ON the occasion of the recent decision by Sheriff Campbell, Portree, in the Glendale case, the Scotsman, following a long, bad record, took occasion to write a bitter leading article on Highland religion. It began badly by quoting a paragraph from Robert Louis Stevenson, in which refined feeling was conspicuous by its absence, as if any opinion from such a quarter on religious matters were worth a moment’s thought. And it ended as badly by appealing to Dr. Marcus Dods. The writer could scarcely have gone to a worse source to set off the gloom and bigotry of Highland religion against the bright effulgence of Lowland latitudinarianism in matters religious. Rarely within recent times has the religious public been presented with a more hopeless outlook than is given in Dr. Dod’s recently published letters. The funereal gloom that hangs like a dismal pall over this Southerner’s religion is as forbidding and as repulsive as anything that ever had birth in the most bigoted parts of the Highlands.
The Scotsman, for some reason or other, has always had an unaccountable propensity to tilt against evangelical religion. On its staff there has been a set of writers who have been affected towards it in the same foolish way that a bull is by a red rag. Once or twice, for some unaccountable reason, our premier newspaper gave the weight of its influence to that same Highland religion which now, in its satiric indignation, it condemns; but it must have been owing to a kind of mental aberration. This was notably the case on the decision of the House of Lords, when it took the side of the weak against the strong. Its stinging articles against the United Free Church were keenly and bitterly resented. Leading men in the U.F. Church made up their minds to crush the power they could not conciliate. And they were successful in pulling the fang of the aggressor in an incredibly short time. A boycott ensued, the revenue of the Scotsman went seriously down, and the great journal, knowing nothing in this case of that
Loyalty which is still the same,
Whether it won or lose the game,
True as the dial to the sun,
Though it be not shone upon,
very discreetly, for financial reasons, ignominiously capitulated to the pressure of the monetary screw that was so tightly and unpleasantly applied. The United Free Church has had a more pleasant time since, and Highland religion is now the red rag. Buckle, it is said, was surprised to find in Scotland so much conservatism in religion and so much liberalism in politics; but if he were alive to-day the problem that would present itself to him would be the narrow, and at times intensely bigoted, conservatism of the Scotsman in politics and its latitudinarianism in religion.
The leader-writer of the article under notice would be well met by some modern Dr. Johnson, who would candidly tell him, as that worthy did the minister of Harris—a moderate as cold and as dry as would satisfy the Scotsman itself:—”Sir, you are a bigot to laxness.”
What, then, has the leader-writer of the Scotsman to say about Highland religion? It is briefly this: when sectarianism, as he terms it, broke up Presbyterianism in the Highlands, the victory was attained by laying waste all the pleasant places of the people’s life. Poetry, music, and legends have survived only in the Roman Catholic districts. Such a charge is a slander on our common Protestantism, which has done so much to dispel the Egyptian darkness of the North of Scotland. No Protestant worthy of the name and in possession of the real facts would so belittle himself as to utter such a charge. It is not our purpose to enter into the question of Gaelic literature: that was very ably done by letters written to the Editor, in which the leader-writer comes off very badly, revealing to unbiased minds that he is quite at sea on matters upon which he had been descanting with oracular dogmatism. To shed tears over the disappearance of the folk songs and legends of the Highlands may be considered an evidence of culture of an advanced type, but fortunately neither Highland religion nor any religion worthy of the name ever regarded such possessions as a necessary indication of a people’s highest moral and spiritual advancement. The very fact that these features have still a place in the Roman Catholic districts is proof positive that they are more in keeping with a religion in which superstition and ignorance have a prominent place. And to bring a railing charge against evangelical religion simply because it did much to root out such a state of things betrays a mind incapable of realising what is really worthy of and essential for a people’s progress. The intellectual and moral worth of the Highlander would not suffer one iota though all his folk-songs and legends were blotted out forever. What, after all, are these legends? Pagan ideas handed down from the dim ages—mere superstitious notions, fantastic and forbidding, peopling every glen, loch, and mountain with mysterious and impossible beings. For the wiping out of these we are called upon to shed tears and bemoan the Protestantism that helped to render their continuance impossible. We will reserve our tears for more serious matters, and if the Scotsman is so hurt on this score, let it weep.
The high praise given to the Roman Catholic population of the Highlands reveals something of the character of the writer. It was not the priests of the Church of Rome or the clergy of the Episcopal Church that wrought the salvation of the Highlands. It was that evangelical religion, blessed by God, which is evidently so distasteful to the Scotsman, preached by such men as Alexander Munro, Thomas Hog, Æneas Sage, Lachlan Mackenzie, Alexander Pope, and others, who fought a hard fight with superstition, ignorance, and savagery. No one acquainted with the condition of things existing in the Highlands during Roman Catholic and Episcopal times will ever be such a traitor to his country as to wish a return to such things. The Privy Council Records, the post-Revolution Acts of the General Assembly, the ecclesiastical documents of the North, all tell a sad tale of the Highlands when poetry, music, and legends had a prominent place in the life of the people. But let us hear Macaulay’s description of the state of matters:—”In many dwellings,” he says, “the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of his hosts would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodgings would sometimes have been in a hut, of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper, grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen, half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch.” That is a dark and repulsive picture, but a picture showing the state of things existing when music and legend had prominent places in the life of the people. Will the Scotsman writer, sitting in his cosy study, be bold enough to say that the religion that changed such a state of things, though it did away with the songs and legends, was a calamity?
But if Macaulay’s picture loses its effect by its very repulsiveness, let us appeal to Dr. Cunningham, of St. Andrews, whose Moderatism is irreproachable, and who had what the leader-writer of the Scotsman has not—a fair acquaintance with the ecclesiastical history of his country. What has he to say to the golden age when Roman Catholicism held sway in the Highlands? “The Church now began,” he says, writing under the year 1703, “to open its eyes to a fact which had escaped its observation during the conflicts—the triumphs and defeats of last century. There were considerable districts of the country upon which the Reformation had never dawned. There were glens in the Highlands where Popish and even Pagan rites were still practised; there were isles amid the Hebrides which had never been trodden by a Protestant missionary. The Assembly addressed itself to the subject with praiseworthy alacrity. . . . It ordered Presbyteries to make returns of all the Papists living within their bounds. . . . In South Uist and Barra, out of fifteen hundred examinable persons, only seventeen were Protestants. In the islands of Canna, Rum, and Muck, out of five hundred examinable persons, only about forty were Protestants. In Knoydart and Morar, out of seven hundred, all were Popish but four. In Arisaig, Moydart, and Glengarry, there was a population of fifteen hundred, and all were Papists but one man. In these districts there was no distinction between Saturday and Sabbath; the thick darkness of a state not much above heathenism was unbroken” (Church History of Scotland, ii. 331). For deliverance from this lamentable state of things the Scotsman writer sighs. We pity the state of mind which, in the name of broad-minded enlightenment, is capable of delighting in a state of things bordering on pagan darkness.
We leave the subject with the hint to the Scotsman that it may find employment for its satiric pen much nearer home than Glendale or the Highlands. There are matters happening in the name of religion at its own doors that would be none the worse of a redding up, and perhaps evidence of a little more Christian charity in its leader columns might convince its readers that it was practising what it so glibly preaches to others. Then, too, even benighted Highland ecclesiastics might feel that the Scotsman writers were making a noble attempt to square “their hiprlin’ practice an’ their creed.” D. B.