The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II: From the Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era 9780198759348, 0198759347

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THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH THEOLOGY The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I Celtic Origins to Reformed Orthodoxy The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III The Long Twentieth Century

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD PROFESSOR ALEXANDER BROADIE (University of Glasgow)

PROFESSOR STEWART J. BROWN (University of Edinburgh)

PROFESSOR SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE (University of Edinburgh)

PROFESSOR COLIN KIDD (University of St Andrews)

PROFESSOR DONALD MACLEOD (Edinburgh Theological Seminary)

PROFESSOR CHARLOTTE METHUEN (University of Glasgow)

PROFESSOR MARGO TODD (University of Pennsylvania)

PROFESSOR IAIN TORRANCE (University of Aberdeen)

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The History of Scottish Theology Volume II The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era Edited by DAVID FERGUSSON and MARK W. ELLIOTT

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948401 ISBN 978–0–19–875934–8 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements We wish to record our thanks to several people who have assisted with the production of this three-volume work. Dr Sandy Forsyth has provided valuable support with contracts, organization of conferences, and regular communication with authors. As associate editor, he has contributed much to this project and we are greatly indebted to him for his labours. Initial copy editing was undertaken by Dr Cory Brock, Revd Craig Meek, and Dr Laura Mair and indexing by Richard Brash. Three conferences were held which enabled contributors to present initial drafts of their work; these were held in 2016–17 at Princeton Theological Seminary and New College, Edinburgh with financial support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are also grateful to the members of the Editorial Advisory Board for their advice and encouragement, particularly during the early stages of the project. David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

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Contents List of Contributors

1. The Significance of the Westminster Confession Donald Macleod 2. Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Blackwell, Halyburton, and Riccaltoun Paul Helm

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3. Jonathan Edwards and his Scottish Contemporaries Jonathan Yeager

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4. Early Enlightenment Shifts: Simson, Campbell, and Leechman Christian Maurer

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5. Philosophy and Theology in the Mid-Eighteenth Century Thomas Ahnert

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6. Moderate Theology and Preaching c.1750–1800 Stewart J. Brown

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7. Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism John R. McIntosh

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8. Reformed Theology in Gaelic Women’s Poetry and Song Anne MacLeod Hill

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9. Literate Piety: John Witherspoon and James McCosh James Foster

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10. Dissenting Theology from the 1720s to the 1840s David Bebbington

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11. The Influence of the Scots Colleges in Paris, Rome, and Spain Tom McInally

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12. Catholic Thought in the Late Eighteenth Century: George Hay and John Geddes Raymond McCluskey 13. Natural and Revealed Theology in Hill and Chalmers Mark W. Elliott

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14. Theology, Slavery, and Abolition 1756–1848 Iain Whyte

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15. Scottish Literature in a Time of Change Ian Campbell

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16. The Calvinist Paradox in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison M. Jack 17. New Trends: Erskine of Linlathen, Irving, and McLeod Campbell Andrew Purves 18. Free Church Theology 1843–1900: Disruption Fathers and Believing Critics Michael Bräutigam

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19. Episcopalian Theology 1689–c.1900 Rowan Strong

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20. Scottish Theology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Andrew R. Holmes

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21. Hume amongst the Theologians David Fergusson

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22. The Borthwick Sisters: Experiential Theology and Women’s Hymnody in the Nineteenth-Century Free Church Frances M. Henderson 23. The Liturgical Revolution: Prayers, Hymns, and Stained Glass Bryan D. Spinks

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24. Biblical Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: Alexander Geddes to William Robertson Smith William Johnstone

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25. As Open as Possible: Presbyterian Modernity in Scotland’s Long Nineteenth Century William Storrar

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26. The Secession and United Presbyterian Churches Eric G. McKimmon 27. Extra-Terrestrials and the Heavens in Nineteenth-Century Theology Colin Kidd

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28. The Reception of Darwin David Fergusson

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29. Liberal, Broad Church, and Reforming Influences in the Late Nineteenth Century Finlay A. J. Macdonald

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Index of Names Index of Subjects

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List of Contributors Thomas Ahnert is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. He has published two monographs, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (2006) and The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 (2014), numerous articles and book chapters on subjects in German and British history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and several editions and translations of early modern texts. He also co-edited a volume of essays with the late Susan Manning on Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (2011). David Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling, has several times served as Visiting Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, Texas, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His publications include The Baptists in Scotland (ed., 1988), Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989), and Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (2012). His current research on Wesleyan Methodism in the Victorian period includes a case study of the Shetland Isles. Michael Bräutigam holds degrees in theology and psychology. He is an ordained minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and he currently serves as Lecturer in Theology, Church History, and Psychology at Melbourne School of Theology. He has published a monograph on the Christology of Swiss theologian Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938), available both in English (2015) and German (2017). His current research focuses on the integration of theology and psychology with a particular emphasis on Christian identity. Stewart J. Brown is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh. He has research interests in religion and the European Enlightenment, and religion, politics, and society in modern Britain, Ireland, and the Empire. His books include Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (1982), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (1997), The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–1846 (2001), and Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815–1914 (2008). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Ian Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Scottish and Victorian Literature in the University of Edinburgh, where he worked from 1964 till retirement in 2009. He remains a Teaching Fellow, and has had visiting appointments in the USA, Canada, Europe, China, and Japan. One of the senior editors of the Carlyle Letters project, he has published extensively on Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, on Victorian and modern Scottish literature, and taught Bible and Literature courses. Mark W. Elliott, formerly Professor of Historical and Biblical Theology at the University of St Andrews at St Mary’s College, School of Divinity, has been since February 2019 Professor

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of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. Glaswegian by birth, he was further educated at Oxford, Aberdeen, and Cambridge, where he wrote a PhD on The Song of Songs and Christology in the Early Church. His main focus is the relationship between biblical exegesis and Christian doctrine, both ancient and modern, but has a particular interest in Scottish theology in its international context. David Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has published Faith and Its Critics (2009), based on his Glasgow Gifford Lectures (2008). His most recent book is The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (2018). James Foster is the Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theology, and director of the Honors Program, at the University of Sioux Falls. Before coming to Sioux Falls he spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is also the editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and director of the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy. He is currently working on a book about Thomas Reid’s moral philosophy. Paul Helm is an Emeritus Professor of King’s College, London, where he served as the Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, 1993–2000. Since then he taught at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. He previously lectured in the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool (1964–93). Among his books are Eternal God (1988, second edition 2010), and John Calvin’s Ideas (2004). Frances M. Henderson is a Transition Minister in the Church of Scotland, and is currently based in Shetland. She is a graduate in English Language and Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford, and later in Divinity from New College, Edinburgh, where her doctoral specialism was Biblical hermeneutics. She has also worked as Assistant Principal of New College, where she lectured in Systematic Theology. She has served as Vice Convener of the Theological Forum of the Church of Scotland, and is a frequent contributor to church publications. Andrew R. Holmes is Reader in History in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770–1840 (2006) and The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism 1830–1930 (2018). Alison M. Jack is Senior Lecturer in Bible and Literature at the University of Edinburgh and Assistant Principal of New College. Her publications include Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis (2012), and The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (2018). William Johnstone is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew & Semitic Languages in the University of Aberdeen. He was President of the British Society for Old Testament Study in 1990. He organized and edited the proceedings of conferences held in Aberdeen in 1994 and 2002 to mark respectively the centenary of the death of William Robertson Smith and the bicentenary of the death of Alexander Geddes. In 1997 he published a two-volume commentary on Chronicles and in 2014 a two-volume commentary on Exodus; in 1998 he published a

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collection of essays exploring the analogy of the relationship between Chronicles and the Deuteronomistic History in Samuel–Kings with that between Deuteronomy and the preceding books of the Pentateuch, especially Exodus. Colin Kidd is Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. A Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he is the author of Subverting Scotland’s Past (1993), British Identities before Nationalism (1999), The Forging of Races (2006), Union and Unionisms (2008), and The World of Mr Casaubon (2016). Raymond McCluskey is a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. Until retirement in 2019, he was Lecturer in Social Studies (History) in the School of Education, University of Glasgow. He is a past Convener of Council of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association, with broad interests in the history of the Scottish Catholic community. He is co-editor (with Professor Stephen J. McKinney) of A History of Catholic Education and Schooling in Scotland (2019). Finlay A. J. Macdonald was Church of Scotland minister at Menstrie, Clackmannanshire (1971–7) and Glasgow: Jordanhill (1977–96) and Principal Clerk of the General Assembly (1996–2010). He was appointed Moderator of the General Assembly (2002–3) and a Chaplain to the Queen in Scotland (2001). His publications include Confidence in a Changing Church (2004) and From Reform to Renewal: Scotland’s Kirk Century by Century (2017). Tom McInally is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. His doctoral research was on the Scots Colleges abroad and the lives of their alumni in the early modern period out of which arose his monographs, The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad 1575–1799 (2012) and A Saltire in the German Lands (2017). Both books are histories of institutions but his primary interest and the focus for his continuing research is on the individuals who ran the Scottish monasteries and colleges and their students. John R. McIntosh is Professor of Church History at Edinburgh Theological Seminary (formerly the Free Church College). Previous to this appointment in 2005, he was a Free Church minister in Lochgilphead (Argyll), and Poolewe and Aultbea (Wester Ross). He has published Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800 (1998) and is at present working on a history of the Free Church of Scotland, 1843–1900. Eric G. McKimmon is a Church of Scotland minister. He is a doctoral graduate of Edinburgh University (2012) with the thesis: ‘John Oman: Orkney’s Theologian: A Contextual Study of John Oman’s Theology with Reference to Personal Freedom as the Unifying Principle’. He contributed to John Oman: New Perspectives (2012) and he wrote on John Cairns in Scottish History Society: Records (2014). He is a regular contributor of homiletical literature to the Expository Times. Donald Macleod (MA, Glasgow University; DD Westminster Theological Seminary) served as Minister of Kilmallie Free Church (Inverness-shire) from 1964 to 1970, and as Minister of Partick Highland Free Church (Glasgow) from 1970 to 1978. He was Professor

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of Systematic Theology at the Free Church of Scotland College (now Edinburgh Theological Seminary) 1978–2010. His publications include A Faith to Live By (2016), Jesus is Lord (2000), The Person of Christ (1998), and Christ Crucified (2014). Anne Macleod Hill completed her PhD in the School of Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. She was awarded the Johann Kaspar Zeuss Prize 2017, by Societas Celtologica Europaea for her thesis, ‘The Pelican in the Wilderness: Symbolism and Allegory in Women’s Evangelical Songs of the Gàidhealtachd’. Her research into Gaelic spiritual poetry and song is ongoing, focusing on the collection, literary analysis, and contextualization of women’s songs against their theological and historical background. Christian Maurer is SNSF–Professor at the Department of Philosophy in Lausanne University (Switzerland). Maurer is a specialist of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British moral philosophy and theology. He is the author of Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy (2019), and he has published widely on the passions, on Archibald Campbell and Francis Hutcheson, on the reception of Stoicism, on seventeenth-century Scottish moral philosophy, and on tolerance regarding religion. Andrew Purves is the Jean and Nancy Davis Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is now retired, living in Leland, NC, where he reads theology for fun and walks regularly on the beach. Bryan D. Spinks is Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. He is a former president of the Society for Oriental Liturgy, former co-editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology, a former member and consultant to the Church of England Liturgical Commission, president emeritus of the Church Service Society of the Church of Scotland, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of Churchill College, Cambridge. A priest in the Church of England, his most recent books are Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (2013) and The Rise and Fall of the Incomparable Liturgy: The Book of Common Prayer 1559–1906 (2017). He is currently working on a book on Scottish Presbyterian worship. William Storrar is Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, USA. After parish ministry in the Church of Scotland, he taught practical theology at the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, where he held the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology and initiated the Global Network for Public Theology. His publications on church and society include edited volumes on God and Society: Doing Social Theology in Scotland Today (2003), Public Theology for the 21st Century (2004), A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (2011), and Yours the Power: Faith-Based Organizing in the USA (2013). Rowan Strong is Professor of Church History at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has written a number of books and articles on Scottish Episcopalianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most recently, he was the General Editor of The Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017–18) and editor of the Volume III in that series on the nineteenth

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century. His latest book is Victorian Christianity & Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840–c.1914 (2017). Iain Whyte has been a Church of Scotland parish minister and Chaplain to the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh. In 2005 he completed a PhD at Edinburgh University where he is presently an Honorary Associate in the School of Classics, History, and Archaeology. His publications include Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery 1756–1848 (2006), Zachary Macaulay: The Steadfast Scot in the British Anti-Slavery Movement (2011), and ‘Send Back the Money’: The Free Church of Scotland and American Slavery (2012). Jonathan Yeager is UC Foundation Associate Professor and Gerry Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His research interest is in eighteenth-century British and American religious history and thought, the history of evangelicalism, and the history of the book. His publications include Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (2011), Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (2013), and Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (2016). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism and co-editing Understanding and Teaching Religion in American History.

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1 The Significance of the Westminster Confession Donald Macleod

The compilers of the Scots Confession famously disclaimed infallibility, protesting that if anyone found in their draft anything ‘repugnant to God’s holy word’ they should inform them in writing. The Westminster Confession contains no such protest, but this does not mean that it saw itself as an unquestionable standard. Its companion document, the Shorter Catechism (Answer 2), describes the Scriptures as not only the ‘supreme’ rule of faith and life, but as the ‘only’ rule. The Confession itself categorically affirms both the ‘entire perfection’ of Scripture and its finality as the supreme judge of all councils and of all purely human compositions (I:10). In the two centuries following its adoption by the Church of Scotland these positions went virtually unchallenged. The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture received little attention, and the fact of its being of authentically human, as well as of divine, authorship, even less. There was, however, at least one exception: the Secession theologian, John Dick (1764–1833). Dick was a firm believer in the plenary inspiration of Scripture, but he also recognized that in giving the Scriptures God accommodated himself to the character and genius of the persons employed, and even argued that there were different degrees of inspiration: superintendence, elevation, and suggestion. He was aware, too, of the issues raised by variant readings in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, but was untroubled by them, as were the Westminster divines themselves (Dick 1838: vol. 1, 92–226). It is notable, however, that while the Confession insists that only the OT in Hebrew and the NT in Greek are authentic, it does not, like modern inerrantists, focus on the autographs. Not only were the Scriptures ‘immediately inspired’ at the point of origin (I:8): they were also ‘kept pure’ during the process of transmission, and thus it was not some lost originals, but the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as we currently have them, that are to be received as the word of God. At the same time, the belief in the ‘immediate’ inspiration of the originals stimulated the search for ever-closer approximation to the autographs, and theologians such as Thomas Chalmers and William Cunningham warmly welcomed the labours of the textual critics, Griesbach, Lachmann, and Tischendorf (Needham 1991: 1–32).

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This commitment to Scripture as both the source and the norm of theology was, of course, nothing new, and it is hardly surprising that the key features of Westminster theology were already well established in the Scottish Reformed tradition before the adoption of the Confession in 1647. Indeed, most of it was already the possession of the church universal. On the Trinity and on Christology Westminster simply endorsed Nicaea and Chalcedon; on Original Sin it set forth the anti-Pelagianism of Augustine; and on the Atonement it followed the broad outline of the doctrine of Vicarious Satisfaction which the whole Western church had derived from Anselm. Much of the rest was the common creed of all the churches of the Reformation. But the more distinctive doctrines of ‘Westminster Calvinism’ had also been adopted by Scottish theology before 1647. For example, though Westminster was the only Reformation confession to adopt a Federal framework, it was already firmly embedded in the thinking of Scottish theologians. As early as 1597 Robert Rollock had laid down in his Tractatus De Vocatione Efficaci that, ‘God speaks nothing to man without the covenant’, and he had then gone on to be among the first to speak of the Covenant of Works. In his Sermons on the Sacrament, preached in St Giles in 1589, Robert Bruce had already described the Lord’s Supper as a holy seal annexed to the Covenant of Grace; in 1638, in a speech before the General Assembly, David Dickson had given a comprehensive outline of the Covenant of Redemption; and Samuel Rutherford’s Trial and Triumph of Faith, incorporating careful treatments of both the Covenant of Redemption and the Covenant of Grace, was published in 1645, when the Westminster Assembly had scarcely begun its work on the Confession. Nor was the Confession responsible for introducing the doctrine of Limited Atonement to Scottish theology. It was already present in Dickson and Rutherford, while, on the other hand, there is room for debate whether it is present in the Confession at all. The Assembly contained a vocal group of Hypothetical Universalists, and their influence is clearly apparent in the final deliverances on this subject. Later Scottish Hypothetical Universalists such as James Fraser and John Brown III were certainly able to argue, plausibly, that their position was not inconsistent with the Confession; even if the doctrine of Limited Atonement is there, as it probably is (III:6, VIII:8), it takes a trained eye to find it. The real question is whether a pronouncement on this issue should feature in a creed at all, but the Anglican Articles (XXXI) had set a precedent, albeit they came down on the opposite side. Did the Confession introduce an unwelcome strand of ‘Bezan Scholasticism’ into Scottish theology? Tempting as it is to see Beza through the eyes of John Cameron, the self-styled ‘scourge’ of Beza, the temptation should be resisted. John Knox and Andrew Melville already shared a common theological outlook with Beza. While it is true that Rutherford adopted Beza’s unambiguous supralapsarianism, the Confession did not endorse it. Besides, as is increasingly recognized,

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scholasticism refers not to the content of a theological system, but to the method of delivery which theology adopts when it moves from the pulpit to the academy. The same individual—Rutherford, for example—could be a scholastic in the one and a passionate evangelist in the other. If by ‘scholastic’ we mean the use of Aristotelian rhetoric, definitions, and distinctions, Calvin by no means avoided them. True, Melville made it his business to introduce Ramus to his students, but he still insisted that they be familiar with ‘the Philosopher’; and the Confession’s systematic order, precision, and use of such distinctions as that between necessity, freedom, and contingency (V:2), are all perfectly consistent with the humanist vision which Melville had introduced to Scotland seventy years previously (Holloway 2011: 155–249). The true significance of the Confession was not that it introduced new streams into Scottish theology, but that it protected the consensus which had developed in the Reformed community in the hundred years after Calvin, Bucer, Vermigli, and Perkins. From this point of view, what was crucially important was not so much the contents of the Confession as the ultimate Formula of Subscription. When it originally approved the Confession in 1647, the General Assembly contented itself with affirming that it had found it ‘most agreeable to the word of God, and in nothing contrary to the received doctrine, worship, discipline and government of this Kirk’. In 1711, however, after a series of modifications, a new Formula was adopted, requiring all ordinands to affirm their sincere personal belief in ‘the whole doctrine’ of the Confession. This Formula defined the significance of the Confession for the next 250 years and there was one clear result: it gave Scottish Christianity a striking degree of theological consensus. These were doctrines on which all were agreed—every pulpit, with varying degrees of emphasis, would preach them, and none would contradict them. Such a degree of mandatory unanimity could be regarded as disturbing. It should be borne in mind, however, that such unanimity was imposed only on the Kirk’s office-bearers, not on ordinary members. Moreover, it may be argued that the church has the same right as any voluntary society to ensure that its officers stay ‘on-message’. Later Scottish theologians were aware of the dangers of a tooextensive creed. For example, some regarded the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675) as too minute and detailed to be imposed as a doctrinal standard. Some even hinted that Calvin himself would have scrupled to subscribe to some of the deliverances of his seventeenth-century successors. In defence of the Westminster Confession, however, it may be said that the unanimity focuses on doctrines covered by the principle, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, while at the same time underlining the harmony between Scottish Protestantism and the Reformed churches of the continent. This is not to say that some retrenchment might not have been appropriate, but the steer it gave to the ideal of agreement on fundamentals may be the supreme significance of the Confession. True, the consensus was sometimes achieved by a

