and Letters, p, 769.

22 Six years later the sister who had so long lived
with him was laid in the same grave. William Cairns sleeps
with his kindred in Cockburnspath churchyard.