“Set Free,” by Rev. Dr. Norman MacLean.
In the course of this year there has appeared a book bearing the above title, by Dr. Norman MacLean, Minister-emeritus of St. Cuthbert’s Church of Scotland, Edinburgh, and a native of Skye. This book, in spite of its many remotely related digressions, is written in a very fascinating style and gives a very graphic description of conditions in the Island of Skye during the author’s boyhood and early manhood, when he was parish minister of Waternish in that island. Of particular interest to Free Presbyterians is the very clear statement which he gives of the reason why their Church took up a separate position in 1893, and his pen-portrait of the late Rev. Donald Macfarlane, Dingwall, as he was seen and heard by him, at a service conducted on a hillside in Braes, and at another one conducted in the Parish Church in Waternish, kindly given for the occasion by Dr. MacLean himself, all of which are faithful in all their details. This has caused it to find its way into many Free Presbyterian homes where, otherwise, it would never have entered. Throughout the book, however, there are liberal doses of that anti-Calvinism which is the very antithesis of the doctrines for which the Free Presbyterian Church stood in 1893, and for which it still stands, and we consider it our duty to warn our people not to swallow the poison pill though sugar-coated in the way above indicated.
Dr. MacLean begins his crusade against Calvinism badly by maintaining that the reason why almost all his boyish friends were unbaptized was that they could give no proofs to Rev. Roderick MacLeod, Snizort, “that either they or their parents were of the elect.” Any person who knows anything of the controversy over baptism in Skye in which Mr. MacLeod was so deeply involved can testify to the fact that the whole root of the trouble was Mr. MacLeod’s conscientiousness in exercising the discipline of the Church, and that that discipline touched some who thought themselves “above the common.” We are afraid that this romance about the baptism controversy in Skye had its origin in the Celtic imagination of Dr. MacLeod as had also that other one about the Skye patriarchs arguing the doctrine of election round the peat-fires and depicting the elect as finding “the bliss of heaven intensified for them by having a look now and then at the everlasting torments of the damned in the unquenchable flames of hell.” Further, it is a travesty of the preaching of the gospel, as that was known in evangelical circles in Skye in common with the rest of Scotland, to say “Look unto Me all ye ends of the earth and be saved,” became with them, “Look unto me all ye elect.” Surely Dr. MacLean has forgotten that, during the Marrow Controversy, it was the party in the Church of Scotland, in connection with which in later times his whole ministry was associated, who sternly set their face against the “free offer of the gospel.” Dr. MacLean gives us a proof of what that party was like in his own day when he tells us that at his licensing the Presbytery did not give him a word of advice, did not engage in prayer nor read even a single verse of Scripture. We need no further evidence as to who were destitute of the full-orbed gospel. It was this same party who were in power years earlier in Skye when Dr. MacLean refers to the conversion of Blind Donald Munro as the result of “the wave of Puritanism” crossing the Kyle. Munro was not catechist at Snizort at the time, as is stated, but at Portree, and
Dr. MacLean conveniently ignores the well-known fact that when he burned his fiddle the dominant party in the Church deprived him of his salary as catechist. This is the result of a fanaticism far worse than he could ever lay to the charge of Puritanism.
It would take up too much space to point out the many ways in which the book under review bristles with statements which show the writer’s antagonism to Calvinism, but, be it remembered, that Calvinism is only the doctrines of the Bible systematised, and that the Creed of the Church of Scotland was Calvinistic in its best days. This makes it all the more lamentable that one of Dr. MacLean’s sentiments should, as he informs us, begin his ministry in the smallest congregation of that Church and end it in the largest congregation, but, in a generation of small men, this may account for his reputation for greatness. However, he dwarfs into insignificance when compared with such intellectual giants as the great Puritan, Dr. John Owen, Dr. Chalmers, Principal Cunningham, the Hodges and Alexanders of Princeton, and a host of others too numerous to be named, who were doughty champions of Calvinism and firm believers in the doctrine of election. When such a galaxy of talented and gracious men can be named as strictly Calvinistic in their beliefs it will not make any difference with those who love the Scriptures though Dr. MacLean should brand Calvinism and Puritanism as evil, for in his writings, a sample of which is in the book before us, they see nothing but the fruitless efforts of a man who is swelling with indignation at the chimera of his own imagination. A seasonable advice to Free Presbyterians and others is, “Be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Ephesians iv. 14).—John Colquhoun.