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studied ambiguity, but it was a consensus that could be shared even by men like Robert Leighton and Henry Scougal, despite their pragmatic attitude towards Episcopacy. It is precisely the unlikelihood of achieving any sort of consensus today that renders it impossible either to replace or revise the Confession. But does the Confession, especially in the light of the 1711 Formula, not reflect an irreversible and immobile orthodoxy, precluding any accommodation of clearer light, and ruling out all further revision, debate, and progress? Champions of the Confession would certainly have contended that it contained the truth, and nothing but the truth. Few, however, would have claimed that it contained the whole truth. There was room for development, just as there was within postTridentine Catholicism. In this respect the Westminster Confession was in no different case from the Ecumenical Creeds. Nicaea had laid down boundaries, but it had not stifled discussion, and eventually it led to Chalcedon. While Westminster was content to endorse the doctrines of these ancient creeds, this did not deter Scottish theologians, even under the 1711 Formula, from continuing to explore such Christological themes as the eternal sonship, the temptability of Jesus, the import of his ‘obedience and sacrifice’, and the meaning of kenosis. There was also room for further development of key themes within the Confession itself, including its Federalism. Westminster’s understanding of the covenants is tentative and unclear, but overall it adhered to a two-covenant arrangement, the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. This was a significant, if silent, divergence from the position of men like Dickson and Rutherford, who had espoused a three-covenant framework, distinguishing between the Covenant of Redemption between the Father and the Son on the one hand, and the Covenant of Grace between God and the believer on the other. However, the authority of the Confession was not sufficient to dislodge the Covenant of Redemption from its position in Scottish theology. Instead, the three-covenant framework was reiterated with fresh clarity in the Sum of Saving Knowledge, composed around 1650, and then regularly bound together with the Confession in printed copies of the Westminster Standards. Come the eighteenth century Thomas Boston and Ebenezer Erskine rejected the three-covenant framework, even arguing that it contravened the Standards of the Church. They restricted the Covenant of Grace to the eternal covenant between the Father and the Son (representing the elect), and denied that there was a second covenant between God and the believing sinner. As they saw it, such a covenant, established through faith, introduced a dangerous element of conditionality into the administration of grace and thus compromised the ‘absolute freeness’ of the gospel, which was fully protected by the one eternal covenant between the Father and the Son: a covenant in which Christ became the Surety for his people’s debts, the Trustee with whom all the blessings of the covenant were lodged, and the Testator who bequeathed his inheritance to the elect. What remained an open question was whether election was prior to the covenant, or

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part of it. No clear answer was given, but there was a general concern to safeguard the divine sovereignty, even to the extent of arguing that Christ could not be the cause of election. Nor, according to Fisher’s Catechism (1753), was there precedence. In one and the same decree, the love of God alighted on both the Head and the members.¹ Behind this rejection of a separate Covenant of Grace lay a reluctance to speak of faith as a ‘condition’. Rutherford, arguing against Antinomianism, had insisted on such language. Boston et al., confronted by Neonomianism, disowned it: faith received, but did not give. This shrinking from the merest whiff of legalism places Scotland’s Federal Theology at the furthest possible remove from the idea of the covenant as a legal contract negotiated between two equal parties. Indeed, such was the aversion of the Marrowmen to any hint of conditionality that they even rejected the comparison of the covenant to a marriage contract (as distinct from a commercial one). The element of ‘consent’, they feared, would introduce too much ‘of one’s own doing’. The fact that there was room for such disagreements makes clear that though the Confession set limits to theological pluralism, it was careful not to set these limits too tightly. Liberty of opinion was still allowed on a range of significant issues. For example, the Confession leaves open the question of Millennialism. This can hardly be due to the debate being irrelevant. Many of the sectaries who swirled around seventeenth-century London were Premillennialists, while most of the Puritans were Postmillennialists. Everyone, then, had a position on the question, yet the Confession appears to have none, and this allowed for the emergence of a significant group of Premillennialists in the Church of Scotland in the nineteenth century. The most prominent of these was Edward Irving, who found Premillennialism in the Scots Confession, and regarded this as one of the marks of its excellence. Irving’s theology did eventually provoke controversy, but this had little to do with his Premillennialism—nor did his Premillennial views die with himself. They were adopted by others who, unlike Irving, had no problem with the Confession, and stood out instead as champions of Calvinist orthodoxy. The most prominent of these were the brothers Andrew and Horatius Bonar, but around them stood a much wider circle, and their views drew a vigorous response from David Brown, a Postmillennialist. Both views were tolerated, and there is no sign that the Bonars (who, like Brown, adhered to the Free Church in 1843) felt any tension between Premillennialism and the Confession. It was an issue on which, to say the least, there was room for latitude of interpretation. The Confession was also less than dogmatic on the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin. Is it immediate or mediate? The Confession assumes, of course, the

¹ See James Fisher, The Assembly’s Shorter Catechism Explained by way of Question and Answer, 20:7: ‘Is Christ the cause of election? No; the free love of God sent Christ to redeem the elect, and therefore he could not be the cause of electing love, John iii.16.’

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historicity of Adam and Eve, and denial of this would clearly be inconsistent with the 1711 Formula of Subscription. However, when it comes to defining the significance of Adam’s sin (VI:3), the Confession proceeds with caution: the guilt of this sin was imputed to his posterity, his corrupted nature was conveyed to them, and the rationale for this was the biological fact that he and Eve were the root of all humankind. But Reformed Orthodoxy had already begun to trouble its soul over the relation between the guilt and the corruption. According to immediate imputation, guilt is imputed to Adam’s posterity simply on the basis that they are his posterity, irrespective of any actual sinfulness on their part. Yet mediate imputation states that guilt is imputed not simply because we are descendants of Adam, but because we are tainted with the corruption inherited from him. This latter view is commonly associated with Joshua de la Place, who was condemned by the 1645 Synod of the French Reformed Church for allegedly denying the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity. He repudiated this charge, but what he did hold was that we share in the guilt of Adam’s sin only because we habitually consent to it. On this understanding, personal corruption comes before inherited guilt. The reaction to this by Reformed Orthodoxy was a dubious refining of the doctrine of immediate imputation to the effect that our native depravity is the penal consequence of our inherited guilt. The Confession takes no notice of this debate, possibly because members of the Assembly were unaware of it, more likely because they did not think such refinements were appropriate in a basis of unity. However, via Francis Turretin and the Formula Consensus Helvetica, the idea that depravity is the penal consequence of imputed guilt passed to such influential figures as Charles Hodge in America and to Ebenezer Erskine and William Cunningham in Scotland. Others disowned it, arguing that it could not claim sanction from either Scripture, the Confession, or Calvin. In Scotland, theologians such as Robert Dick, John Macpherson, and John Laidlaw maintained a discreet silence, though Macpherson did insist that no one suffered the punishment due to a guilty race without having personally committed offences which deserve such punishment (see Armstrong 2004: 114–15; Macleod 2014). There is, however, one issue, now seen as very much an open question, which the Confession seems to regard as a closed one: divine passibility. ‘God,’ declares the Confession, ‘is without body, parts or passions’ (II:1). The assertion of divine incorporeality and divine simplicity will raise no eyebrows. But what of the statement that God is without passions? This wording is not peculiar to the Westminster Confession: it is lifted directly from the first of the Anglican Articles. But does it rule out the idea of divine passibility? It may be, for example, that what is in view is not passions as such, but bodily passions; or, alternatively, what Augustine called ‘a movement of the mind contrary to reason’. The language also covers other important points which not

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even the most ardent advocate of divine passibility would deny, such as the notion that God cannot suffer passively, as a mere victim; nor is he, like pagan deities, liable to furious outbursts of passionate anger. To infer from this statement that subscribers to the Confession were bound to the view that God has no emotions, or that he is not affected by events outside himself, or that he was not moved by the death of his own Son, would be to remove from Scripture key elements of its revelation of God. If the crucifixion cost God the Father nothing, the Christian Eucharist loses much of its focus. Typical Scottish preachers certainly give no impression that they moderated their language for fear of being accused of denying divine impassibility. Samuel Rutherford, referring to the Cross, can even speak of ‘God weeping, God sobbing under the water!’ It is devoutly to be hoped that all churches will leave divine impassibility an open question. If we were to gauge the significance of the Confession by the volume of criticism it has attracted, our minds would immediately turn to its chapter on the Divine Decree (Chapter III). At the head of the chapter, however, lies a statement that cries out, not for either irate rejection or stubborn dogmatism, but for careful attention and fruitful development. While divine foreordination, we are told, does indeed cover ‘whatsoever comes to pass’, it does so without violating the human will, or eliminating either liberty or contingency (III:1). At the heart of these caveats lies a deliberate distinction between foreordination and determination. While the distinction may be as difficult to articulate as the Trinitarian distinction between ‘generation’ and ‘procession’, it is none the less real. God foreordains our human decisions, but he ordains them as free decisions. This clearly implies that our individual choices are not determined by genetics, childhood experiences, environment, instinct, character or any other factors external or internal. They are our own personal choices: free choices. How far this can comport with divine foreordination has so far remained beyond us. What is important, as Cunningham pointed out, is that there is nothing in the Westminster Confession which requires subscribers to be Determinists (1862: 508). On the contrary, they are free to be Calvinistic Libertarians. Even more fascinating is the Confession’s statement on contingency: a statement which has taken on a whole new significance in the light of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Unfortunately, subsequent Scottish theology, including expositions of the Confession, refused to linger over the idea that God had decreed the contingent as well as the free and the necessary, and rushed on, instead, to the more comfortable topic of predestination. It remains, however, that while piety may protest that there is no such thing as chance, physics and the Westminster Confession both leave room for it, while the Confession adds that it is established by God. This still cries out for elucidation. Yet any assessment of the significance of the Confession must take account of the fact that side by side with such metaphysical flights there are several

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statements of clear pastoral relevance. One striking example occurs in the chapter on Justification (XI:5). This recognizes that believers, once justified, can never fall out of the state of justification, but it leaves no place for the view expressed by James Hogg’s justified sinner, Robert Wringhim, that ‘a justified person could do no wrong’ (1991: 134). Instead, it declares that the sins of believers bring them under God’s ‘fatherly displeasure’. The key word here is ‘fatherly’. Believers are no longer liable to judicial condemnation, but as God’s children they are subject to his house-rules. Although he will never turn them out, they will quickly find that they cannot sin with impunity. On the contrary, they will incur divine displeasure, expressed, very likely, in challenging providences. But what is particularly moving is the paragraph’s description of the backslider’s road to recovery. They must ‘humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance’. This is grace, but it is not cheap grace, and it shows the Confession as not only theologically acute, but pastorally aware. But if the Confession did not preclude debate and development, did its very status not silence anti-Confessional voices? A mere forty years after the passing of the 1711 Formula, control of the General Assembly passed to the Moderates under the leadership of Principal Robertson of Edinburgh University. Even allowing for the fact that the line between Moderates and Evangelicals (otherwise, the ‘Popular Party’) is far from clear, there can be no doubt that among the Moderates there was deep resentment of the Confession since, in theory at least, a minister could be deposed for contravention of any of its doctrines. If this bred resentment, it also bred fear. The outcome, according to Drummond and Bulloch, was that the Moderates failed to produce any theology of distinction: ‘They were restrained by the Westminster Confession. They did not hold its doctrines, but could not say so in public’ (1973: 104). It was not merely a matter of feeling restrained. There was also a serious degree of contempt, as John Witherspoon highlighted in his satirical Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753), declaring it ‘a necessary part of the character of a moderate man, never to speak of the Confession of Faith but with a sneer’. Yet the contempt produced little inclination to propose revision of either the Confession or the Formula of Subscription. Living as they did in the shadow of the Jacobite uprisings, men like Robertson were opposed to any ecclesiastical move that might jeopardize ‘the late happy settlement’ of 1707. That settlement had the Confession at its heart, and even had churchmen proposed a change, the government would not have allowed it. Yet, whatever the restraint arising from fear of breaching the Confession, the years of Moderate dominance were not a complete blank in Scotland’s theological history. Not only did men such as Adam Gib within the Secession, and John Erskine within the Kirk, continue to produce theology along Confessional lines, but even within the Moderate party itself some significant work was being done. For example, George Campbell of Marischal College, Aberdeen, published an

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influential ‘Dissertation on Miracles’ (1762). While Principal Hill of St Andrews was enough of a Moderate to succeed Robertson as leader of the party, his Lectures in Divinity were so impeccably Confessional that Thomas Chalmers was happy to use them as his textbook at New College. But these were exceptions. Other Moderates who certainly had the capacity to make a significant contribution to theology chose a different path. Robertson excelled as a historian, Hugh Blair concentrated on his duties as Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, John Home sought celebrity as a playwright, and Alexander Carlyle found it by writing his Autobiography. One can only speculate whether under a looser confessional regime they might have devoted their talents to theology. Such theological disengagement could not last, and by the early nineteenth century Scottish theology was beginning to forge a whole new relationship with the Westminster Confession. One of the prime drivers of change, however, was not a minister, but a layman, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, a laird of sufficient means, leisure, and learning to publish serious theological works: and, among these, works which denied the doctrines of election and limited atonement. As a layman, Erskine could not be prosecuted for heresy, but events took a new turn when his views were taken up by his friend, John McLeod Campbell, Minister of Row (Rhu) in Dunbartonshire: a train of events which ended with Campbell being deposed for heresy in 1831. There had, of course, been heresy trials before the Campbell case. In the 1720s Professor John Simson of Glasgow had come under suspicion of holding Arian views, but, while the Assembly of 1729 had suspended him, it had not deposed him. In 1789 the trial of Dr William McGill of Ayr on a charge of Socinianism had ended in a similar compromise. The trial of the Marrowmen (1720–1) had been the trial of a book, rather than of men’s personal opinions. Although the book was condemned and the men put on notice, they were not deposed. Taken together, such episodes indicate that, however clear the Confession (and the Formula of Subscription), deposing a person for heresy was no easy matter in eighteenth-century Scotland. The McLeod Campbell case began when some members of his congregation presented a Memorial to the Presbytery of Dumbarton in March 1830, alleging that he had been preaching doctrines contrary to Scripture and the Standards of the Church. The fact that the complaints came from this source should make us hesitate before accepting the view that the Row doctrines were a welcome pastoral corrective to the excesses of Federal Calvinism. Campbell faced two charges: first, that he preached universal atonement and pardon through the death of Christ and, secondly, that he had preached that assurance was of the essence of faith. Both these doctrines, it was alleged, were contrary to Confessional teaching. The two charges were closely connected. Early in his ministry at Row, Campbell had become aware that lack of assurance was a serious problem among his

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parishioners, he had quickly linked this to the doctrine of Limited Atonement, and he had formed the conviction that without a doctrine of Universal Redemption it was impossible for people to say with assurance, ‘The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me’. On the question of assurance, Campbell was on plausible ground. The Confession certainly did not rule out the idea that assurance was of the essence of faith. Yet had it done so, it would have been in flagrant contradiction of Calvin, for whom faith was certainty (Bell 1985: 22–5). Moreover, it would also have been in contradiction of itself, since its chapter on Saving Faith (Chapter XIV) specifically lays down that faith is certainty—whatever God has revealed in his word is true. The problem was that in the Confession’s chapter headed ‘Assurance’, what is in view is not this objective certainty, but an individual’s assurance of being, personally, in ‘the state of grace’. Yet even this is not denied to be of the essence of faith. The Confession says only that it does not ‘so’ belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer ‘might wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it’ (XVIII:3). This clearly allows that even this ‘reflex’ assurance is in some sense of the essence of faith, and while it would be wrong to question someone’s discipleship simply because they doubt their own salvation, it would be equally wrong to normalize such doubt; a tendency which too often blighted Scottish religion, and which a careless reading of the Confession may well have encouraged. Campbell was on much less secure ground when he argued that his doctrine of universal redemption was not inconsistent with the Confession. Not that he had any great respect for the Confession. He argued that the charge against him put it above Scripture, the only legitimate criterion of heresy, and even went so far as to declare that, compared to the confessions of the early Reformed church, ‘there is an awful falling off in the Confession we now have’. Campbell also claimed that the Confession was silent on the question of the extent of redemption: a silence which, in his view, was not to its credit, but which nevertheless rendered the charge against him irrelevant. He also invoked the more technical argument that the word ‘redemption’ as used in the Confession (VIII:6, 8) did not refer to the act of expiation by which Christ secured remission of sins, but to salvation in its most comprehensive sense. When, therefore, the Confession declared that none are redeemed but the elect, it did not mean that only the sins of the elect are atoned for. Rather, it meant that only the elect are eventually saved. Campbell caused further confusion by speaking not only of universal redemption, but of universal pardon. His defence was that his doctrine was not contrary to the Confession. On the very night the Assembly had passed its sentence, Campbell was asked by a friend whether he could ‘sign the Confession now?’ His answer was unequivocal: ‘No. The Assembly was right. Our doctrine and the Confession are incompatible’ (Tuttle 1986: 53–4). Two years after it deposed Campbell, the General Assembly decided that the views of Edward Irving were also incompatible with the Confession. Irving first

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came under scrutiny in 1832, when his Presbytery (Annan) received a complaint that he was allowing tongue-speaking during public worship in his London congregation. Once again, however, the defence refrained from challenging the Confession, and argued, instead, that there was nothing in the constitution of the Church to forbid the use of such a gift. The Presbytery proceeded, nonetheless, to declare Irving unfit to remain as Minister of the congregation. Irving still remained a minister of the Church of Scotland, but a year later he faced a more serious charge: holding a heretical view on ‘the sinfulness of our Lord’s human nature’. At first sight, the relevance of this charge can also be challenged. Irving did not deny the sinlessness of Christ. What he did preach was that Christ’s human nature was ‘fallen’, but he distinguished between ‘fallenness’ and ‘sinfulness’. By ‘fallen’ he meant that Christ, like other human beings, had to struggle against the ‘flesh’, but he remained sinless because he was able to subdue the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit. Following Irving’s endorsement by Barth (1956: 151–9), the idea that Christ took ‘fallen’ human nature is widely accepted; however, to nineteenth-century Scottish theology ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’ were synonymous. For Irving to assume that a Confessionally-anchored Kirk could take in its stride the idea that Jesus had a native propensity to sin which was held in check only by the power of the Spirit, was to show remarkable naïveté. By Irving’s time, there were clear signs that the Westminster Confession was already losing ground among Scottish theologians. Irving might deny that his theology contradicted the Confession, but he, too, was scathing of the Confession as a whole. Like Campbell, Irving deplored the doctrine of Limited Atonement. This attitude was typical of the circle in which both men moved. The same Assembly that deposed Campbell had also withdrawn from his young friend, A. J. Scott, his licence to preach: not for any specific doctrinal deviation, but because he had made it known that he would not subscribe the Confession. Further evidence of a growing anti-Confessionalism appears from the rash of depositions which marked the decade after 1831 (Drummond and Bulloch 1973: 203–5). While the Church and her Confession were increasingly out of step, no one called for any change in the wording of the Confession itself, even when it gave rise to genuine disquiet. One clear cause of disquiet was the Confession’s position on the power of the civil magistrate. Chapters XX:4 and XXIII:3 clearly sanctioned criminal proceedings against blasphemers and heretics, and while this was perfectly in tune with the attitudes of the seventeenth century, later generations rightly saw it as a mandate for suppressing all dissent. Instead of amending or deleting the offending paragraphs, the Associate (Burgher) Synod in 1799 sanctioned a Preamble to the Confession, disavowing the principle of ‘compulsory measures in religion’. In 1846 the Free Church Assembly adopted a similarly indirect approach, declaring that they did not regard any portion of the Confession, ‘when fairly interpreted’, as favouring intolerance or persecution. This was clear enough as a statement of the Church’s position, but less than satisfactory as

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an explanation of the Confession, which, ‘fairly interpreted’, means precisely that blasphemers and heretics are not to be tolerated. A more honest position was taken by the American Presbyterian Church when in 1788 it replaced the original wording of Chapter XXIII:3 with the declaration that it is the duty of the magistrate to ensure that no one offers any indignity, violence, abuse or injury to any other person ‘either upon pretence of religion or of infidelity’ (Hodge 1869: 21–3). In Scotland, reluctance to amend or retrench the Confession persisted even as more and more consciences professed themselves troubled by its doctrines. It was through declarations and disclaimers rather than through modifications of the text that the Church offered relief, and the tendency gathered momentum as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The United Presbyterian Church passed a Declaratory Act in 1879 allowing liberty of opinion on such points ‘in the Standards’ as did not enter into the substance of the faith, while the Free Church passed a similar Act in 1892 (provoking the formation of the separate Free Presbyterian Church). The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (which, as an Established Church, had to secure the consent of Parliament) followed suit in 1910. These developments revolutionized the relationship between Scottish theology and the Westminster Confession. It continued as the doctrinal standard of both the Free Church and the Free Presbyterian Church, but the modification of the terms of subscription meant that in the major Presbyterian body, the Church of Scotland, the Confession itself was no longer regarded as the substance of the faith. What exactly that substance is, was left undefined. The Confession had become irrelevant. Leaving us with a new question: What is the significance for Scottish theology of the loss of the Westminster Confession? It may still be too soon to tell.

