By D. HAY FLEMING, LL.D.
At a Conference arranged by the Western Committee of the Scottish Reformation Society, and convened at Glasgow on the 23rd September, the following address was delivered:—
In the Church of Rome, Protestantism has an enemy, sleepless, watchful, alert, remorseless, and unscrupulous. She seldom, if ever, misses an opportunity of self-advertising, and in that advertising is not ashamed to claim what is not her due. Of this phase of innate impudence, she gave a striking illustration at Whithorn, barely five weeks ago, when, according to “The Dumfries and Galloway Standard,” “bishops and other dignitaries of the Church walked in solemn procession garbed in the picturesque robes peculiar to their various offices. In the van of the procession was a richly bejewelled cross, inset into which were relics of the bodies of Scotland’s patron saints, St Andrew and St Margaret.” “A special place of prominence was allotted to a gorgeously wrought banner of silk embroidered in pure gold;” and which bore, inter alia, the words, “St Ninian, Apostle of Galloway, pray for us.” “Solemn high mass in honour of St Ninian was sung by the combined choirs.” It is rather remarkable that from her countless repositories she did not produce, for the occasion, a tooth or a toe of St Ninian, or at least a morsel of his gown. The prayers of such a relic might have been fervently invoked by such pious devotees.1
The saint is believed to have been born about the year 350, and to have died about 432; but the dates are uncertain. The first historian who mentions him is Bede, and Bede was not born until 240 years after the reputed date of Ninian’s death. As Hill Burton has said:—”There is only a gulf between the narrator and his facts; and it is only an exceptional respect for Bede, as an extremely honest narrator with a strong sagacity for finding historical truth, that will induce one in this instance to relax the usual canons of historical evidence, and believe that Bede had reason for what he says about St Ninian’s ministrations in Scotland.”2 It is in his brief account of the coming of Columba to the Northern Picts that Bede interjects the statement that the southern Picts “had long before (as is reported) forsaken the errors of idolatry, and embraced the truth, by the preaching of the Word by Ninias, a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome in the faith and mysteries of the truth; whose episcopal see and church, named after St Martin the bishop (wherein he and many other saints rest in the body) is at this time in the possession of the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians, and is generally called the White House, because he there built a church of stone, which was not usual among the Britons.”3 The “Catholic Encyclopedia” (xi. 84) acknowledges that “the facts given in this passage form practically all we know of St Ninian’s life and work;” and that “his work among the southern Picts seems to have had but a short-lived success. St Patrick, in his epistle to Coroticus, terms the Picts ‘apostates,’ and references to Ninian’s converts having abandoned Christianity are found in the lives of Saints Columba and Kentigern.”
The life of Ninian compiled, four centuries after Bede’s death, by Ailred, Abbot of Rievaux, in Yorkshire, supplies many details; but Bishop Forbes, with every wish to deal fairly with it, was amply justified in pronouncing it to be “almost worthless as a historical tract.”4 Some of its marvellous miracles are obviously inventions. Needless to say, Dr M’Carthy, the Popish Bishop of Galloway, in addressing the pilgrims, numbering nearly a thousand, did not confine his account of Ninian and his labours to Bede’s modest dimensions.
