Norman Macleod. John Wellwood
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in his grandiose way: ‘The best, the holiest feelings of our Scottish patriarchs, by lordly oppressors, sitting in state and judgment, were barbarously scorned.’
After the French Revolution the awakening of man’s spirit, extending from letters and politics to religion, led in Scotland to the rise of the Evangelical party. They had lofty notions of ecclesiastical authority, and manifested their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose holiness was qualified by originality, such as Macleod Campbell, whom they incontinently deposed. But, for all that, they were the best of the clergy, because they were in vital earnest with the highest things.
What was their policy on the question of intrusion? In some way it should prevent the patron from thrusting in a minister against the will of the congregation. The General Assembly of 1834, the first in which the Evangelicals outnumbered the Moderates, conferred upon the majority of heads of families (being communicants) the right of vetoing, without assigning reasons, the settlement of a presentee. Now it is conceivable that one might be eager for reform, and yet disapprove of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stop intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it would have led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees on trivial and absurd pretexts, rejection for rejection’s sake. Popular election entails complete responsibility, but when men have to take their ministers from a patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another without saying why, they will be apt to use their licence to make up for their slavery. This were hardly worth remarking but for the assumption, conveyed in many an oration, that the policy was as admirable as the principle which it embodied. Let the non-intrusionists have all the praise of meeting, in some sort, the just claim of the people.
The General Assembly, however, had gone beyond its powers. Both the House of Lords and the Court of Session pronounced the Veto Law to be ultra vires, the judges holding that the presbytery was bound to take on trials any presentee to whom there was no objection on the ground of morals, scholarship, or doctrine. Notwithstanding this, the General Assembly stuck to the veto. So there would be rejected presentees demanding, in accordance with the law, to be taken on trials, and presbyteries at their wits’ end, pulled one way by the General Assembly, and another way by the civil Court. The General Assembly ordered the presbytery of Strathbogie not to take on trials a certain presentee who had been vetoed. The presbytery obeyed. But the Court of Session declared the order of the General Assembly to be illegal. Thereupon the presbytery, by a majority of seven, admitted the presentee. For that the seven were deposed. And now came the event which was the cause of the Disruption. The minority in the General Assembly, failing to see how it could be rebellion to obey the law of the land, treated the deposition of these men as null and void. The question then was, which of the two sides was the Church of Scotland? Parliament, all the time, was trying to reconcile parties by changes in the law, but as it always insisted on making the presbytery the final judge of the fitness of presentees, the non-intrusionists would not hear of legislation.
It was not till near the end of the struggle that the minister of Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The thunder of the captains and the shouting had been long in his ears without stirring him to action. He was all in his vocation, the cure of souls,—the mystery of existence ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and death, or remembered his days upon the hills. ‘I wished,’ he said, ‘to keep out of this row, and to do my Master’s work and will in my dear, dear parish.’ Some clerics are listless in religion; but when a question of church politics is raised, alert as a horse at the sound of the trumpet. Macleod hated controversy, and said it was the worst way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he might have sung, ‘How happy could I be with neither!’ In him the opposing types were blended; he had all the humanism which marked the one,—the love of letters, the relish of things, the superiority to clerical prejudice,—with all the zeal of the other for the cause of the gospel. But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred ‘the cold gentlemanly Moderate’ to ‘the loud-speaking high professor.’ And the non-intrusionists were claiming to be the only true Christian ministers in the land, nay more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared that they were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes of the Moderate clergy, and preached, telling the people that now, for the first time, the gospel was in their ears. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ they said, ‘will have left the Church when we go.’ In a pamphlet written by Macleod, ‘A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk,’ which had a large sale, Saunders observes: ‘I ken mony that are foremost eneuch in this steer that in my opinion hae little o’ the meekness and gentleness o’ Christ.’ He must have been thinking of the minister who said that ‘the devil was preparing a cradle in hell for the opposition.’ Everything in the popular cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ‘earthly, sensual, devilish’; vox populi, vox Dei, and no mistake. The struggle against the civil courts was ‘one of the most illustrious conflicts for the spirituality and liberty of the Church of Christ of which any record can be found either in modern or in ancient times.’ What Macleod could least endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper. They insisted on remaining in an Established Church, while flying in the face of the law by which it was established. The Headship of Christ was bound up with the resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an order of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh.
As for patronage, Macleod was probably willing that it should be abolished altogether, but he could not support the veto in defiance of the declared law of the Church. ‘I’m desperate keen for gude reform,’ says Saunders again, ‘and would like the folk to hae mair poo’er, but I would like to get it in a legal way.’ Macleod believed that the Establishment was necessary for the religious welfare of the country, and saw nothing that was worth the risk of its existence. Not till it became evident that the non-intrusionists were bent on destroying the Church did he join in the conflict. ‘It will be our bounden duty,’ one of the leaders had said, ‘to use every effort that if we be driven out, they shall be driven out too; it is our bounden duty to bear this testimony that the Church ought to be established on the principles which we are contending for, or that there should be no establishment in the land at all.’ When things like that were being said, Macleod, in alarm, plunged into the whole literature of the controversy. The position he reached was this, that when there was a dispute as to the privileges granted by the State to the Church, it was for the civil court to interpret the terms of the contract. He became one of the Forty, a set of Independents, whose chief distinction is that they promoted parliamentary legislation for the reform of patronage. While opposed to the revolutionary policy, they were not Moderates, for they countenanced some of the acts of the majority. They were as little for Erastus as for Hildebrand.
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