Bibliography Armstrong, Brian G. (2004). Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Barth, Karl (1956). Church Dogmatics, I/2. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Bell, M. Charles (1985). Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. Cunningham, William (1862). The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation. Reprint, London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967. Dick, John (1838). Lectures on Theology. Reprint, Stoke-on-Trent: Tentmaker Publications, 2004. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1973). The Scottish Church 1688–1843: The Age of the Moderates. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

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Hodge, A. A. (1869). The Confession of Faith: A Handbook of Christian Doctrine Expounding the Westminster Confession. Reprint, London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1958. Hogg, James (1824). The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Reprint, ed. David Groves, Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1991. Holloway, Ernest R. III (2011). Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland 1545–1622. Leiden: Brill. Macleod, Donald (2014). ‘Original Sin in Reformed Theology’, in Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (eds.), Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 129–46. Needham, Nicholas R. (1991). The Doctrine of Holy Scripture in the Free Church Fathers. Edinburgh: Rutherford House. Tuttle, George M. (1986). So Rich A Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement. Edinburgh: Handsel Press.

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2 Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment Blackwell, Halyburton, and Riccaltoun Paul Helm

The historiography of the Enlightenment, said generally to extend to the period 1685–1815, is routinely presented and understood to be much neater than it was in fact. This period is presented in church history as preceded by ‘Orthodoxy’ both Reformed and Lutheran, and followed by an anthropological turn, due to the influence of Immanuel Kant in one way or another. But matters are not that simple if the careers of individual theologians and church leaders, and the differential behaviour of various regions, are taken into account. For example, the Reformed Orthodox theologian Bernardinus à Moor was practising his trade at the University of Leiden until his death in 1780. And Orthodoxy had already engaged the thought of Descartes and Spinoza in the mid-seventeenth century. The three figures discussed in this chapter live in the post-Orthodoxy transitional period, yet all of them are undeviating in adherence to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. The Enlightenment is also generally regarded as a unified, monolithic movement, engaged in a fresh and unfettered expression of ‘reason’ and of ‘nature’ in a secular sense. But this neglects the diversity of philosophical outlook, the fact that its well-known practitioners were not resolutely ‘secular’ but were generally religious in character, and that the soils in which seeds of reason were sown, were very diverse. One of these was that of the Church of Scotland, with a pervasive commitment to the Westminster Standards. This chapter highlights three figures in this period in the Church of Scotland: Thomas Blackwell (1660–1728), Professor of Divinity, Marischal College, Aberdeen; Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712), Professor of Divinity, University of St Andrews, who lived in roughly the same period; and Robert Riccaltoun (1691–1769), minister of the Church of Scotland in Hobkirk, Roxburghshire, who lived somewhat later. All men spent outwardly uneventful lives, so we shall concentrate on their published writings. Each bears some marks of the modes and tendencies of the turn of the century, and one of them bears marks of a serious internal controversy within the Church of Scotland in this period, the Marrow Controversy. The influences of the Enlightenment on them were varied, mediated by issues that were nearer at hand.

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Thomas Blackwell Thomas Blackwell was a loyal member of the Church of Scotland, first in its pastoral ministry, and then as Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen and later as Principal of Marischal College. He is noteworthy in having published two of his major works, Ratio Sacra, or An Appeal unto The Rational World about the Reasonableness of Revealed Religion, 1710 and Forma Sacra, or a Sacred Platform of Natural and Revealed Religion, also in 1710, while still in the pastoral ministry. His third main work, Methodus Evangelica, or, A Modest Essay Upon the True Scriptural-Rational Way of Preaching the Gospel was published in 1712 and dedicated to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.¹ His thought seems largely to have occupied the general area of the faith and its relation to reason, stressing the harmony of the revealed propositions of the faith to human reason. In occupying this territory he was performing a useful task for those who, in the age of deism, were concerned that the ‘mysteries’ of the faith were under critical scrutiny and repudiation. This is most obvious in the case of Ratio Sacra, which drew a line between the reductionist rationalism of the deists on the one hand, and the pietistic, apocalyptic ‘enthusiasm’ promoted by the writings of Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80) on the other. The one extreme was tempting to some of the clergy, while the latter, ‘Bourignonism’, was attractive to some of those in the pews. The General Assembly of 1709 and the two years after this, warned against the ‘dangerous errors’ of Bourignonism, estimated to be on the same level of the more traditional enemies of Reformed theology: Roman Catholicism, Arianism, Socinianism, and Arminianism. The timeliness of Forma Sacra can be judged from the need for five further editions. Blackwell was no doubt regarded as a theologian with his finger on the pulse of things. Later on, he allied himself with the opponents of the Marrowmen in his work on the Commission set up in 1722 by the General Assembly. The first two of these books, Ratio Sacra, and Forma Sacra, together have the aim of promoting the harmony of reason with revelation. This harmony was promoted by employing the conventional distinction between matters of religion which are above reason, inaccessible, while the features of religion, especially its moral features, are in accord with the divine perfections, the gifts of God’s grace. It is not so much that religion is the product of reason as that it is seen to be in accordance with reason once it is revealed. The Reformed character of the work can be seen in the prominence given to ‘The whole complex eternal Plan of Divine Predestination, comprehending the great Events relevant to Angles [sp.] and Men’. This is one of the three important heads of that ‘Scriptural and Rational

¹ A fuller account of the career of Blackwell can be found in Muller (2015).

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account of natural and revealed religion’ besides creation and providence, which Forma Sacra offers. Blackwell’s third book, Methodus Evangelica, a book on preaching, is not devoted to preaching technique, but to what Blackwell regarded as the objectives of preaching. These objectives are each theological in kind, though in Blackwell’s case with an orientation that is somewhat neonomian, a tendency of the antiMarrow side of things, with its fear of antinomianism. The Christian life is thought of in terms of an obligation to fulfilling the terms of the covenant. This is not salvation by works but the working of the law of faith, the expression of its tendency to fidelity in action. Just as this does not amount to legalism pure and simple, its tendency to rationalism that some commentators have spotted is not to the secular rationalism of a later day, though it may be a foretaste of later Moderatism in the Church of Scotland. To characterize Blackwell’s theological stance as ‘rationalistic’ cannot be to ascribe to it a sort of foundationalism with human reason as the foundation stone, rather to point to a discussion of the employment of reason in the working out of Christian obligations (inter alia), coupled with the recommendation of the virtues of prudence and good sense in the Christian life, without ascribing to it a full-orbed moralism. This justifies the otherwise rather odd use of ‘rationalistic’ in the subtitle of Methodus Evangelica. The charge of ‘hyper-Calvinism’ made by some seems far-fetched, even allowing for its vagueness. This prince of the Scottish church seems not to have a lot in common with the rather lowly English Independents and Baptists in whom hyperCalvinist opinions chiefly lodged. The fact that the Marrowmen were all for the free offer of the gospel, and that Blackwell was less than enthusiastic about it, does not make Blackwell ipso facto a hyper-Calvinist. This is not to say that issues that arose in hyper-Calvinism were not to be found at the time in Scotland. Examples of such issues are whether believers are to be governed by the moral law as the rule of their conduct, and whether the offer of the gospel is to be restricted to ‘sensible sinners’, to those aware of their sinfulness. Looking back from the book on preaching, which as noted was a work of theology rather than of technique, to Blackwell’s first two books, the Ratio Schema and the Schema Sacrum, we note that these were also works in which human rationality was promoted. But this is a carefully-tailored rationality (Muller 2015: 237). Blackwell distinguishes between kinds of reason or of reasoning—‘carnal reason’ or more fully ‘the Atheistical, Irreligious, Subtile, Reasoning and Disputing genius of the day’ and ‘solid reason’. So reasoning is not necessarily demonstrative, but it provides a God-given harmonizing tool, for bringing together the doctrines that are revealed, many of which are above human reason, with the conclusions of ‘solid reasoning’. He must certainly know little either of Revealed Religion, if of True and Solid Reason, which would presume, by the dim Light if such a finite twinkling Star,

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as what Humane Reason now is (yea and ever was) to demonstrate and comprehend, the High, Supernatural, Mysterious Truths and Doctrines of Revealed Religion: Which were originally contrived, and only communicate amongst the Great Three in One; Till once the Sun of Righteousness, displayed the same unto the World, so far as was necessary and proper for Man to know. And therefor, for Any Man to offer, a Rational Account of Revealed Religion, in this Demonstrative Sense, should certainly rue, the most daring Presumption, the Humane Mind is capable of. (Blackwell 1710a: i–ii)

Such a project is not inconsistent with harmonizing the doctrines of revealed religion with the principles of true reason. Since reason is as divine as revelation, there can be no inconsistency.

Thomas Halyburton Thomas Halyburton was Professor of Divinity in St Andrews for the short period from 1710 until his death. He has chiefly been known in Scotland during the period of the history of Reformed dogmatics that Richard Muller has called the later phase of High Orthodoxy, 1685–1725 (Muller 2003: 31f.), for his posthumously-published Memoirs (Halyburton 1714), which disclose a person somewhat sceptical in nature, engrossed in the quest for assurance. Natural Religion Insufficient, and Reveal’d Necessary . . . or, A Rational Enquiry into the Principles of modern Deists, was published in 1714. Living at the start of the eighteenth century, Halyburton, who was at one stage in his life personally attracted to deism, was involved in the first influential wave of Enlightenment thinking in the British Isles. John Locke (1632–1704), the author of The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and particularly his chapters ‘Of Faith and Reason and their Distinct Provinces’ and ‘Of Enthusiasm’ in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690 and later editions) interested Halyburton, particularly Locke’s view of the relation between reason and the authority of Scripture.² He was left with a high regard for John Locke as a thinker, though he was suspicious of some of the arguments by which Locke grounded the authority of Scripture in reason. Natural Religion Insufficient, and Reveal’d Necessary . . . or, A Rational Enquiry into the Principles of modern Deists was Halyburton’s main work in theology, along with An Essay on the Nature of Faith. His thesis was that in generalizing ‘religion’ to a lowest common denominator of which all professing Christians can agree, deism becomes useless as a criterion of truth. So it is insufficient in

² For further discussion of Halyburton’s views on faith, see Helm (2015).

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satisfying what counts as the knowledge of God, or what true happiness consists in, and especially accounting for the malformity of sin and the source of pardon (Halyburton 1833: 275). What is different from other treatments of the reasonableness of religion in the early eighteenth century is that Halyburton is highly satisfied with his understanding of the Christian religion. The idea of reducing it to some general principles was not an option for him. So his criticism of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s (1583–1648) De Veritate (1683) appeals to the distinctives of his own faith. There is an authenticity in this, for Halyburton had been a deist himself for a time as his Memoir attests. He needed a religion that could deliver him from the fear of death. And the deism that he was attracted to for a short period in 1696 failed lamentably in this. He was delivered from such fear by word and Spirit. His Memoir is cast in a highly personal, ‘experimental’ style. His work against deism is, rather similarly, wholly concerned with the inadequacies of deism in regard to religion. The work culminates with a detailed critical review of Halyburton’s treatment not only the five articles of Lord Herbert’s De Veritate, but also De Religione gentilium, posthumously published in Amsterdam in 1663, and the Religio laici (1683) of Charles Blount, Herbert’s admirer. He uses Locke’s arguments against innate ideas as a criticism of Herbert’s claims that his five articles are innate truths (Halyburton 1833: 477). So the internal indicia of Scripture of its divine authority, and their instrumentality in human lives, afford grounds for the Christian religion’s sufficiency as a revealed religion. And a fortiori the strength of Scripture to satisfy human needs grounds the thesis that only revealed religion is sufficient and thus rational in this instrumental sense. It is not possible to enter into the question of the relation of Natural Religion Insufficient to his other writings, since all of them were published together, posthumously. But it seems that the thesis of the larger book was in line with that in his treatment of Locke in his work on faith. So the idea that the Christian should rebut the deist on the deist’s own terms, using reason alone, is not something that Halyburton would countenance. The resources are rather the riches of the Christian revelation and the book which is their expression. In discussing Locke, Halyburton became involved in the early movements of the Enlightenment in England. What concerned Halyburton was Locke’s view of the relation between reason and the authority of Scripture. His treatment of this question provides us with a window into how the Reformed Orthodox reacted to this new cultural phase, the arrival of the Enlightenment. Weight is placed by Halyburton on internal arguments, by which is meant the material or cognitive content of the divine revelation itself, and on the illumination of the Holy Spirit in making the force of this evidence apparent. Within the category of ‘internal arguments’ some theologians give more weight to the creedal elements in Scripture, others to the unique impact of that content on individual lives. The effect of the Holy Spirit’s work is not fideistic, but works on the senses

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and intellect as they come to identify the evidence, and gain some understanding of it, and by the Spirit’s illumination they come to appreciate its attractiveness and force, as words coming from the mouth of God, having his distinctive authority, even when conveyed through varieties of human agency (Duncan 1907: 163). In matters other than those under discussion it seems Halyburton had a high opinion of Locke. So, for example, in his work against deism he more than once shows his approval of the cogency of Locke’s arguments against innate ideas, as well the insufficiency of natural light to be found in Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (Halyburton 1833: 321, 323, 357–8). The arguments against innate ideas provided reasons to undercut the deists’ claim that the principles of natural religion were innate and so did not have their source in revelation. Halyburton refers to ‘the ingenious Mr. Locke’ (Halyburton 1833: 393). So when Halyburton criticized Locke we can be sure that this is not merely the pique of party spirit at work, but that he was capable of judging arguments on their merits. In the case of Locke’s views on divine revelation, he sees Locke’s appeal to reason as an argument for biblical authority arising from factors external to Scripture. He responds by upholding the greater legitimacy and strength of the factors internal to the biblical text, while not denying that external factors have a place, but not a principal one. So Locke’s appeal to reason is insufficient to support the authority of divine revelation, and that internal arguments are not ruled out by anything that Locke claims. For Locke, the original revelation must have been accompanied by miracles, to be authenticated, while in the case of ‘traditional revelation’, the documents, they must reliably report miracles. Halyburton reads Locke as an upholder of a rationalistic Christianity, not as a forerunner and fount of deism. Halyburton argues that to insist on a uniform requirement of miracles to authenticate Scripture as Locke does is ‘highly injurious to the honour of divine revelation’ (Halyburton 1833: 518). To start with, Locke has no evidence from Scripture that there is such a uniform connection between evidential assurance and outward signs. It is mere supposition that the one was always accompanied by, and partly generated by, the other. And even where there were outward signs, as with Moses and the burning bush (cited by Locke in the chapter ‘Of Enthusiasm’), there are alternative explanations available as to why the miracles occurred; for example, many matters revealed were things ‘at a distance’, requiring God’s extraordinary power, and so external signs were given not so much to assure and remind the people that God was speaking as to reaffirm that God’s power was sufficient to bring about what he had promised. But in the light of Locke’s claims, the terminology of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ needs handling with care, because to us who read the Bible today, since the closure of the canon, the record of miraculous signs that Locke emphasizes are physically present in the Bible, and in this sense they are a part of the document which is the Bible, internal to it. But according to Halyburton they are not internal to the words

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of God, to the salvific ‘message’ of prophets and apostles, for in many instances that message is given without a miraculous accompaniment. So what is Halyburton’s case against the charge of enthusiasm? To start with, the fact that Locke and millions more don’t experience such personal enlightenment, neither proves that it is not possible, nor that Locke may not have had such an experience while failing to identify its true significance. It surely cannot be doubted that God might produce such a sense, which does not contradict the working of the other human senses. If we grant, as Locke does, that God may sometimes by his Spirit illuminate the minds of men, why may there not be evidence of a different sort from that provided by the five senses, resulting from such extraordinary productions, amounting to evidence of the highest degree? (Halyburton 1833: 519–20). Halyburton goes on to claim that there are in fact such cases of inward, objective light, providing the highest assurance that the truths impressed upon the mind were from God. This is his version of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit (Halyburton 1833: 520). The prophets would be a case in point. They were convinced (but not by argument, nor of course by sense-experience, or by miracles), that they had received truth from God by an immediate impression made on their minds. This is objective evidence that makes itself evident in the same sort of way in which other kinds of intellectual light do (Halyburton 1833: 521). Such impressions as this light imparts have distinctive, characteristic effects. To further elucidate all this, we may note that a better account can be given of this subjective enlightenment grounding assent to the Scriptures, than can be given of the visibility of objects to those who have no natural sight. Further, the fact that a phenomenon may not be intelligibly articulated by everyone who experiences it does not mean that there is no such thing. A writer’s characteristic style, or a person’s face and vocal expressions, may be clearly recognized, but they are notoriously difficult to describe. Yet this limitation does not undermine their efficacy. Similarly with the impressions of divinity in Scripture. ‘And where one has an understanding given to know him that is true, and is made thereby to entertain any suitable notion of the Deity, upon intuition of this objective evidence, without waiting to reason on the matter, his assent will be carried, and unavoidably determined to rest on it as the highest ground of assurance’ (Halyburton 1833: 522). It does not need the persuasiveness of arguments to recognize the divine imprint in the Scriptures. (Halyburton was a definite egalitarian at such points.) But is this not a case of enthusiasm? He offers a number of reasons to think not. For example, it is not a persuasion without reason; it does not contradict the findings of our faculties, but influences them; it is not a persuasion apart from the word, but it is from evidence in the word (Halyburton 1833: 523). But is it not a decisive argument against such an objective experience that not everyone has it? Halyburton demurs. Again, many arguments are offered, among

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which are: many lack the ability by which Christ’s sheep hear his voice; many have perverse notions of God; many have unsuitable dispositions; many never make any attempt to do the will of God; and so on (Halyburton 1833: 524). He concludes that Locke cannot be claiming that no proposition can be a revelation from God unless it was explicitly testified to be such, otherwise he would be overthrowing the Christian religion entirely (Halyburton 1833: 525–6).

