Æt. 37.

PREPARED FOR THE DISRUPTION.

3

would follow if a rupture took place, that some doubted how he would act. In truth, the approaching cataclysm so weighed him down, in reference to its effects on his own mission, that he refrained from speech, in public, till the issue should be fairly put before him and his colleagues for decisive settlement. But not one of the clerical combatants in the thick of the fight knew its meaning, historical and spiritual, better than the missionary. His youth had been overshadowed by the "cloud of witnesses." His heroes had ever been the men of the Covenant. His hatred

was that of the patriot rather than of the priest, to the Stewarts who, down to the last act in Queen Anne's time, had robbed the Kirk and its people of spiritual freedom. He waited only for the right time, the time of duty to the Mission as well as to his principles, to declare himself with an energy and an uncompromising thoroughness, hardly equalled by the ecclesiastical leaders who headed the host of disrup tion heroes on the memorable eighteenth day of May, 1843.

But not only had the education of the Highland boy, under such a father and teacher as his, early fed his young life with the history of his Kirk, which is that of his country. In his three years' wanderings over every presbytery and almost every parish of Scotland, from the Shetland Isles to the Solway, he had become acquainted with the actual state of religious and social life in a way unknown to Chalmers or the young Guthrie, or the most experienced Lowlander of the time. To the highest test which can try a Christian or a Church, the Christ-like philanthropy of missions, he had jealously brought the Church of Scotland from 1834 to 1840, its ministers and people, its parties and their professions, its policy and aims. He thus learned, as no one else could, the wrong, religious

and political, done to the country by the dishonest legislation of Queen Anne's advisers all through the eighteenth century, even to the Reform Act in the State and the Veto Law in the Kirk. And a happy experience taught him, and Chalmers through him, that the heart of the people was sound in spite of the torpor and retrogression of a century and a quarter, that the Scotsmen of 1834-43 were the true spiritual descendants of their fathers of the first and the second Reformation. This had been his experience of the ministers of the "moderate party," who had formed the majority in the Kirk down to the year 1834 and who called in the civil courts to drive out the evangelical majority ten years after.

Dr. Duff was wont to declare that, personally, he had received everywhere at their hands the most courteous and friendly treatment, with the two exceptions of Peebles and Dunbar. Seeing that he kept his cause and himself aloof from parties, Moderates as well as Evangelicals invited him to their manses, placed their conveyances at his disposal, passed him on from presbytery to presbytery, and loyally obeyed the Assembly of 1835 in promoting meetings and subscriptions. The majority of the moderate ministers he found to be farmers and politicians, whose conversation was divided between agricultural talk and political criticism, "But," he once said, "I do not remember their volunteering any remarks on the vastly higher subject of the spiritual culture of the human mind, or the Georgics of the soul, as it might be called." In one case the moderator of the presbytery, having duly summoned a meeting on the market day, could not himself be found to preside until it was reported that he had been seen among the crowd gazing at the tricks of a vagrant mountebank. The one evangelical member of that body charged

Æt. 37.

REMINISCENCES OF THE KIRK.

5

him with the shameful forgetfulness, but the majority hushed up the proceedings at a time when the daily newspaper was unknown. In another case Dr. Duff happened to succeed, in the guest chamber of the manse, a minister who was notorious for Unitarian views. The parish was ringing with the story, how he had surprised all by first delivering a communion address surcharged with the evangelicalism of the Puritans, and then, when suddenly called to fill a vacant place in the long services, had preached a discourse of the most repulsively cold heresy. On inquiry it was discovered that he had compiled from the "Marrowmen," whom he despised, an address suited to evangelical congregations, and which alone he was wont to speak on such occasions.

But for reminiscences such as those of Dr. Duff it would be incredible to what extent not only heterodoxy but profanity, intemperance, and other immorality found a place among the moderate ministers in rural districts, especially in the Highlands and islands to which public opinion never penetrated. Many of them, among themselves, avowed theological opinions contrary to the Confession of Faith, the contract on which they claimed to hold their livings. At the upper end of a long strath in the Highlands lived a parish minister who was scarcely ever known to be sober. Business took him frequently to the other end of the valley, where he had to pass a distillery. It was the frequent sport of the owner to tempt the poor wretch, and then, placing him on his pony with his head to the tail, send him back amid the derision of the whole people, a man supporting him on either side. Another parish was a preserve of smugglers, whose rendezvous was the kirk, where the little barrels of Highland whisky were concentrated before despatch to the south. The isolated spot was the terror of the

gaugers, for whom the hardy inhabitants, banded together, were long more than a match. A new minister was presented to the parish, a man of great promise and considerable scholarship. His one weakness was a passion for the violin. Through that he fell so low, that when his parishioners assembled at the inn they sent for the minister to play to them, and even carried him off when well drunk to a house of doubtful repute where the revelry was continued. On one occasion he fell into the peat fire, where his limbs became so roasted that for six months he was laid aside and he was lamed for life. His brethren resented the scandal only by refusing to allow him to attend the presbytery dinner, and by denying him all help at communion seasons. Brooding over these insults, he resolved to adopt that form of retaliation which would be most disagreeable to colleagues some of whom differed from himself only by being greater hypocrites. He sent to the neighbouring cities for the most evangelical Gaelic ministers to assist him on fast and sacrament days. The result was that the smuggling parish became not only a new place, such as all the success of the excise could never have made it, but the centre of light to the whole presbytery. The people flocked from a great distance to hear the grand preaching in their own tongue. The drunkard's successor, appointed under the Veto Act, was a godly man, and when the disruption came the whole parish left the Established Church.

When farther north still, Dr. Duff found himself the inhabitant of a room in the manse which was curiously stained. On asking an explanation he was told that, as the most secure place, the attics had long been the storehouse of the smugglers of Hollands and small sacks of salt. So soon as the brig appeared in the harbour of Stromness, with flying colours, the minister at the beginning of the century promptly went on

Æt. 37.

ROBERT BURNS AND HIS CENSORS.

7

board. Even if the day were Sunday he would go in the face of all the people, before or after doing pulpit duty! The manse had been built for the purpose of receiving the contraband articles, which were hoisted up by a pulley swung to a hook projecting from a window in the high-pointed gable. The plaster of the roof below was saturated with salt, which appeared in moist weather.

Dr. Duff's investigations in Ayrshire found results hardly more satisfactory than in the Highlands and the Scandinavian islands. His familiarity with the poems of Robert Burns, and knowledge of the use which had been made of their finer strains by the young Hindoo reformers of Bengal, led him to make very minute inquiries of some of the older men who had had personal intercourse with the poet. They assured him that Burns was often blamed for caricaturing sacred things when, in truth, he was giving a most vivid description of sad reality. A man of Burns's pious training, knowledge of the Bible and exceeding acuteness, could not fail to be struck with the marked contrast between Christianity as expressed in the creed and in the life of a great body of the ministers and people. "Having thrown off the fear of man, and alas! to some extent the fear of God," remarked Dr. Duff, "Robert Burns satirised this state of things in their gross literality with all faithfulness. Hence not a few who were godly men declared to me their conviction that the description given in The Holy Fair' of scenes at the administration of the Lord's Supper was not exaggerated; and the same was asserted of some of what were reckoned his more objectionable minor poems. Oh! what these ministers have to answer for at the Day of Judgment. The mischief they did by lapsing into gross errors in doctrine, and more than loose practices in life, is incredible." To the end of his life