If it were possible to interview Ninian, by wireless or otherwise, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that he would approve of the recent pilgrimage, procession, and mass in his honour, or that he would own the apostate Church of Rome as the Church of Christ. There is good reason to infer that he would promptly disown and refuse to recognise Dr M’Carthy as being in any sense his successor. The late Bishop Dowden pointed out that, in Ninian’s time, “there was perhaps no Church in Christendom more free from doctrinal corruptions than the Church of Rome,” and that its Bishops “had not then put forward the monstrous pretensions to universal jurisdiction that appear in latter days, nor had the doctrines which they inculcated yet taken the unscriptural and uncatholic shapes that some of them assumed in mediaeval times.”5
There were no pilgrimages in the Apostolic Church, and, after they came into vogue, it was found that, sometimes at least, they led to immorality. Lecky says:—”The evil reputation of pilgrimages long continued; and, in the eighth century, we find St Boniface writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, imploring the bishops to take some measures to restrain or regulate the pilgrimages of their fellow-countrywomen; for there were few towns in central Europe, on the way to Rome, where English ladies, who started as pilgrims, were not living in open prostitution.”6 With its worldly astuteness, the Church of Rome turned the craze for pilgrimage into a source of money-making; but its astuteness has sometimes met with serious drawbacks. Dean Stanley was convinced that the levity, the idleness, the dissoluteness produced by promiscuous pilgrimages, provoked that sense of just indignation, which was one of the most animating motives of the Lollards, and was one of the first causes which directly prepared the way for the Reformation.”7 The idolatry and immorality associated with pilgrimages in Scotland were trenchantly denounced by Sir David Lyndsay8; and the exposure of a fraudulent cure of blindness, at Loretto near Musselburgh, was a mental eye-opener to many9.
In 1581, the General Assembly requested Parliament to make an Act against those who went on pilgrimage, and used superstition at wells, crosses, images, or other Papistical idolatry.10 Next month Parliament enacted that none of the lieges should take part in such things. For the first offence, a landed gentleman or his wife was to be fined £100; an unlanded one, 100 merks; a yeoman, £40. For a second offence, the penalty was “deith as idolateris.”11 This severe Act did not put a stop to the superstitious practices. Probably, it was not enforced. At any rate, thirty-five years later, the General Assembly had still to lament the “great abuse in peiple passing to pilgrimages, to wells, to trees, and to auld chappells.”12 The Act of 1581 was revived, ratified, and confirmed in 170013; but both were expressly and specifically repealed in 1906, by the Statute Law Revision (Scotland) Act.
Processions like that at Whithorn are, however, still illegal. The Act of 1829, entitled “An Act for Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects” (known technically as 10 George IV. ch. 7), provides that any Roman Catholic ecclesiastic, or member of any religious order or community or society, of the Church of Rome, bound by monastic or religious vows, who exercises any of the rites or ceremonies of that religion, or wears the habits of his order, save within the usual places of worship or in private houses, shall forfeit for every such offence £50, on being convicted by due course of law. If that penalty were exacted from each of the culprits in the Whithorn display of ecclesiastical millinery, a right goodly sum would be realised.
It is reported that “there is now every prospect of the journey to Whithorn becoming as popular as the pilgrimages to Lourdes and Carfin.” Lourdes owes its origin to a girl of fourteen, described by the gushing Lasserre as “a poor, miserable object,” who could neither read nor write, who had never learned her Catechism and knew no prayers except her rosary.14 To this child, it is solemnly alleged that the Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times, in 1858, although crowds of people, who were sometimes present, neither saw the Virgin nor heard her voice. The place has since become famous for its alleged miraculous cures. Carfin, it seems, is merely an imitation Lourdes. When it can equal its Pyrenean prototype in reputed wonders, a Lasserre will doubtless arise to puff its praises.
—”The Bulwark.”
1 A pilgrim to Treves in 1891 was struck by the cry of the pilgrims—”Heilige Rock bitte fur uns,” “O Holy Coat pray for us” (“The Shrines,” by R. N. Cust, 1892, p. 71).
2 “History of Scotland,” 1876, i. 68.
3 “Church Historians of England,” i. 393.
4 “Historians of Scotland,” 1874, v. p. x.
5 “Celtic Church in Scotland,” 1894, pp. 28, 29.
6 “History of European Morals,” 1911, ii. 152.
7 “Historical Memorials of Canterbury,” ninth edition, p. 240.
8 Laing’s “Lyndsay’s Poetical Works,” iii. 29, 30, 40-42.
9 Row’s “History,” Woodrow Society, pp. 450-455.
10 “Booke of the Universal Kirk,” ii. 535, 538.
11 “Acts of Parliament,” ii. 212.
12 “Booke of the Universal Kirk,” iii. 1120.
13 “Acts of Parliament,” x. 215. Lasserre’s “Our Lady of Lourdes,” pp. 29-32.