Robert Riccaltoun Robert Riccaltoun was born in the Scottish Borders near Jedburgh, educated locally and at the University of Edinburgh. He is probably the most intriguing of our three theologians. He was a farmer until 1717 when he was ordained and became minister in Hobkirk, where he served until his death. The poet James Thomson (1700–49) was a neighbour, one of several children of a fellow minister. Riccaltoun, something of a poet himself, befriended James. Riccaltoun is best known for his pro-Marrow work. The first was a short work, the anonymously published The Politick Disputant: choice Instructions for Quashing a Stubborn Adversary. Gathered from, and exemplified in, the Learned Principal Hadow’s Conduct in His late Appearances against The Marrow of Modern Divinity and its friends (1722), written when Riccaltoun was thirty. It was admired not only for its theological views, but also for its satirical humour. This was followed by A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the Church of Scotland, Wherein the Matters Under Debate are Fairly Stated, the Differences Adjusted and Hadow’s Detection Considered and Weighed, published in 1723. The Sober Inquiry is regarded as a masterful review and adjudication of the issues debated in the Marrow controversy: ‘Riccaltoun attempted to mediate, though making it clear that the Marrow brethren had the better argument and faulting Hadow for widening breaches rather than seeking peace’ (Lachman 1993: 718). He corrects misrepresentations among opponents, examines the real import of the Marrow divinity’s unfamiliar phrases, and points to the common ground held by all true sons of the Church of Scotland. Though the Sober Enquiry has never been reprinted, the book contains an exceptionally able treatment of the role of mediator in the Covenant of Grace. Riccaltoun might have approved of the sentiments of William Cunningham on Hadow and Boston as having ‘divided the truth between them in the points controverted’ (as reported by Macleod 1974: 145). Less notice has been given to another, later and last anonymous book, his defence of the views of James Hervey (1714–58). Hervey (or Harvey) was an English evangelical clergyman, his Theron and Aspasio (1755) being very popular and highly thought of. Robert Sandeman’s Letters on Theron and Aspasio and A View of the Law of Nature, also of 1755, was a something of a tirade against

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Hervey’s book. Riccaltoun’s defence is An Inquiry into The Spirit and Tendency of Letters on Theron and Aspasio: with A View of the Law of Nature and an Inquiry in Letters on The Law of Nature (Riccaltoun 1762). Robert Sandeman (1718–71) was the son-in-law of John Glas (1695–1773), who had been deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for his view that the church should return to the early primitiveness of the New Testament. The accretions of the established and connexional churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant, must be abandoned, and the church was to henceforth consist of voluntary independent congregations. Sandemanianism stressed that faith is purely an act of the intellect. He attracted a number of followers to the sect which came to be known as the Glasites or Sandemanians. Sandeman also had his own ideas about natural law. Riccaltoun’s Inquiry reads as if the defence of Hervey may have been a pretext to attack and ridicule Glasite views. Why they irritated him so much is not clear. As a separate church movement they did not prosper, but their views on faith seemed to have been held up as a defence of the sufficiency of a purely nominal attachment to the gospel, without any fiducial element. These views were at odds with the Confession of Faith and so to be avoided. So Riccaltoun’s entire literary output published during his life consisted of anonymous works of a decidedly polemical character. He died in 1769. Besides these writings, his son posthumously published his father’s other writings, which were rather of a different character. These are didactic, a set of essays, and an exposition of Galatians. James Walker, in his The Theology and Theologians of Scotland, Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, says of one of his posthumously published writings that it is ‘a remarkable but peculiar Treatise on the Christian Life . . . and of various other writings rather speculative than theological’ (1875: 30). Riccaltoun occasionally refers to Locke. His outlook may be said to be commonsensical and he uses phrases e.g. ‘active powers’, a term that the philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96) was to use, though Riccaltoun was writing before Reid blossomed (Riccaltoun 1762: 131). It can be said that these two sets of writings, published and posthumous, have as a common thread a dislike of artificial language or scholastic refinement or neologisms in theology, or polemics that is nothing other than pure logomachy, and so a confidence in plain English as a reliable theological medium of communication. Yet defences of the Westminster Confession, as each Inquiry was, and as his posthumous writings may be said to be, though less directly, can hardly avoid the use of some scholastic expressions. But his unpublished essays published posthumously are plain and polished, setting forth the same theology. Why some were published posthumously while others were left for publication after his death, is unclear. So the contrast between his anonymous polemical pieces and his posthumously published writings by his son in three elegant volumes is appreciable (Riccaltoun

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1771). The anonymously published writings, published by himself, were oblique, committed, polemical works. The material in his posthumous works is calm, gentlemanly, more eighteenth-century with emphasis on the ‘essay’ format. Yet nearly all productions express a pronounced evangelicalism, and in their different ways from his earlier, anonymous productions the posthumous publications are a protest against over-complicated theology. In the Inquiry, even his supporters of it would have to acknowledge that his partisanship for the Marrow position against Hadow was modified by the judgement that matters of faith and assurance, the substance of the controversy, had been made over-complicated. A set of opinions on these matters in a book by Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646), a barber-physician and theologian, had been blown out of all proportion. The following extracts from Chapter IV of his Sober Enquiry, ‘Of the Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ, or the Covenant of Grace between God and Man by the Mediator’ give a sense of his style and temper: Hitherto we have considered the Covenant of Grace, as it was managed and carried on, between God and the mediator, representing the elect and standing in their room and stead; where we have seen how life and salvation, comprehending all that was necessary to their complete deliverance from that thralldom, bondage and misery which sin had brought them under, was purchased and secured for them in his hand, and that in such a manner, as God was well pleased with. We come next to consider this same covenant, as it is managed between the mediator acting in God’s name, and representing him; and these elect sinners; whereby this purchased salvation comes to be actually applied, and the covenant blessings, thus lodged in the surety’s hand, conveyed and made over to them. This is one of these subjects, which, in themselves plain and easy, have been, by the learned labors of such as have employed themselves therein, made very intricate. And while every one molds it according to his own fancy, and the hypothesis he has taken to serve by it; it is become so overgrown with controversies, and these so embarrassed with quirks and subtleties, that it is no wonder, if a great many of these concerned in it are at a loss how to conceive of it: It is none of my design to entangle the reader in these learned mazes any further, than is just necessary to set the present questions in a proper light; the fittest method for accomplishing this, will, I think, be plainly and simply to present in one view what God has revealed unto us in his word, concerning the nature and method of this conveyance, as he has laid it to our hands, without any of that artificial coloring, and mixture of human learning and scholastic notions, which serve rather to amuse and mislead an inadvertent reader, than to any other good purpose, when interspersed with things so inconceivably above the reach of human understanding and reason. (Riccaltoun 1723: 128)

So for Riccaltoun, the gospel, though profound, is capable of simple and straightforward presentation. Coupled with this, he believes that scholastic presentations

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and attacks on theology were pretentious, confidently laying out matters beyond experience. His views of epistemology make natural theology a rather hazardous enterprise. But he is not a sceptic or a fideist. Yet his epistemology is notable for its stress on the limits of human knowledge; the modesty of its claims, therefore, were Lockean in outlook, but not Humean. The works published anonymously in his lifetime are oblique defences of orthodoxy in the sense that he pokes serious fun at the critics of orthodoxy, Hadow for the mode of his opposition to the Marrow, and Robert Sandeman for his opposition to Calvinistic evangelicalism in the form of James Hervey (1714–56), whose Theron and Aspasio had given rise to charges of antinomianism. Besides carrying into England the theological disputes to which the Marrow of Modern Divinity had given rise, it also led to what is known as the Sandemanian controversy as to the nature of saving faith. But in the works for which he is best known, on the Marrow controversy, and the other against Sandeman, there is a strange indirectness. The various adjudications respecting issues with which the books are full are delivered forcefully yet anonymously. But also there is another of his themes, that the effect of both the position of Hadow, and that of some of his opponents, make things more difficult than they should be and are. He defends the Marrow position from the charge of antinomianism with very similar arguments to that in which he defends Hervey against the charge of antinomianism. His work published in his life may be said to show an adherence to the Westminster Confession and to the Calvinistic side of the evangelical awakening. His talents lay in approaching the theologically-disputed tenets via polemical attacks on the attackers, as in Hervey’s treatment at the hands of critics of his theology. This was aimed at the cultivated classes appreciative of evangelical doctrine rather than the popular crowds at open air preaching. This is also the case in his Sober Enquiry in the case of the Marrow controversy, as well as, a generation later, in his Inquiry into . . . Letters on Theron and Aspasio (Riccaltoun 1762).

Conclusion These three vignettes provide a window into the lives of proponents of orthodoxy at the period during which the Christian community was coming under the influences of the Enlightenment, but before the Scottish Enlightenment and Moderatism in the Church of Scotland had got into its stride. What we see are Scottish theologians operating within the confessional boundaries while having a variety of outlooks. They rehearsed important topics regarding reason and revelation, faith and grace, the dangers of legalism, and the challenge of deism. They provide evidence that in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was not sufficient to make a decisive theological

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impact on capable and influential ministers. But John Simson (1667–1740) in Glasgow and William Hamilton (1669–1732) in Edinburgh were examples of troubling exceptions, and so the period was not entirely free of conflict in the Church of Scotland. But though there were areas of mutual antagonism, notably the Marrow conflict, they were within a prevailing confessional orthodoxy, and not disruptive of it. They were, in fact, a reprise of different strands in the previous century’s Puritanism, espousing a personal and evangelical covenant theology on the one hand, and a more legalistic or moralistic strand on the other. Thomas Halyburton provided a more experiential and personal preservative against a rationalistic reading of John Locke, while such as Thomas Blackwell were able to make use of the growing rationalistic temper of the century to ascribe a divine rationality to Scripture and so, for a time at least, to preserve its authority. Robert Riccaltoun is perhaps the most complex figure of the three, at once the champion of theological plain speaking, and yet with a lifelong fondness for anonymity.

Bibliography Primary Literature Blackwell, Thomas (1710a). Ratio Sacra, or An Appeal unto The Rational World about the Reasonableness of Revealed Religion. London: Heirs of Andrew Ashton. Blackwell, Thomas (1710b). Schema Sacra, or a Sacred Platform of Natural and Revealed Religion. London: Heirs of Andrew Ashton. Blackwell, Thomas (1712). Methodus Evangelica, or, A Modest Essay Upon the True Scriptural-Rational Way of Preaching the Gospel. London. Duncan, John ‘Rabbi’ (1907). Colloquia, 6th edition. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier. Halyburton, Thomas (1833). The Works of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton, with an Essay on his Life and Writings, ed. Rev. Robert Burns. Glasgow: Blackie and Son. Hervey, James (1755). Theron and Aspasio. London: J. F. and C. Rivington. Locke, John (1700). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4th edition. London: Bassett. Riccaltoun, Robert (1722). The Politick Disputant: choice Instructions for Quashing a Stubborn Adversary. Gathered from, and exemplified in, the Learned Principal Hadow’s Conduct in His late Appearances against The Marrow of Modern Divinity and its friends. Edinburgh. Riccaltoun, Robert (1723). A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present Differences in the Church of Scotland, Wherein the Matters Under Debate are Fairly Stated, the Differences Adjusted and Hadow’s Detection Considered and Weighed. London (?). Riccaltoun, Robert (1762). An Inquiry into The Spirit and Tendency of Letters on Theron and Aspasio: with A View of the Law of Nature, and an Inquiry in Letters on The Law of Nature. London.

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Riccaltoun, Robert (1771). The Works of the late Reverend Mr Robert Riccaltoun, Minister of the Gospel at Hobkirk, 3 vols. Edinburgh: A. Murray & J. Cochran. Walker, James (1875). The Theology and Theologians of Scotland, Chiefly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

Secondary Literature Helm, Paul (2015). ‘Thomas Halyburton and John Locke on the Grounding of Faith in Scripture’, in Aaron Clay Denlinger (ed.), Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 213–30. Lachman, David C. (1993). ‘Robert Riccaltoun’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron, et al. (eds.), The Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Macleod, John (1974). Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History since the Reformation. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Muller, Richard A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, 2nd edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Muller, Richard A. (2015). ‘The Rational Defence and Exposition of Christianity: Thomas Blackwell and Scottish Orthodoxy in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Aaron Clay Denlinger (ed.), Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology 1560–1775. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 231–52.

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3 Jonathan Edwards and his Scottish Contemporaries Jonathan Yeager

By the early 1740s, Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) had established an international reputation as a revivalist theologian. By this time, he had led a revival at his parish in Northampton, Massachusetts the account of which was subsequently published in London in 1737 as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. Whereas virtually no one had heard of Jonathan Edwards outside of New England in 1737, less than five years later the American minister had gained international recognition through subsequent Scottish, German, and Dutch editions of his book (Stievermann 2014). Edwards went on to publish other revivalist works—The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (1743), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746)—all of which assessed the spiritual tempo at Northampton and the broader Great Awakening that saturated New England in the first half of the 1740s. In each of these books Edwards empirically analysed the nature of authentic conversions (versus false perceptions), and whether extraordinary visions and bodily manifestations should be perceived as the work of the Holy Spirit. With each succeeding publication, Edwards took a more cautious view on the nature of true religion, warning his readers of spiritual pride exerted by those who boasted of ecstatic experiences, while also arguing that extraordinary bodily manifestations might indeed be the work of God under certain conditions (McClymond and McDermott 2012: 424–47). Beginning with A Faithful Narrative, Edwards’ earliest books on revivalism served as theological manuals for evangelical ministers, particularly for a group of Scottish Calvinists who had witnessed awakenings in their country in the early 1740s. The most significant revivals in Scotland took place in the western towns of Cambuslang and Kilsyth. A revival erupted in Cambuslang, beginning in February 1742, under the ministry of William McCulloch that peaked in the summer of that year when the town held an unprecedented two communion services during July and August. People from the surrounding regions flocked to Cambuslang to hear continuous preaching from local evangelical ministers, as well as the English itinerant minister George Whitefield, who McCulloch called upon to assist with the awakening. An estimated 20,000 attended the first communion service in July,

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and there were reports of 30,000 to 50,000 people gathered at the town the following August for the second communion service. The swell of people at Cambuslang is especially impressive considering that the nearby town of Glasgow consisted of only about 17,000 inhabitants at that time. The revival at Cambuslang spilled over into neighbouring towns and communities, most significantly at Kilsyth, where the minister there, James Robe, oversaw two communion services during the months of July and October in 1742. Whitefield also preached at Kilsyth, and estimated the crowds to be around 10,000 people (Fawcett 1971). The key leaders of the Cambuslang and Kilsyth revivals formed the core group of Scottish ministers with whom Jonathan Edwards corresponded regularly until his death in 1758. William McCulloch of Cambuslang (1691–1771), James Robe of Kilsyth (1688–1753), Thomas Gillespie of Carnock (1708–74), and John Maclaurin of Glasgow (1693–1754) all assisted with the western Scottish revivals through preaching, catechizing, and instructing those who attended the communion services and experienced conversion. Edwards’ youngest Scottish correspondent, John Erskine (1721–1803), attended the communion celebrations at both towns as an undergraduate student at Edinburgh University. Importantly, these Scottish evangelicals looked to Edwards and his theology of revivalism in order to understand the events that took place in Scotland, and to defend the awakenings as a work of God from critics (Simonson 1987: 369–71). Other Scottish ministers, including Alexander Webster of Edinburgh and John Willison of Dundee also admired Edwards, praising him in their defences of the revivals, but only McCulloch, Robe, Gillespie, Maclaurin, and Erskine maintained steady contact with the American theologian throughout their lives.¹ It is these five ministers who form the basis of this essay, each being examined in turn and with proportionally the most attention going to Erskine, who held the longest running correspondence with Edwards, and who more than any of the other four men continued to promote the American minister’s publications until the end of the eighteenth century. William McCulloch first heard of Edwards and the revival at Northampton in 1735, not long after his ordination and the start of his ministry at Cambuslang in 1731. He had read parts of Edwards’ Faithful Narrative from his pulpit, and published extracts of the American theologian’s writings in the Glasgow WeeklyHistory, a revival magazine founded with the intent of passing along news of transatlantic awakenings (Durden 1976: 255). McCulloch sought to connect the revival at Cambuslang with the awakening at Northampton, and so was eager to receive insight from Edwards on how to interpret certain conversion experiences.

¹ For Alexander Webster’s comments on Edwards, see his Divine Influence the True Spring of the Extraordinary Work at Cambuslang and Other Places in the West of Scotland (Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1742) and Willison’s A Fair and Impartial Testimony (Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1744).

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In Edwards’ first known letter to McCulloch, sent in May 1743, he expressed concern about the current practice of those affected by the revival talking too much about their spiritual experiences. Later in 1744 Edwards buttressed his position by counselling his Scottish correspondent against assuming that ecstatic behaviour could not be the work of the Spirit. Whereas Edwards complained in his first letter to McCulloch of multiple people expressing ‘unbounded openness, frequency, and constancy in talking of their experiences, declaring almost everything that passes between God and their own souls, everywhere and before everybody’, in his later letter on 5 March 1744, he advised his friend that those claiming visions and trances are ‘neither to be rejected, nor approved on such a foundation’, referring to his discussion on this topic in Distinguishing Marks of the Spirit of God (Edwards 1998: 105–7, 142). Other letters by Edwards to McCulloch throughout the 1740s and 1750s relayed news of the state of religion in America, remarks on biblical prophecies, and offering updates on establishing a transatlantic network dedicated to praying for the continuance of revivals throughout the world.² Like McCulloch, James Robe of Kilsyth also associated the revival at Northampton with those that took place in western Scotland. Not coincidentally, Robe titled his account of the religious surge at Kilsyth as A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God, at Kilsyth (1742). In his narrative, Robe drew from Edwards’ Distinguishing Marks to silence sceptical Associate Presbytery ministers that extraordinary outbursts, such as trembling, fainting, convulsions, and general hysteria that resulted from the weight of sin impressed on participants during the summer and autumn communion celebrations were not the work of the devil, but instead the effusion of the Holy Spirit. Robe was quick to point out that not everyone touched by the revival succumbed to bodily seizures or other physical outbursts, and even those whose bodies were affected exhibited signs of authentic conversion that ‘any thinking person’ would conclude to be the work of God (Robe 1742: vi–xv). On the same day that he wrote to McCulloch in May 1743, Edwards also penned a letter to Robe with similar suggestions on how to treat those claiming conversion. Edwards warned Robe not to comfort potential converts that they had definitely received divine grace, writing that ‘Many among us have been ready to think, that all high raptures are divine; but experience plainly shows, that it is not the degree of rapture and ecstasy . . . but the nature and kind that must determine us in their favor’. In hindsight, Edwards wished that he had taken better care to distinguish ‘raised affections’ with ‘deep humiliation, brokenness of heart, poverty

² See Edwards’ letters to McCulloch on 12 May 1743, 5 March 1744, 12 May 1746, 21 January 1747, 23 September 1747, 7 October 1748, 23 May 1749, 6 July 1750, 24 November 1752, and 10 April 1756 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. George S. Claghorn, vol. 16 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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of spirit, mourning for sin, solemnity of spirit, a trembling reverence towards God, tenderness of spirit, self-jealousy and fear, and great engagedness of heart after holiness of life, and a readiness to esteem others better than themselves’ (Edwards 1998: 109). As the revival in his town had by this time waned, Edwards became more cynical about the exuberance his parishioners had earlier expressed for spiritual things, wanting instead to see more evidence of contrition and sombreness in their testimony of faith. Edwards wrote other letters to Robe, offering news of awakenings in other parts of America as they occurred, but the exchange of letters was cut short when the Scottish minister passed away in 1753. On the heels of the Cambuslang and Kilsyth revivals, Thomas Gillespie of Carnock also sought to understand the nature of true conversion, looking to Edwards’ works on revivalism for a theological explanation of the outward displays he witnessed. Gillespie travelled from his parish at Carnock in western Scotland to Cambuslang and Kilsyth in order to assist McCulloch and Robe by preaching and counselling those who experienced conversion. Gillespie was especially concerned about the communicants who claimed to have received extraordinary visions and prophecies. The Carnock minister feared that affirmation of immediate revelations would diminish the authority of Scripture, while also worrying that such extraordinary impressions on the mind might be demonic. More practically, Gillespie opined that such visions and the like might give a person a false assurance of salvation for a conversion that they never truly experienced (Roxburgh 1999). Seeking advice on the nature of conversion, Gillespie wrote to Edwards in November 1746. He praised the American theologian for his works on revivalism, while also asking for clarification on certain points that he had written about. Gillespie began his letter stating: I have ever honoured you for your work’s sake, and what the great Shepherd made you the instrument of, from the time you published the then very extraordinary account of the Revival of Religion at Northampton . . . The two performances you published on the subject of the late glorious work in New England [The Distinguishing Marks and Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival], well adapted to that in Scotland, gave me great satisfaction, especially the last of them.

Gillespie was particularly keen to receive Edwards’ insight on ‘impressions respecting facts and future events, etc. whether by Scripture texts or otherwise, made on the minds of good people, and supposed to be from the Lord’ (Edwards 1959: 470–1). He looked to Edwards for advice on this subject because, contrary to some of his ministerial colleagues, who he believed had too quickly attributed such outward displays as from of the Lord, the American minister had taken a more restrained approach to analysing the veracity of such claims. At the time of his letter, Gillespie had quickly scanned Edwards’ most recent publication on Religious Affections, and had specific questions about some of the

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statements that Edwards made that related to the nature of conversion. In particular, Gillespie pointed to what he assumed were contradictory remarks in the book about all people being obliged to believe in Jesus Christ as Saviour, but yet could not do so unless they had received what Edwards had referred to as ‘a divine and spiritual light’. Gillespie cited Edwards suggesting that no one should be urged to seek Christ unless they had received divine grace enabling them to believe. Gillespie thought that everyone should actively seek God, because by doing so, some would be given supernatural faith by the Holy Spirit, allowing them to experience true conversion (Edwards 1959: 472–4). Edwards responded to Gillespie’s queries in a letter in September 1747, agreeing with his Scottish correspondent that Christians and non-Christians alike are dutifully bound to believe in Jesus Christ as Saviour. As Edwards would say more explicitly in his later book Freedom of the Will (1754), he argued that all are obliged to believe because there are no natural or physical impediments keeping them from assenting to such faith (Guelzo 1989; Fisk 2016). Only those who are enlightened by the Holy Spirit are actually able to believe, because everyone else is held captive to their sinful nature, and thus morally incapable of obtaining saving faith (Caldwell 2017: 63–7). Edwards told Gillespie that the context for his comments on this subject had to do with people in New England who had boldly claimed to be Christians, but their actions revealed that they had not received a divine and supernatural light. In line with Gillespie and orthodox Calvinism, Edwards argued that such people were not among the elect (Edwards 1998: 225–7). Gillespie corresponded with Edwards into the 1750s, but after each man was deposed from their congregations in the early years of that decade, they shifted much of their conversation from theological affairs to sympathizing with one another as both began new ministerial assignments. After he was deposed in 1750 Edwards took a position as a missionary pastor in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, while Gillespie eventually helped found the dissenting Presbytery of Relief in 1761 following his deposal in 1752. One of the more theologically astute analyses of the work of the Spirit during the revivals came from the Glasgow clergyman John Maclaurin, who is believed to have been the first of the Scottish ministers to establish a correspondence with Edwards. Maclaurin might also have been the first to propose that Edwards join an already-established group of Scottish ministers praying for worldwide revival. This united effort of transatlantic prayer became known as the ‘Concert for Prayer’, which entailed praying on set days and times during the 1740s. Edwards would later write a book (1747) in support of such coordinated prayer efforts (Marsden 2003: 334–9). There is not very much surviving correspondence between the two men, but it is clear from Maclaurin’s posthumously published writings that they shared similar theological perspectives about the nature of conversion. Combating those who claimed that the revivals were ‘enthusiastic’ and displayed ungodly

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forms of ecstatic behaviour, Maclaurin turned the tables on critics by arguing that in order to be truly human, one must accept the inner workings of the Holy Spirit, who sometimes overwhelms the senses. Advocating the Calvinistic doctrine of Original Sin, Maclaurin stated that ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the human race has been corrupted by sin, and that God has sought to restore humanity to their ‘natural state’ through supernatural grace. Such supernatural grace was reasonable and natural because it brings humans to the state of being intended by God before the Fall of Adam and Eve. It is humanity’s sinful nature that is ‘unnatural’, Maclaurin said, and in need of reform by God, who restores individuals to their rightful state. Maclaurin believed that God used secondary causes, such as preaching, to entice people into seeking divine things. No doubt finding inspiration from Edwards’ works on revivalism, he claimed that sometimes divine grace produces ecstatic responses, such as fainting, weeping, and extreme emotions, when it comes into contact with the body. In effect, Maclaurin was saying something similar to Edwards: because the human body is temporal, when it is touched by the supernatural power of God, the senses might be overwhelmed to the point of acting out in extravagant ways. Also like Edwards, Maclaurin suggested that remorse, fear, trembling, sorrow, and even weeping are not definite signs of an authentic conversion. Instead, the best way of determining true religious affections is one’s sincere and long-term desire to love God and follow his ways (Yeager 2012). Maclaurin’s sudden death in 1754 brought an end to Edwards’ correspondence with him. Writing to another Scottish correspondent in April 1755 upon learning the news of Maclaurin’s death, Edwards eulogized that ‘There is reason to think that he was one of them that stood in the gap, to make up the hedge in these evil times. He was a wise, steady, and most faithful friend of gospel truth, and vital piety, in these days of great corruption’ (Edwards 1998: 663). Edwards’ most significant Scottish connection was with the youngest of the five ministers. Unlike the other four clergymen, John Erskine was born into a wealthy household, eventually inheriting a family estate at Carnock. Erskine was groomed to become a barrister. His father was an advocate and professor of municipal law at Edinburgh University, and his grandfather had studied law in the Netherlands. But Erskine changed the course of his studies once he witnessed the revivals at Cambuslang and Kilsyth, writing an account of his experience that was never published (Yeager 2013). He was particularly impressed with the preaching of George Whitefield, Alexander Webster, John Maclaurin, and his family’s pastor, Thomas Gillespie. Although it would have been moving in the wrong social direction, Erskine purposely abandoned a career in law for the ministry, serving first at Kirkintilloch near Glasgow (1744–53), then at Culross in Fife (1753–8), and finally finishing his years in Edinburgh at the city’s New Greyfriars Church (1758–67) and the prestigious Old Greyfriars Church (1767–1803).

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By the time of the revival at Cambuslang, Erskine was already familiar with Jonathan Edwards. Erskine wrote a defence of the Scottish revivals in his Signs of the Times Consider’d (1742), remarking on how ‘delightful’ Edwards’ account of the awakening at Northampton had been. Like his fellow Scottish evangelicals, Erskine argued that ecstatic behaviour displayed at Cambuslang and Kilsyth might have been the result of the Spirit of God overcoming one’s senses. In Signs of the Times, he asked his readers, ‘is there any Absurdity in supposing that the inward concern about Religion may be so deep, that in some it must needs have a Vent by Cries, Grones, or Tremblings?’ (Erskine 1742: 28). Such views conformed to what other evangelical defenders of the revivals had written, including Alexander Webster’s The True Spring of the Extraordinary Work at Cambuslang and Other Places in the West of Scotland, in which the Edinburgh minister admitted of bodily outbursts at the communion services while insisting that these types of displays paled by comparison to the lives that had been changed (Webster 1742: 28). Erskine was perhaps the last of the five ministers to make contact with Edwards, but once he did, he proved to be an indefatigable promoter of the American minister’s writings (Bebbington 2003). During Edwards’ lifetime, Erskine regularly kept his friend abreast of the latest religious works published outside of America, gratuitously sending him scores of books, sermons, and pamphlets, perhaps amounting to as much as one-third of the American’s personal library (Mitchell 2003: 233–4). Erskine also alerted Edwards to the reception of his writings in Britain. Shortly before Edwards’ death, Erskine made his friend aware that his views on the will had been misappropriated in Scotland in such a way as to affirm the determinism presented in Lord Kames’ 1751 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. In line with Edwards’ views in Freedom of the Will, the Scottish jurist had argued that people act on their motives. But different from Edwards, Kames suggested that individuals deceive themselves into thinking that they can make decisions contrary to their motives. Kames was saying that people falsely believe that they make free choices, but in reality God determines their actions. Edwards, on the other hand, had argued that individuals do make free choices; however, because of their corrupt nature they ultimately choose to sin. Edwards asserted that because humans are not limited by any natural laws, and freely respond to sinful motives, God in no way compels them and therefore they are held responsible for their actions (Noll 2005: 100–1). Following Erskine’s advice, Edwards explained these differences between his view of liberty and that of Kames in a letter to his Scottish friend, dated 25 July 1757. Erskine then took Edwards’ letter to members of the Edinburgh book trade, one of whom printed it anonymously in 1758 as Remarks on the Essays, on the Principles of Morality, and Natural Religion. In a Letter to a Minister of the Church of Scotland (Edwards 1998: 678–81). Theologically, Erskine agreed with Edwards and other evangelical Calvinists on many traditional Reformed doctrines. In Erskine’s sermons, he told his

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parishioners that all of humanity is depraved, and born with a sinful nature. He preached against a works-oriented righteousness, claiming that salvation was only possible through Christ’s atoning work on the Cross. Like Edwards, he rejected Arminian theology that left the decision of salvation up to the individual to either accept or reject God’s offer of divine grace. Instead, as many Calvinists before him had said, Erskine proclaimed God’s sovereignty in choosing election for those he willed prior to creation. Erskine adhered to a robust form of soteriology, following the English Puritan John Owen and other Reformed ministers in affirming that Christ died only for the elect. But, similar to his evangelical colleagues, he believed that no one should be deterred from the preaching of the gospel. So, even if God had already decided who would ultimately be saved, because no one can be certain who are among the elect, all should be given the chance to respond to the gospel message. Advocating that the elect receive Christ’s imputed righteousness through transference, Erskine credited the teachings of John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and John Maclaurin on this subject (Yeager 2011: 73–8). Overall, Erskine held Edwards’ theology in high esteem. He especially liked the American minister’s Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, pointing to it as one of the best sources for determining true saving faith.³ In one of his sermons, Erskine warned his audience of feelings that might seem to imply true conversion, but had the power to bring a person ‘to the grave with a lie in your right hands’. These ‘certain religious impressions made upon their minds’, might simply be a ‘resemblance’ of a true work of the Spirit (Erskine 1798–1804: 303). Like Edwards, Erskine believed in false impressions that individuals might incorrectly interpret as a genuine work of God. Some may even obtain knowledge of God and of salvation without receiving saving faith. While Erskine paid homage to orthodox Calvinistic doctrines in his sermons, utilizing Edwards’ works to buttress his teachings, he nevertheless took a more critical approach to the American minister’s thought outside the pulpit. In Erskine’s published theological treatises, he offered at times some very innovative interpretations of Scripture that did not conform to traditional Reformed teachings, and, in one particular essay, directly challenged Edwards’ affectional approach to faith in Freedom of the Will by arguing that assent to faith occurred strictly in the mind (Yeager 2011: 89–102). In the first treatise within his 1765 Theological Dissertations, entitled ‘The Nature of the Sinai’, Erskine offered an interesting perspective on the differences between the Old and New Testaments. Drawing from the work of the Anglican Bishop William Warburton and the Dutch professor of theology Herman

³ In Erskine’s sermon on ‘The Qualifications Necessary for Teachers of Christianity’, preached on 2 October 1750 before the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, he stated in a footnote that ‘I know no writer who, in inquiring into this important subject [distinguishing a true Christian from one who has been self-deceived], has proceeded with such cautious regard to the infallible touchstone of truth, as Mr Jonathan Edwards of Northampton’.

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Venema, he argued that the covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai was simply an external agreement between God and the Israelites. Erskine averred that if the Israelites obeyed God’s law, they were entitled to blessings of material wealth, health, and prosperity. Within his first essay, Erskine asserted that he saw no spiritual blessings attached to this covenant. Instead, spiritual blessings, he said, only applied to the covenant established in the New Testament with Jesus Christ (Erskine 1765: 1–66). Although Edwards had passed away by the time Erskine’s essay was published, he surely would have opposed such a dichotomy of Scripture, since he intended to produce a ‘great work’ at the end of his life entitled The Harmony of the Old and New Testament that he never finished because of his untimely death (Minkema 1996). Erskine’s second dissertation on ‘The Character and Privileges of the Christian Church’ was a more focused analysis of the blessings associated with the New Testament covenant. In this essay, Erskine wanted to confront the English Presbyterian minister John Taylor and his Key to the Apostolic Writings (1745) in which he argued that a simple profession of faith entitled individuals to receive the spiritual blessings reserved for true Christians, including election, justification, adoption, and sanctification. In his work, Taylor claimed that the Jews of the Old Testament enjoyed the same ‘spiritual privileges’ as believers living in the present. Erskine had hoped that Edwards would challenge Taylor, sending his American friend the English Presbyterian’s books on Original Sin (1740) and his Key to the Apostolic Writings. But instead of addressing Taylor’s view of faith, Edwards used the books that Erskine sent to combat the English minister’s work on original sin. When Edwards failed to address Taylor’s view of faith, Erskine took it upon himself to write a polemical treatise on this subject. Important for Erskine’s argument against Taylor was the existence of two covenants, one with the Israelites that had been based strictly on material blessings, and one with Jesus Christ that was tied to spiritual blessings. Like other Calvinists, including Edwards, Erskine believed that there was both a visible and invisible church. While people may belong to a visible church, this did not necessarily mean that they were true Christians. Although Erskine does not cite Edwards, he might have drawn from Edwards’ discussion of Jesus’ parable on the wheat and the tares in The Distinguishing Marks and Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, since the Scottish minister also pointed out that the wheat and tares in this biblical story grow together until the time of the harvest when they are separated. Taylor, on the other hand, had said that through a simple profession of faith, one was entitled to the spiritual blessings associated with the Christian. Taylor thought that only through carnal living could a person be disqualified from eternal salvation. He further asserted that this all-encompassing covenant was first established in the Old Testament, and then continued into the New Testament. Erskine refuted him by showing that only in the New Testament was a covenant created that brought spiritual blessings to believers, and only for

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the elect who had received saving faith, and were a part of the invisible church (Erskine 1765: 67–138). In Erskine’s third theological dissertation on ‘The Nature of Christian Faith’, he presented an innovate understanding of saving faith that directly challenged the volitional and affectional notion taught by other Calvinists, including Jonathan Edwards (McIntosh 1998: 166–75). Earlier, in the preface to his Theological Dissertations, he referred to Edwards’ ‘excellent’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, but commented that his ‘ideas of the nature of faith’ are ‘different than mine’. Erskine wanted to put forward an understanding of faith that was consistent with Calvinism and reason. In doing so, he took aim at Edwards’ thesis on faith as described in his 1754 treatise on The Freedom of the Will, which Erskine believed relied too heavily on human volition. Contrary to Edwards’ affectional approach, Erskine held that faith was the product of the intellect only. Believing that the American theologian’s approach could lead to the promotion of human ability in the salvific process, Erskine demurred from including any element of human volition in his thesis on faith. Instead, for Erskine, faith is simply the revelation of Jesus Christ as the Saviour to the elect, as though a person was blind to this perspective, but then suddenly has their eyes open to this truth. For Erskine, faith was not a choice, affection, temper, or behaviour, ‘but merely persuasion or assent’. Saving faith was like putting on a pair of glasses that allowed a person for the first time to see clearly what already existed in reality. This was not a blind faith, but one that conformed to reason. Erskine’s view of faith was also evangelical in that he argued that this faith is only obtained through the supernatural revelation supplied by the Holy Spirit. So that, even though Christ as the Saviour is real, regardless of whether a person believes that fact or not, this reality could not be assented to without the supernatural enlightenment of God’s Spirit. From this perspective, volitional willing had nothing to do with faith. Because of the overwhelming power of saving faith presented by the Holy Spirit, the elect cannot help but believe. Referring to Edwards’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Erskine submitted that the excellence of the gospel can be so strong, that when it is perceived, it produces saving faith. This was Erskine’s take on the Calvinistic notion of irresistible grace: The word of God’s grace falls with such power and evidence on the soul of the enlightened sinner, that he can no more withhold his assent, than one who has his eyes open and found, can hinder himself from seeing light at noon day, or than a philosopher can refrain his assent from a mathematical theorem, when his understanding is overpowered by demonstration.

It is the mind’s adherence to overwhelming and undeniable evidence. NonChristians can believe that God exists, or even that Jesus was the Messiah, but only the elect, who are supernaturally enlightened by the Holy Spirit, have saving faith. Erskine’s view of faith was strikingly similar to that of the Scottish separatist

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minister John Glas and his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, both of whom claimed that faith was strictly an intellectual exercise (Smith 2010: 39). Erskine tried to differentiate himself from their views, however, by arguing that individuals should use the means of grace for conversion. Although it was the Holy Spirit who enlightened a person, God might employ prayer, preaching, or other means to produce this faith. On this point, Erskine might have been drawing from John Maclaurin’s view on God’s use of secondary causes. Where Erskine agreed with Edwards was on true faith being confirmed by godly activity. Faith may be revelatory in nature, but confirmation and assurance of it could be gradual, and should be tested for authenticity. Heartfelt feelings and godly actions attest to the authentic faith that the minds of the elect assent to (Erskine 1765: 139–99). In sum, while Erskine appreciated Edwards’ works on revivalism that offered advice on determining the difference between true and false conversion, he did not accept all of the Northampton minister’s theology, most notably his affectional approach to faith. Erskine’s reservations with aspects of Edwards’ theology did not deter him from promoting his works in Britain. Erskine partnered with John Maclaurin to secure forty-five Scottish subscribers for eighty-eight copies of Freedom of the Will in 1754, and, when Maclaurin passed away that same year, he was able to convince more than thirty of his countrymen to buy over fifty copies of Edwards’ book on Original Sin before it was published from Boston in 1758. After Edwards’ death 1758, Erskine became more involved in promoting his writings. He worked closely with the Edinburgh bookseller William Gray to issue a new edition of The Life of Brainerd in 1765, later using his influence to have Original Sin, Freedom of the Will, Edwards’ Two Dissertations, and Samuel Hopkins’ Life of Edwards sold in Gray’s shop. More significantly, Erskine convinced Gray, and later the bookseller’s daughter Margaret, to publish several of Edwards’ manuscripts. In the late 1760s, Erskine wrote to Jonathan Edwards Jr, urging him to publish some of his father’s dormant writings. Erskine specifically had his eye on Edwards’ unfinished History of the Work of Redemption. As early as 1755, he had learned of Edwards’ intent to publish a history of the redemption of humanity. The plan to publish this work, originally delivered by Edwards as a sermon series in Northampton in 1739, however, was interrupted by his move to Princeton to become the president of the college there, and by his subsequent death due to complications with a smallpox inoculation. Erskine hatched a plan to have Edwards Jr transcribe his father’s manuscript and send the sheets to him in Edinburgh, where he would edit them and find a publisher. Only lightly editing the manuscript, Erskine finished the work and passed it on to Gray, who published it in 1774. Erskine and Edwards Jr made plans to publish more manuscripts, but America’s war with Britain for independence disrupted their efforts. Once the war came to a conclusion, Erskine quickly regained contact with Edwards Jr, and

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shortly afterward began collaborating again on other projects. Between 1785 and Edwards Jr’s death in 1801, Erskine wielded his influence to have new editions of Edwards’ Sermons on Various Important Subjects (1785), A History of the Work of Redemption (1788), and Twenty Sermons (1789) reprinted, edited a fresh set of thirty-three previously unpublished sermons by Edwards Sr, published in 1788 as Practical Sermons, and shepherded through the press two volumes of Edwards’ ‘Miscellanies’ notebooks, printed from Edinburgh as Miscellaneous Observations on Important Theological Subjects in 1793 and Remarks on Important Theological Controversies in 1796. By the end of the century, Erskine was credited by his countrymen as the primary reason for Edwards’ works being well known in Britain. Whereas during Edwards’ lifetime, only his earliest books on revivalism— A Faithful Narrative, The Distinguishing Marks, and Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival—had been reprinted in Scotland, from the 1760s until the end of the century, Erskine tirelessly worked to ensure that nearly the full corpus of the American theologian’s works were printed in Britain, including several of his previously unpublished manuscripts (Yeager 2016). The connection between Edwards and his core group of Scottish correspondents demonstrates the high regard that they held for the American theologian’s works on revivalism. McCulloch, Robe, Gillespie, Maclaurin, and Erskine looked first to Edwards’ Faithful Narrative, and then to The Distinguishing Marks, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, and Religious Affections, for clues on how to determine an authentic conversion from a false one. But Edwards’ later books did not garner as much praise from these men. One reason was that Maclaurin and Robe had passed away before Freedom of the Will was published in 1754, and other theological works, such as his 1758 book on Original Sin. A second reason is that, by the time that these later theological treatises went to print, the revivals in America and Britain had waned. The interest in interpreting the awakenings had been a central concern for these Scottish evangelicals during the early 1740s, and so once this intense period of religion had passed, some of them turned their attention to other subjects. A third reason is that Erskine, Edwards’ longest surviving correspondent and arguably the leader of the evangelical party within the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century, found fault with some of his friend’s theological notions, especially his affectional approach on faith as described in Freedom of the Will. It would not be until the next generation, under Thomas Chalmers’ leadership, that Edwards’ Freedom of the Will would be overtly praised among the Scottish evangelical clergy (Noll 1993: 74). Despite his reservations with Edwards’ view of the will, Erskine put considerable effort in seeing to it that his friend’s books were reprinted in Britain, and, through a collaboration with Jonathan Edwards Jr, made arrangements for several unpublished manuscripts to be printed for the first time in Scotland. Edwards’ theology had a significant influence on his Scottish contemporaries’ outlook

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on revivalism; however, his later works did not have as marked an effect, because they were printed after some of his Scottish friends had died, were not on subjects that demanded their attention, or they presented theological concepts that competed with views held by those who survived. For his part, Edwards benefited from the encouragement, empathy, and patronage offered by his Scottish friends, most notably Erskine, who supplied him with multiple books that he consulted for his theological treatises.

Bibliography Primary Literature Edwards, Jonathan (1737). A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. London: Oswald. Edwards, Jonathan (1959). A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. Paul Ramsey. Volume 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan (1998). Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn. Volume 16 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Erskine, John (1742). The Signs of the Times Consider’d: Or the High Probability, That the Present Appearances in New-England, and the West of Scotland, Are a Prelude of the Glorious Things Promised to the Church in the Latter Ages. Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson. Erskine, John (1765). Theological Dissertations. London: Edward and Charles Dilly. Erskine, John (1798–1804). Discourses Preached on Several Occasions, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Creech, Constable, Dilly, Cadell, Davies, and T. Kay. Gillespie, Thomas (1771). An Essay on the Continuance of Immediate Revelations of Facts and Future Events in the Christian Church. Edinburgh: W. Gray. Moncreiff-Wellwood, Henry (1818). Account of the Life and Writings of John Erskine. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable. Robe, James (1742). A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God, at Kilsyth. London: S. Mason. Webster, Alexander (1742). Divine Influence: The True Spring of the Extraordinary Work at Cambuslang and Other Places in the West of Scotland, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson.

Secondary Literature Bebbington, David (2003). ‘Remembered Around the World: The International Scope of Edwards’s Legacy’, in David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (eds.), Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 177–200.

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Caldwell, Robert W. (2017). Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Durden, Susan (1976). ‘A Study of the First Evangelical Magazines, 1740–1748’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27: 255–78. Fawcett, Arthur (1971). The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century. London: The Banner of Truth Trust. Fisk, Philip J. (2016). Jonathan Edwards’s Turn from the Classic-Reformed Tradition of Freedom of the Will. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Guelzo, Allen C. (1989). Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Jung, Peter (2017). ‘Thomas Reid’s Reading Notes on Edwards’ Freedom of the Will’, Jonathan Edwards Studies 7: 62–71. McClymond, Michael J. and Gerald R. McDermott (2011). The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, John R. (1998). Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Marsden, George (2003). Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Minkema, Kenneth P. (1996). ‘The Other Unfinished “Great Work”: Jonathan Edwards, Messianic Prophecy, and “The Harmony of the Old and New Testament” ’, in Stephen J. Stein (ed.), Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 52–65. Minkema, Kenneth P., Adriaan C. Neele, and Kelly van Andel (eds.) (2011). Jonathan Edwards and Scotland. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic. Mitchell, Christopher W. (2003). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection’, in David W. Kling and Douglas A. Sweeney (eds.), Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad: Historical Memories, Cultural Movements, Global Horizons. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 222–47. Noll, Mark A. (1993). ‘Revival, Enlightenment, Civic Humanism and the Development of Dogma: Scotland and America, 1735–1843’, in George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll (eds.), Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 73–107. Noll, Mark A. (2005). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will Abroad’, in Harry S. Stout, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Caleb J. Maskell (eds.), Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 98–110. Roxburgh, Kenneth B. E. (1999). Thomas Gillespie and the Origins of the Relief Church in 18th Century Scotland. Bern: Peter Lang. Simonson, Harold P. (1987). ‘Jonathan Edwards and His Scottish Connections’, Journal of American Studies 21: 353–76.

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Smith, John Howard (2010). The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion: A History of Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stievermann, Jan (2014). ‘Faithful Translations: New Discoveries on the German Pietist Reception of Jonathan Edwards’, Church History 83: 324–66. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2011). Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2012). ‘Nature and Grace in the Theology of John Maclaurin’, Scottish Journal of Theology 65: 435–48. Yeager, Jonathan M. (ed.) (2013). ‘The John Erskine Letterbook, 1742–45’, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, general editor John McCallum, Vol. 14. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 229–61. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2016). Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

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4 Early Enlightenment Shifts Simson, Campbell, and Leechman Christian Maurer

Introduction The phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, which deeply marked a broad range of eighteenth-century Scottish culture, including theology and religious life, is typically associated with themes such as innovation and progress, toleration, and rational debate.¹ Sometimes by commentators, and sometimes by Enlightenment thinkers themselves, these concepts are contrasted to stagnation and barbarism, to intolerance and persecution, and to dogmatic insistence on tradition. It is often noted that in the highly polemical context of the French Enlightenment, such negative notions were associated with theology and religion, whereas the positive ones were said to characterize philosophy. In the Scottish Enlightenment, by contrast, the relation between philosophy and theology was famously less confrontational—most Enlightenment figures were active members of the Kirk, and taught at universities. Yet then again, when in the early eighteenth century Scotland underwent profound political, religious, and cultural changes, tensions were clearly stronger than during the Enlightenment. Besides the impact of the more general political situation created by the Union of Parliaments in 1707, the recently re-established Presbyterian Kirk found itself in the difficult position of having to deal with new developments, in and outside Scotland, regarding doctrine and worship, subscription to the Confession of Faith, and patronage. In this situation, the themes of innovation, toleration, and rational debate constituted areas of conflict, which marked theological developments in early eighteenth-century Scotland. In the present chapter, I concentrate on three theologians: John Simson (1667–1740), Archibald Campbell (1691–1756), and William Leechman (1706–85). They taught at Scottish universities in the first half of the eighteenth century—Simson in Glasgow from 1708 until 1728, the year of his suspension by the General Assembly; Campbell in St Andrews from 1731 until

¹ See for example Broadie (2001: 1–2); Skoczylas (2001: 15).

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1756; and Leechman in Glasgow from 1743 until 1785. The tensions between the more conservative orthodox members of the Kirk and these three more, say, ‘liberal’ theologians were particularly visible when it came to doctrine: Simson, Campbell, and Leechman were at some point in their careers confronted by Committees for Purity of Doctrine—Simson around 1715–17 and 1727–9; Campbell around 1735–6; and Leechman around 1744. Studying their cases allows us to understand better not only where and why their preaching, teaching, and writing were considered problematic, but more generally how the Kirk’s dealing with such matters changed within a relatively short time span, and how developments took place which later in the century helped the members of the Moderate party famously rise to prominence. Some introductory remarks are apposite on the themes of innovation, toleration, and rational debate. First, during the Enlightenment, innovation was typically connected to a general optimism about the progress of society. Especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, a strong faction of the Church of Scotland was opposed to novel developments, especially in religious matters, since innovation was seen to threaten the Kirk’s unity, and since there was a general fear of heresies. Several Acts of the General Assembly demonstrate this attitude: the ‘Barrier Act’ from 8 January 1697 was aimed at preventing ‘innovations’ in religious matters (Acts, 260f.), meaning a broad range of heresies, and on 21 April 1707 an ‘Act against Innovations in the Worship of God’ was passed. It was motivated by the idea that ‘the purity of religion, and particularly of divine worship, and uniformity therein, is a signal blessing to the Church of God’ (Acts, 418f.). In order to strengthen the recently re-established Presbyterian Church, the General Assembly gave the right to the respective Commissions to ‘use all proper means, by applying to the Government or otherwise, for suppressing and removing all such innovations, and preventing the evils and dangers that may ensue thereupon to this Church’ (Acts, 418f.). Second, toleration—that is the acceptance for some higher reason of ‘dissenting’ opinions, doctrines, and practices—is often presented as one of the flagship virtues of the Enlightenment. The ‘Act concerning the Grievances of this Church from Toleration, Patronages, &c.’ from 14 May 1715 (Acts, 501f.) demonstrates that in the early eighteenth century, a significant faction of the Church of Scotland saw toleration as a danger—somewhat in the vein of the seventeenth-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford, who warned against toleration in his Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649). The Act complains that in Scotland, ‘the toleration doth not restrain the disseminating the most dangerous errors, by requiring a Confession of Faith, or subscription to the doctrinal articles of the Established Church, as is required of Dissenters in England’ (Acts, 502). Again, the underlying point was the preservation of the unity of the Scottish Kirk, which was seen as threatened by new developments in and outside Scotland—political, religious, and intellectual more broadly speaking.

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Third, as far as theological perspectives on reason and rational debate are concerned, the recently re-established Presbyterian Kirk faced the difficult task of simultaneously countering currents which exaggerated the weakness of reason (such as religious Enthusiasm and Fideism), as well as currents which exaggerated the strength of natural reason (such as Arminianism, Socinianism, and Deism). The very opening of the Confession of Faith (first adopted in 1648, renewed in 1690) demonstrates how the orthodox position oscillated between two extremes: Altho’ the Light of Nature, and the Works of Creation and Providence, do so far manifest the Goodness, Wisdom, and Power of God, as to leave Men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that Knowledge of God, and of his Will, which is necessary unto Salvation. (Confession of Faith, I.1., 23f.)

Scripture references to the famous passages in the Pauline Epistles Rom. 1:19–20 and Rom. 2:14–15 on the light of nature (which is natural reason or conscience unaided by Revelation), were used to point at two demarcation lines for orthodoxy. On the one hand, the weakness of natural reason had to be emphasized to insist on the necessity of Revelation (a claim for example endangered by the Deists’ confidence in the strength of natural reason). On the other hand, as the case of Campbell will demonstrate, this same weakness had not to be exaggerated, since then the inexcusability of postlapsarian mankind would be endangered. These points show why, in the early eighteenth century, certain larger developments were eyed with suspicion by conservative orthodox members of the Kirk. The increasing success of the ‘novel’ natural sciences—even if these were typically presented as a support to a religious world-view—nurtured suspicions about the importance attributed to reason, especially when placed next to Deist claims that revelation was superfluous, and that natural reason on its own could know essential truths about God and salvation. On a somewhat different front, the insistence by conservative orthodox thinkers on the importance of doctrinal soundness and of the Confession of Faith was seen as threatened by an increasing emphasis on the centrality of moral goodness and the virtuous life (see Sher 1985; Ahnert 2014). Especially Genevan and Dutch debates on subscription to the Confessions of Faith were followed with great suspicion in Scotland. The emphasis on the virtuous life was typically connected to new developments in moral philosophy, which often took place outside the universities, and were accompanied by a revived interest in classical authors—most importantly the Stoics, according to whom virtue was fully in our power, or eph hêmin, and did thus not depend on grace.² Emphasizing

² Here, one should mention the importance of the Cambridge Platonists, of Shaftesbury, and later of Hutcheson (see Rivers 1991, 2000; Hutton 2015). In different ways, these thinkers strongly limited the consequences of the Fall and stressed how far our moral faculty could bring us in our attempts to live a virtuous life.

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moral goodness over grace was seen as an attack on a central pillar of Reformed religion in the eyes of many conservative orthodox members of the Kirk. More specifically, universalist ideas about grace and salvation, as well as Christological questions turned into battlegrounds for demarcating orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Many theological ‘innovations’ were seen as connected to heresies from the seventeenth century and earlier: Arminianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Arianism, Antinomianism, and so on, were often feared to re-emerge.

John Simson In such an atmosphere, Simson taught divinity at Glasgow. On 13 May 1715—one day before the passing of the mentioned ‘Act concerning the Grievances of this Church from Toleration, Patronages, &c.’ (Acts, 501f.)—the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland appointed a Committee for preserving the Purity of Doctrine in order to decide a charge of heresy by James Webster against John Simson. Within one decade, Simson attracted accusations by conservative orthodox factions of the Kirk twice, and he was finally suspended by the General Assembly. Simson is often described as a ‘New Licht’ theologian, which points directly at one of the major problems the conservative faction in the Kirk had with Simson’s theology and teaching methods: innovation. Simson had studied in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and then in the Netherlands (in Leiden and Utrecht). He returned to Scotland and became Professor of Divinity at Glasgow in 1708. In his teaching, Simson relied on textbooks by Johannes Marckius (1656–1731) and Bénédict Pictet (1655–1724). He avoided overly scholastic and speculative theological approaches, and instead emphasized the importance of biblical revelation for religion and morality. Anne Skoczylas describes Simson’s theology as ‘inclusive Calvinism’, in which he attempted to incorporate ‘some natural theology and a form of hypothetical universalism’ (Skoczylas 2001: 92). Was Simson emphasizing natural reason too much, and putting in danger free grace? Beyond such worries, Simson was also a modernizer in education, training his students in open debate and controversy with the goal of enabling them to answer potentially dangerous challenges and heresies (Skoczylas 2001: 59f., 76, 87f.). Furthermore, even if Simson supported the Confession of Faith, he nevertheless treated is as a man-made and revisable document. By certain factions in the Church of Scotland, this may have been considered as too lukewarm an embracing of the Kirk’s doctrinal pillars—even if the Confession itself contains explicit disclaimers about its own status, and strong rejections of the Roman Catholic way of imposing unity (Confession of Faith, I.9–10, XXV.5–6). Tensions between Simson and conservative exponents of orthodoxy arose quickly. (Skoczylas 2001: 103ff.). Based on Simson’s teaching and preaching, and on testimony of private conversations, James Webster accused Simson of

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Arminianism, Jesuitism, and Socinianism (Skoczylas 2001: 68). Webster’s attacks focused on suspicions of universalism regarding the number of the elect, on Simson’s emphasis on the power of natural reason in connection with his treatment of the topos of postlapsarian corruption, and on Simson’s ‘liberal’ approach to federal theology, in particular in connection with the imputation of Adam’s original sin (Skoczylas 2001: 76–99; Ahnert 2014: 31f.). The ‘Act for maintaining the Purity of Doctrine of this Church, and determining the Process, Mr James Webster against Mr John Simson’ from 14 May 1717 expresses the following opinion, adopted by the majority of the General Assembly: Simson hath adopted some hypotheses different from what are commonly used among orthodox divines, that are not evidently founded on Scripture, and tend to attribute too much to natural reason and the power of corrupt nature, – which undue advancement of reason and nature is always to the disparagement of revelation and efficacious free grace. (Acts, 518)

Simson was warned, but for the time being he could continue teaching and preaching. An exemplary moment in Simson’s defence against Webster demonstrates the centrality of the theme of free debate. When Simson had to defend himself against the charge of Arminianism, he stated: ‘I will not Grant, that a Proposition is Erroneous, because Arminius Taught it’ (Simson 1715: 200; Skoczylas 2001: 150). Simson was not willing to discard a thesis without examination, only because it was defended by someone who was labelled a heretic. Rather, open debate of such propositions was essential for the progress of mankind, especially when the interpretation of Scripture was concerned. Otherwise, one risked to introduce ‘into this Church, some of the most Dangerous Popish Errors; such as, making the Authority of Men, whether Good or Bad, Orthodox or Heterodox, the Rule of Interpreting Scripture, and of Truth and Error in Matters of Religion’ (Simson 1715: 108). We will see this point re-emerge in Campbell. In a second round of charges, about a decade later, Simson faced more serious trouble. Within an environment fearful of Antinomianism, shaken by the Marrow controversy, anxious to defend mandatory subscription to the Confession of Faith against continental developments, and struggling with modernizing university education, a renewed attack led finally to Simson’s suspension (Skoczylas 2001: 210–39; Ahnert 2014: 27–33). The ‘Act concerning Mr John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow’ from 16 May 1728, named worries about his sincerity in professing Trinitarian creeds, since on several occasions he was judged to ‘inject needless and ill-grounded doubts and scruples into the minds of men’ (Acts, 604.). On 13 May 1729, in the ‘Act concerning Mr John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the College of Glasgow’, the General Assembly confirmed its previous sentence, ‘suspending the said Mr John Simson from preaching and teaching’ (Acts, 608.; Skoczylas 2001: 210–26).

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Archibald Campbell In its session of 19 May 1735, the General Assembly passed an ‘Act and Recommendation for Preserving Unity, and Preventing Error within this Church’, which evidences continuing worries about the unity of the Kirk—especially after the 1733 secession. The Act states that the General Assembly considers, with great grief and regret, that deism, infidelity, Popery, and other gross errors, appear to be very prevalent and threatening in this island at this day; and that it is the duty of this Church to do all in her power, under Divine direction, for suppressing the same, and preventing the growth thereof. (Acts, 632)

Only a few weeks later, on 3 July 1735, Archibald Campbell—Simson’s former student—got a visit by three members of a new Committee for Purity of Doctrine, who presented him with a list of seventeen potentially heretical points from his writings (Campbell 1735: 5–10). Campbell had been appointed Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in St Andrews in 1730. In 1735, following a series of pamphlets, his publications on matters of theology and moral philosophy attracted the attention of the conservative faction in the Kirk.³ Campbell claimed, for example, that the laws of nature ‘in themselves are a certain and sufficient rule to direct rational Minds to happiness, yet this, in the present situation of mankind, does by no means supersede the fitness or necessity of supernatural Revelation’ (Campbell 1730: vi). Four points in Campbell’s published writings were considered particularly problematic, as a Report by the Committee reveals: first, Campbell’s claim that without Revelation, we are unable ‘to find out the Being of a God’; second, his assertion that there is a moral law of nature which is ‘sufficient to guide rational Minds to Happiness’; third, his claim that self-love is the motive for all ‘virtuous and religious Actions’; and fourth, his view that after Christ’s death, the Apostles did not expect him to resurrect, which Campbell claimed to prove that ‘the Apostles were no Enthusiasts’ (Campbell 1736b: iii–iv; Campbell 1730). Taken together, the first two points show the difficulty of the Kirk’s position regarding the status of natural reason. On the one hand, the Committee refers in its criticisms of Campbell to the very opening of the Confession of Faith, I.1, and to Rom. 1:19–20, insisting that Campbell’s claims about the weakness of natural reason put at risk mankind’s inexcusability, even if he wanted to defend the necessity of revelation. In his Oratio de vanitate luminis naturæ (1733), Campbell had claimed—purportedly against the Deists’ confidence in natural reason—that

³ By then, Campbell had published the Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (1728/1733), the Discourse Proving that the Apostles were no Enthusiasts (1730), and the Oratio de vanitate luminis naturæ (1733). In 1739, he would furthermore publish The Necessity of Revelation, and in 1759 there was a posthumous publication of The Authenticity of the Gospel-History Justified.

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the erroneous theological ideas in the heathen philosophers’ writings prove that natural reason alone cannot discover anything regarding God’s existence, his attributes, or the immortality of the soul.⁴ Yet the members of the Committee were equally concerned about Campbell’s statements regarding the reality of (moral) laws of nature, which they feared to entail that ‘a supernatural Revelation of a Saviour, and Faith in him, were superfluous, and not necessary to the Happiness of fallen Man’ (Campbell 1736b: iii). In combination with Campbell’s claims about the reality of such a moral law of nature—which would be sufficient to guide a rational agent to happiness, if only it were discovered—Campbell’s position looked particularly suspicious and in turn close to Deism (Campbell 1730: vi; Maurer 2016a, 2016b). His confidence in progress in the sciences, which he shared with Simson, made for a potentially dangerous mixture of ideas. Campbell’s moral philosophy was furthermore judged problematic because of its emphasis on self-love as ‘the sole and universal Motive to all virtuous and religious Actions’, because of its apparent rejection of our duty to self-denial, and because of its neglecting ‘the present State of corrupt Nature’ (Campbell 1735: 6, 9, 10). Did Campbell underplay the consequences of the Fall, and our dependence on divine grace?

Simson’s Letters to Campbell, and Campbell’s Pamphlets As in the case of Simson, questions about the power of natural reason, about good works and grace, and about the capacity of human creatures to morally improve themselves, attracted a lot of attention in the case of Campbell. After Simson’s suspension, Campbell and his former professor continued discussing theological, philosophical, and procedural matters. In two of Simson’s letters to Campbell, written during the period when Campbell was under investigation by the Committee for Purity of Doctrine, and allowing for quite intimate insights into their theological ideas, Simson expresses repeatedly his general dissatisfaction with ‘Speculations about the phisical or metaphisical nature of the first & supreme Cause of all Effects’ (Simson 1736a: 2). Simson opposes these ‘philosophical notions’ to a sincere believer’s owning the supreme power, wisdom, Justice & Goodness of the first cause of all things & pay that Reverence, Love & Obedience that is due to him: altho’ all are obliged to study to have more Just & distinct notions of him, according as they advance in the knowledge of the Nature of the things he has made or the discoveries providence affords them. (Simson 1736a: 2) ⁴ Mills (2015: 728) suggests that The Necessity of Revelation (1739), in which Campbell later elaborates on the points criticized by the Committee, can be read as an ‘experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy’.

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For Simson, even without Revelation, any man can observe and learn ‘the Natural difference between Good & Evil, Virtue & vice’ (Simson 1736b: 1), understand that virtue and happiness are connected, and from there proceed to ‘the discovery of the Moral Attributes of God & also of the chief precepts of his law’ (Simson 1736b: 2). Put in terms of the debates on Rom. 1:19–20, Simson may tend to emphasize the power of natural reason over mankind’s inexcusability. Accordingly, Simson disagrees with the conclusions Campbell draws from the theological errors in the heathen philosophers’ writings. Simson sees the limitations of natural reason especially in the domains of speculative or metaphysical matters. However, when observing the universe with natural reason alone, ‘the Infinite wisdome & power of their maker is discoverable’ (Simson 1736b: 2). Scholastic and metaphysical speculations, however, are dangerous since ‘from false Speculations false conclusions will naturally follow which would overturn all Religion which therefore ought to be confuted; tho it oft happens that these who hold such fals Speculations had no thought of such consequences’ (Simson 1736b: 2). In accordance with his principles, Simson argues instead that natural philosophy and free, open debate are crucial remedies against prejudices: all the heathens who were trained up with fals notions lay under almost incurable prejudices against acquiring right Ideas especially considering their Ignorance of natural philosophy & the danger of thinking, or at least writing freely on that subject. (Simson 1736a: 3)

This demonstrates Simson’s persistent openness to new discoveries in natural philosophy, which he, like Campbell, considers a means to better understand divine providence, and it shows his uninterrupted commitment to open, free debate. More generally, Simson also seems to embrace a principle that came to mark profoundly the moral discourse of eighteenth-century Scotland, against the efforts of the conservative orthodox faction in the Kirk: virtuous conduct can matter more than orthodoxy in doctrine. Unfortunately, we do not possess Campbell’s answers to Simson. But in both pamphlets from 1736, Campbell manifests a similar spirit to Simson’s. One point is particularly noteworthy: when charged with the heresy of Socinianism, Campbell adapts Simson’s reply to the charge of Arminianism: if all orthodox divines condemn Socinus’ teaching on the weakness of natural reason, does it necessarily follow from hence, that herein without Doubt Socinus is erroneous? I am apt to think, that the Judgment of Orthodox Divines is not in all Instances infallibly right: And as little can I think, that the Judgment of Hereticks is in all Instances infallibly wrong. [ . . . ] For one to pretend, that in such a Point he is Orthodox, because in that Point he differs from such a Heretick, is (in my Apprehension) to prove a Traitor to Truth, and rudely to insult over human Understanding. (Campbell 1736a: 22)

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Rational debate and examination remain crucial, even if potential heresies are in play. Like Simson before him, Campbell refers to the Confession of Faith, I.9 and XXV.5, insisting that all churches, even the purest ones, are ‘subject both to Mixture and Error’ (Campbell 1736a: 44). In some sense, this is indeed a call for toleration. When it comes to the interpretation of specific Scripture passages—in Campbell’s case, debates centred especially on Rom. 1:19–20—Campbell maintains that Scripture has to be treated as more important than the man-made Confession of Faith. Protestants should beware of falling into the same error as the Church of Rome: But for a Society of Men and Protestants, without any Evidence arising from a free and open Debate, or from a careful Enquiry into an Argument that deserves the utmost Attention, to submit to acknowledge that for a Truth, which, it is affirm’d, universal Experience declares to be a Falshood, is not to be reconcil’d to the Principles of common Sense and Honesty. (Campbell 1736b: 41)

On 21 May 1736, the General Assembly declared in its ‘Act and Recommendation for preserving Purity of Doctrine, and concerning Professor Campbell’ that they are of opinion, that the examining and stating the matter, as has been done by the committee for purity of doctrine, is sufficient for cautioning against the errors that some at first supposed Mr Campbell was guilty of, without giving any judgment or formal sentence upon the report; and therefore do resolve and appoint that the matter rest here. (Acts, 639)

They then recommended to Campbell in particular, and more generally to ‘all ministers and teachers of divinity whatsoever within this National Church’ to ‘hold fast the form of sound words’, not to lead their hearers to error. In comparison with the Kirk’s handling of Simson, this was a mild judgement, which evidences a substantial change in policy. Campbell could continue teaching in St Andrews. However, the Acts of the General Assembly from 1737 demonstrate that the matter was not entirely settled in 1736. The General Assembly was accused of supporting Campbell’s ideas, and it had to explicitly declare that ‘they gave no judgment or formal sentence upon the report of the committee, and therefore could not be constructed to adopt any of [Campbell’s] expressions’ (Acts, 644f.).

William Leechman Less than a decade later, William Leechman’s Sermon The Nature, Reasonableness, and Advantages of Prayer, printed in 1743 in the famous Foulis brothers’ press in Glasgow, stirred up controversy. Leechman had just been appointed Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, yet the Presbytery of Glasgow rejected him on

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account of his Sermon (Davidson Kennedy 2004). There, Leechman discussed the nature of prayer, defended it against objections and drew attention to ‘the advantages which arise from the sincere and stedfast practice of it’ (Leechman 1743: 4). The goal of prayer can be neither to inform an omniscient God about our intentions, nor to move God’s affections or ‘raise his pity’, since ‘God is not subject to those sudden passions and emotions of mind which we feel’ (Leechman 1743: 17). Thus, instead of seeking to influence God with our prayers, we should conceive it as a support of the cultivation of virtue, which produces a specific ‘frame of mind’ in us (Leechman 1743: 17f.). Because prayer is so useful in the cultivation of virtue, for example reinforcing humility over pride, and in helping us to overcome bad habits, Leechman suggests that prayer ‘is not only an innocent and harmless exercise; but, that it is our indispensible duty to be frequently employed in it’ (Leechman 1743: 20). David Hume somewhat jokingly referred to Leechman as an ‘Atheist’ in one of his letters, and discussed Leechman’s presentation of prayer as a mere ‘kind of rhetorical Figure’ (Hume 1954: 11, 13). Hume’s main point was that prayer could not be considered a duty, but much more in Leechman’s Sermon was potentially dangerous from a conservative orthodox point of view, as shown in the Remarks of the Committee of the Presbytery of Glasgow (Leechman 1744: 41–5). The striking quasi-absence in Leechman’s Sermon of references to Christ as a mediator raised Christological worries. Suspicions of universalism emerged since Leechman seemed ‘to insinuate, that there are some of Mankind, who, without the Benefit of Revelation, are capable to reason out to themselves such a Knowledge of God, as may be sufficient to their attaining to eternal Happiness’, and since he seemed to suggest ‘a necessary Connection betwixt a penitent Disposition, and the Pardon of our Sins’, against God’s free gift of grace (Leechman 1744: 43f.). Several articles in the Confession of Faith were quoted (amongst which XXI.2.; I.1.; and XV.3), and the Committee referred to the ‘Act concerning Preaching’ from 21 May 1736, which was passed on the very day when the Campbell case was closed. There, the General Assembly reminded the Kirk’s ministers and preachers that in order to ‘enforce conformity to the moral law both in heart and life, [ . . . ] it is necessary to show men the corruption and depravity of human nature by their fall in Adam’ (Acts, 636f.). Leechman managed to defend himself. He stressed his Trinitarian convictions and declared that he never ‘meant to assert that the necessity of the Christian religion itself is superseded by the light of nature; or that the light of nature is sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of his will, which is necessary to salvation’ (Acts, 676). However, he also stated that Rom. 1:19–21 and the Confession of Faith, I.1, allow for ‘a very considerable Degree of speculative Knowledge attainable by the Light of Nature’ (Leechman 1744: 72). The General Assembly subsequently decided that ‘the Professor has given abundant satisfaction concerning the orthodoxy of his sentiments’ (Acts, 677) and closed his case.

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Hazlett states that as a consequence, as in the case of Simson, ‘fear of heresy trials [ . . . ] drove Leechman and others like him into self-protective inscrutability, evasiveness and silence’, as well as ‘literary self-censorship’ (1993: 20). This diagnosis may not be the full truth, especially not in the case of Campbell, but it points at some of the challenges which novel ideas in theology faced in the first half of the century, before the Moderates were in power.

Concluding Thoughts Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1730 until his death, provides a Glaswegian link between the three theologians. Like Campbell, Hutcheson was a student of Simson, and he was a supporter of Leechman, who later wrote the Preface to the posthumous publication of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy (1755). Hazlett presents Simson, Hutcheson, and Leechman as a ‘trio’, emphasizing that for quite some time, the moral philosopher Hutcheson was ‘the most sought for teaching in theology’ in the University of Glasgow (Hazlett 1993: 17.). Hutcheson was one of the earliest proponents of the Scottish Enlightenment to decisively shift emphasis to the importance of a virtuous life, namely one based on benevolence in deed and character (see Moore 2013). The Classics played an important role in this, and Hutcheson’s interest in the Stoics culminated in an anonymous translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, published in 1742 with James Moor. In Leechman’s Preface to Hutcheson’s System, Leechman wrote about Hutcheson: The grand maxims he dwelt upon, and laboured to instil into the minds of his pupils, were to rejoice above all things in the firm persuasion of the universal Providence of a Being infinitely wise and good, who loves all his works, and cannot be conceived as hating any thing he hath made. (Leechman 1755: xxxiv)

Hutcheson’s Sunday lectures on ‘the truth and excellency of Christianity’, Leechman described as drawing ‘from the original records of the New Testament, and not from the party-tenets or scholastic systems of modern ages’ (Leechman 1755: xxxvi). In a phrase which reminds us of Simson, Leechman stated on Hutcheson: ‘High speculations on disputable points, either of Theology or Philosophy, he looked upon as altogether improper for the pulpit, at least on all ordinary occasions’ (Leechman 1755: xxxviii). In a similar vein to Hutcheson, William Hamilton (1669–1732) in Edinburgh, ally to Hutcheson and teacher of Leechman, had emphasized the importance of living a benevolent life over engaging in speculations about doctrinal orthodoxy (Hamilton 1732: 16). These examples further illustrate the more general shift noted in Simson, Campbell, and Leechman. Famously, the question of subscription to the Confession of Faith was quasiundiscussed in eighteenth-century Scotland—subscription remained mandatory

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throughout the Enlightenment (Kidd 2000, 2004). Even so, we have seen that the Kirk started to deal more and more, say, ‘moderately’ with problems concerning orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and dissent. The Campbell episode especially seems to have been a turning point—a profound disappointment for the conservative factions in the Church of Scotland, yet a boost for the subsequent Moderate ascendancy. The general emphasis by the discussed early eighteenth-century theologians on the importance of a virtuous life, and their idea that this virtuous life is something we can cultivate ourselves, their openness for rational debate and tolerant attitude towards dissenting ideas, as well as their interest in the new sciences came to mark much of Scottish theology later in the eighteenth century.⁵

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (1728). The Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, with the Scripture Proofs at large, ed. Church of Scotland. Edinburgh. Anon. (1843). Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1638–1842, ed. Church Law Society. Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Printing & Publishing Society. Campbell, Archibald (1730). A Discourse Proving that the Apostles were no Enthusiasts. London. Campbell, Archibald (1733). Oratio de vanitate luminis naturæ. Edinburgh. Campbell, Archibald (1735). Remarks upon some Passages in Books publish’d by Mr Archibald Campbell [ . . . ], with his Explications on them. Edinburgh. Campbell, Archibald (1736a). Professor Campbell’s Further Explications. Edinburgh. Campbell, Archibald (1736b). The Report of the Committee for Purity of Doctrine, with Professor Campbell’s Remarks upon it. Edinburgh. Hamilton, William (1732). The Truth and Excellency of the Christian Religion. Edinburgh. Hume, David (1954). New Letters of David Hume, ed. R. Klibansky and E. Mossner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutcheson, Francis (1755). A System of Moral Philosophy. London. Leechman, William (1743). The Nature, Reasonableness, and Advantages of Prayer, with an Attempt to answer the Objections against it. A Sermon. Glasgow. Leechman, William (1744). The Remarks of the Committee of the Presbytery of Glasgow upon Mr Leechman’s Sermon on Prayer, with his Replies thereunto. Edinburgh.

⁵ I wish to thank Sandy Stewart for his invaluable help and patience in deciphering John Simson’s handwriting, as well as Neven Leddy and the editors of these volumes for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. This chapter has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), grant number PP00P1_163751.

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Leechman, William (1755). ‘Preface’, in Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, ed. William Leechman. London. Simson, John (1715). The Case of Mr John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow. Simson, John (1736a) [manuscript]. Letter to Archibald Campbell, 3 March 1736. National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Lawrie Papers: GD461/15/7. Simson, John (1736b) [manuscript]. Letter to Archibald Campbell, May 1736. National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Lawrie Papers: GD461/15/8.

Secondary Literature Ahnert, Thomas (2014). The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment 1690–1805. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Broadie, Alexander (2001). The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Davidson Kennedy, Thomas (2004). ‘Leechman, William (1706–1785)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hazlett, Ian (1993). ‘Ebbs and Flows of Theology in Glasgow 1451–1843’, in Ian Hazlett (ed.), Traditions of Theology in Glasgow 1450–1990. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1–26. Hutton, Sarah (2015). British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidd, Colin (2000). ‘Scotland’s Invisible Enlightenment: Subscription and Heterodoxy in the Eighteenth-Century Kirk’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 30: 28–59. Kidd, Colin (2004). ‘Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55/3: 502–19. Maurer, Christian (2016a). ‘Archibald Campbell and the Committee for Purity of Doctrine on Natural Reason, Natural Religion, and Revelation’, History of European Ideas 42/2: 256–75. Maurer, Christian (2016b). ‘Doctrinal Issues Concerning Human Nature and Self-love, and the Case of Archibald Campbell’, Intellectual History Review 26/3: 355–69. Maurer, Christian (2016c). ‘“A Lapsu Corruptus”: Calvinist Doctrines and SeventeenthCentury Scottish Theses Ethicæ’, History of Universities 29/2: 188–209. Mills, Robin (2015). ‘Archibald Campbell’s Necessity of Revelation (1739): The Science of Human Nature’s First Study of Religion’, History of European Ideas 41/6: 728–46. Moore, James (2013). ‘Evangelical Calvinists versus the Hutcheson Circle: Debating the Faith in Scotland, 1738–1739’, in A. Dunan-Page and C. Prunier (eds.), Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain 1550–1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas 209. Dordrecht: Springer, 177–93.

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Rivers, Isabel (1991). Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. I: Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivers, Isabel (2000). Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. II: Shaftesbury to Hume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sher, Richard (1985). Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Skoczylas, Anne (2001). Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early 18th-Century Scotland. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Skoczylas, Anne (2004). ‘Simson, John (1667–1740)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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5 Philosophy and Theology in the Mid-Eighteenth Century Thomas Ahnert

The most famous author in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland to comment on the relationship between philosophy and theology was probably David Hume. Near the end of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he declared that the ‘best and most solid foundation’ of divinity and theology was ‘faith and divine revelation’ (Hume 1975: 165). Philosophy, founded on natural reason and empirical evidence, was of no use in matters of religion. Many other passages can be found where Hume uses similar, broadly fideist arguments to criticize the application of philosophical reason to religious questions. In his essay on the immortality of the soul, for example, which was published posthumously in 1777, Hume said that it was ‘difficult’ to prove the immortality of the soul by the ‘mere light of reason’. It was rather ‘the gospel, and the gospel alone that has brought life and immortality to light’ (Hume 1987: 590). The question I shall address in this chapter is how Hume’s criticism of the use of philosophy in religious and theological argument compares to the beliefs of his contemporaries on the same subject. In particular, I shall examine his intellectual relationship with the two main groups within the mid-eighteenth-century Presbyterian Kirk, the ‘Orthodox’ and the ‘Moderates’. That relationship has been interpreted in various ways. Some have argued that Hume’s appeals to the non-rational foundations of faith must have been either subterfuge or heavy-handed irony. His real aim, it is said, was to undermine religious belief in general (Berman 1987: 70; Gaskin 1988: 181; Buckle 2001: 274; Botterill 2002: 289). By praising its dependence on non-rational faith, he was as good as saying that it deserved no credibility at all. Hume was, basically, an atheist, who veiled his true beliefs, possibly for prudential reasons. The execution of Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy was in the distant past by the time Hume was writing, but he himself had encountered opposition of a less life-threatening kind when his candidacy for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy was blocked in 1744–5, and when, a decade later, orthodox Presbyterians sought to pass a motion censuring Hume and his remote kinsman Henry Home, Lord Kames, for their philosophical beliefs (Stewart 2001; Ahnert 2014: 96–7; Sher 2015: 63–74). One of the most vigorous recent proponents of the argument that Hume was a genuine atheist is Paul Russell, who writes that ‘Hume’s philosophy

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of religion has an evident practical objective, which is to discredit and dislodge the role of religion in human life’ (Russell 2008: 290). Hume, according to Russell was on a ‘Lucretian mission’ to banish religion from human society altogether. His protestations about the importance of faith rather than reason in religious affairs simply cannot be taken literally. He must, rather, be understood to mean the exact opposite of what he was saying. An alternative explanation has been put forward by James Harris who has argued that Hume’s fideist statements need to be seen in relation to his failed bid for the Edinburgh chair in 1744–5, when his main opponents were not the more orthodox Presbyterians, but the ‘Moderate’ and, as we might now call them, more ‘liberal’ or ‘enlightened’ members of the Kirk, such as the Glasgow professor of moral philosophy, Francis Hutcheson, and his close associate, the Glasgow professor of divinity, William Leechman. Hume’s use of fideist arguments, according to Harris, was directed against these Moderates’ view of religious faith, in which natural religion—that is, religion based on philosophy and reason rather than revelation—played a central role (Harris 2003, 2005; Ahnert 2004). More conservative, orthodox Calvinists on the other hand, Harris argues, were deeply sceptical about the usefulness of reason in religious matters because they were convinced that religious belief was founded on faith, not reason. Of course Hume did not align himself with orthodox Calvinists, but, it has been argued, he made use of typically orthodox fideist rhetoric in order to expose the incoherence of his Moderate opponents’ religious beliefs. The reason why Hume adopted the persona of the religious fideist was not clunky irony towards the orthodox, at least not primarily. Nor was it a prudential move to protect himself from accusations of irreligion. If that had been his aim he would have been unsuccessful in achieving it, given his widespread reputation as an infidel and atheist, which, moreover, did not cause him any real harm. Nor was his fideism genuine. Rather, it is suggested, Hume was showing how the position of Moderate Presbyterians like Hutcheson and Leechman made no sense for a religious believer, who had to acknowledge revelation as the only secure foundation of faith.¹ In this chapter another, different interpretation will be offered. I shall argue first that the fideist arguments made by Hume do not in fact reflect the position of orthodox Presbyterians. I shall then discuss Hume’s relationship to Moderate Presbyterianism, as represented by Hutcheson and Leechman, but also by later, Edinburgh-based literati such as the clergyman and historian William Robertson and the clergyman and first professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at the University, Hugh Blair, who were key figures in the Moderate party from the early 1750s onwards. It will be shown that Hume’s sceptical, fideist arguments about philosophy and religion were close to the beliefs of these Moderates, not opposed to them, ¹ See Harris (2005). Harris has slightly modified this interpretation in his recent intellectual biography of Hume (Harris 2015: 231).

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though there is at least one significant difference between Hume and many of these Moderates. I shall conclude by considering the implications of these findings for our understanding of the place of philosophy in the religious Enlightenment in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century.

Calvinist Orthodoxy and Fideism It seems plausible to expect fideism from an orthodox Calvinist. One of the most persistent themes in Calvinist theology, after all, is the utter corruption and depravity of human nature since the Fall from Grace. John Knox wrote that ‘the brightnes of our God doth so blind nature and reason (as they now be corrupted,) that the natural man can never atteine to those things which apperteine to God’ (Knox 1846–64: vol. 5, 396). In the early eighteenth century Thomas Halyburton, a professor of divinity at St Andrews, published his Natural Religion Insufficient; and Reveal’d Necessary to Man’s Happiness in his Present State (1714). The title continued by advertising Halyburton’s work as ‘a Rational ENQUIRY into the Principles of the modern Deists: Wherein is largely discovered their utter Insufficiency to answer the great Ends of Religion, and the Weakness of their Pleadings for the Sufficiency of Nature’s Light to eternal Happiness’. Clearly, Halyburton and like-minded Calvinists thought that reason offered no secure foundation for religious faith. But this orthodox view of the insufficiency of reason for faith was not the same as fideism. One did not have to be a fideist to emphasize the absolute need for divine revelation for faith. It was possible to believe in the existence of a natural religion that was true and useful, but that was still insufficient for attaining salvation. A fideist, by contrast, would say that human reason and understanding could not provide support for any important religious beliefs at all. A fideist would argue, for example, that reason could not prove the existence of an omnipotent Creator and his just and benevolent government of the world through providence, or of the immortality of the soul and of an afterlife in which rewards and punishments will be distributed according to everyone’s merits, whereas a believer in natural religion would argue that these truths were known from reason, without divine revelation, but not necessarily that they were sufficient for salvation. Some believers in natural religion did of course go so far as to substitute natural religion for revelation. So-called deists like the Englishman Matthew Tindal declared Scripture to be superfluous, because all necessary religious truths were contained in natural religion (Tindal 1730). But very few adherents of natural religion were deists. A firm belief in natural religion could go together with an equally firm emphasis on the insufficiency of natural religion and the absolute dependence of humankind on revelation for their salvation. Orthodox Presbyterians were an example of that. Far from being fideists, they were strong believers in natural religion founded in philosophical reasoning.

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In fact, one of the Orthodox’ main criticisms of Hume was precisely his lack of commitment to a natural religion. This becomes especially clear in the controversy surrounding the campaign in 1755–6 to have Hume and Lord Kames censured and, possibly, excommunicated from the Presbyterian Kirk.² The campaign began with the publication of an anonymous pamphlet, An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments contained in the Writings of Sopho and David Hume, Esq., which was almost certainly by the orthodox clergyman John Bonar of Cockpen (Anon. 1755). ‘Sopho’ was a nickname for Lord Kames which had been bestowed on him by another orthodox Calvinist, the clergyman George Anderson, by then in his eighties, who had published in 1753 An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion, personally and publicly stated. This book was mainly a critique of Kames’ Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion of 1751, though Hume and Lord Shaftesbury were other prominent targets. Despite its title, Kames’ Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion was anything but a vigorous defence of natural religion. Although he allowed that there was some evidence for the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent Creator, Kames believed that reason was generally a weak and insufficient guide in religious matters. He even cited Hume’s argument from Section XI of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding about the futility of attempts to demonstrate philosophically the existence and attributes of God, in which Hume, as Kames said, proposed ‘that we have no foundation for ascribing any attribute to the Deity, but what is perfectly commensurate with the imperfection of the world’ (Kames 1751: 354).³ It was therefore impossible to use the world as evidence for, say, the benevolence or omnipotence of God, since the nature of events in this world was mixed, ‘partly good and partly evil’ (Kames 1751: 353). The argument that the world had to have a cause and that only an all-powerful deity could be that cause did not stand up to scrutiny, because our reasoning from effects to causes assumed that we had experience of other causal relationships of this kind. The world, however, was unique. We had not been present at its beginning and had not witnessed the creation of other worlds. Therefore, the existence of this world was no reason to argue that it must have been created by a God. And, conceded Kames, ‘supposing reason to be our only guide in these matters, which is supposed by this philosopher [Hume] in this argument, I cannot help feeling his reasonings to be just’ (Kames 1751: 355). Although Kames’ scepticism about natural religion was not as extreme as Hume’s, the differences between them appear to have been ones of degree rather than kind. Their scepticism about natural religion was one of the main grounds on which Hume and Kames were criticized in 1755–6 by the author of the Analysis (that is,

² The following paragraphs are based in large parts on Ahnert (2014: chapter 4). ³ The main modern edition of Kames’ work is Kames (2005). Kames here is paraphrasing rather than quoting from Hume’s work.

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probably Bonar), who objected, for example, to Kames’ propositions that ‘[n]othing appears from reason that can induce us to think that the world is not eternal’ (Anon. 1755: 8); that ‘[t]he powers of reason can give us no satisfying evidence of the being of a God’; and that ‘[t]he perfections of God are either such as we cannot prove, or cannot comprehend’ (Anon. 1755: 10). Far from being hostile to natural religion, orthodox Calvinists were keen defenders of its viability and importance. Indeed, it was precisely because of their theological emphasis on revelation and the gospel that the orthodox believed in the need for a natural religion (Ahnert 2014: 103). Humans had to be able to realize the sinfulness of their own nature and their liability for punishment for their sins before they were persuaded of the need for faith in the gospel as the means to achieve a divine pardon for their sins. They first had to understand on the basis of natural reason alone that there was an omnipotent and perfectly just deity who would punish human beings for their sins. They also had to be capable of knowing of the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife in which divine justice would be done, because there was no clear system of sanctions attached to morality in this life, in which humans often ‘disobey the law of God . . . with safety’ (Anderson 1756: 372). Vice might be accompanied by some disadvantages, especially in the long run, but these disadvantages did not qualify as proper punishments, because they did not always follow from an immoral action, and insofar as they did occur, they were part of the normal, natural course of events, not inflicted by an angry deity in such a way that they were recognizable as a form of chastisement. Natural religion supplied that defect by providing ‘plain presages’ of punishments ‘in the world to come’ (Witherspoon 1804–5: vol. 9, 21), which were, in principle, known to all humans, Christians and infidels alike. George Anderson thought, for example, that all the heathen philosophers of classical antiquity, with the exception of the Epicureans, entertained some notion of the immortality of the soul and a divine judgement in an afterlife. ‘For time beyond tradition, all the ancient world believed, that the soul survived the body, and was immortal’ (Anderson 1756: 331). The orthodox clergyman John Witherspoon, too, had declared that the belief in a ‘future state of rewards and punishments has been as universal as the belief of a Deity, and seems inseparable from it, and therefore must be considered as the sanction of the moral law’ (1804–5: vol. 7, 41). Judgement in the afterlife, Witherspoon believed, was necessary to account for the fact that the distribution of external good fortune in this world often seemed unfair: ‘Frequently we see everything turning out well for the most criminal of all people, while the good are weighed down by countless evils’. If there were no life after death these injustices in temporal life would mean either that God was not a wise and just deity, or that he was incapable of governing the world through his providence. This natural religion was necessary for leading everyone, infidels especially, to a recognition of their dependence on the saving doctrines of the gospel. The means

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of obtaining this pardon were known only from revelation, not natural reason, because ‘pardon’, as Anderson explained, ‘is an act of absolute sovereignty’ (1753: 241). There was no rational necessity for God to forgive anybody their violations of natural morality, which was identical to the original Law of Works given to humankind in the Garden of Eden. ‘And though those who admit natural religion might justly conclude, that unto the supreme Being belonged mercy and forgiveness of sins; yet, they must be at a loss to know, how this forgiveness of sins was to be sued for, and upon what terms it was to be obtained’ (Anderson 1753: 241). Witherspoon argued similarly that humans had to be capable of knowing the complete duties of natural morality without the aid of revelation. Otherwise those humans who were not Christian could plead ignorance of the Law of Works as an excuse for their actions. The universal consciousness of guilt led humankind to seek a further remedy, namely the gospel, and especially the merit of Christ’s death on the cross, which had to be known and believed sincerely in order to effect the justification of the sinner (Witherspoon 1804–5: vol. 4, 245). Thus, for the Orthodox the defence of a natural religion founded on reason and philosophy was tied closely to their theological views on the means of obtaining salvation, and on the justice of God in condemning the reprobate.

Philosophical Scepticism and the Moderates By criticizing natural religion Hume, therefore, was not aligning himself with orthodox Presbyterianism—on the contrary. His arguments were far more similar to those of the so-called Moderates than has often been recognized. Although Moderate Presbyterians are often thought to have adhered to some form of natural religion (Harris 2003), in many cases their attitude towards it was in fact characterized by a scepticism which was not as extreme as Hume’s, but different from his in degree rather than in kind. William Leechman, for example, who was one of the Moderate opponents of Hume’s candidacy for the Edinburgh chair in 1744–5, once argued that insofar as the philosophers of classical, pagan antiquity had some idea or premonition of a future state and divine providence, this could not have been the product of philosophical reasoning: ‘[W]e cannot’, wrote Leechman, ‘certainly conclude from what the [pagan] Philosophers have actually taught, that so far the unaided light of Reason has gone, because we find some of the oldest and best Philosophers acknowledging, that they did not investigate some of their most important Doctrines, but received them from antient Traditions’ which had their origin in specific acts of revelation. The philosophical investigation of these theological questions invariably led to error. Those ancient philosophers who accepted the truth of traditional (ultimately, revealed) knowledge ‘spoke frequently more justly and more worthily of Deity and Providence, and with less hesitation of a future

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state, than their Successors, whose pride of understanding made them depend solely on the strength of their own reasoning’ (Leechman 1758: 11). Very similar arguments were advanced some decades later by the Moderate clergyman John Logan. In a passage that appears to echo the scepticism of Kames and even Hume, Logan said there was no conclusive evidence in the natural world for the ‘wisdom and goodness’ of the Creator. Although there was ‘order and beauty’ in creation, there were also ‘irregularities and evils of the moral world’, which did not seem compatible with the idea of a just and benevolent deity. Moreover, and crucially, among pagans the ‘immortality of the soul’, the basis of any coherent moral theory, ‘was rather the object of their wishes, than of their firm belief ’. In these circumstances, the ‘sense of moral good and evil, amidst the universal degeneracy and depravity of manners, was in danger of being altogether lost’ (Logan 1791: 101). The ‘wisest of the ancient [pagan] philosophers’ recognized that arguments from natural reason were no effective support for virtue, and concluded that some form of immediate ‘revelation of the Divine will’ (Logan 1791: 101), which they lacked, was needed to establish morality on a robust foundation. After Logan’s death in 1788, his sermons were edited for publication by Hugh Blair, one of the leading Moderate clergymen, who was also the first holder of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Edinburgh (Sher 2004). Blair argued in a very similar vein in his own sermons, which appeared in numerous editions throughout the second half of the eighteenth century (Ahnert 2011). Some religious sentiments, he said, were natural to humans, but the understanding humans could acquire of God and of religious matters by their own efforts was extremely feeble. Although humans everywhere practised some form of religious worship, without divine revelation it was always deficient. Scripture in particular informed humanity more reliably than natural reason ever could of key religious truths: the reality of divine providence, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of an afterlife in which rewards and punishments would be distributed. Natural reason could not supply this knowledge because ‘[s]uch a discovery rises far above the dubious conjectures, which mere natural light suggests concerning the future condition of mankind’ (Blair 1780: 437–8). Throughout Blair’s works there is an emphasis on the weakness of human reason and understanding in relation to religious subjects (Ahnert 2011: 76). William Robertson was another influential Moderate who shared these sceptical attitudes towards natural religion. His views on religious matters are difficult to establish because his surviving religious writings are limited to a very small number of sermons.⁴ But Robertson was also one of the most prominent and ⁴ William Robertson’s only published sermon was The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of his Religion Considered. A Sermon preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Robertson 1755). Another sermon from

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prolific historians of his age. His histories are a rich source of evidence for his views on the natural, philosophical knowledge of religious truth, particularly if they are read in conjunction with the sermon Robertson gave to the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in 1755, on the ‘Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance’. From these texts it is clear that Robertson shared the doubts of figures like Blair or Logan about the capacity of unassisted reason to demonstrate, for example, the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife. The ‘doctrine of future rewards and punishments’, Robertson wrote, ‘hath been, and must ever be, the chief foundation of virtuous obedience’ (Robertson 1755: 22), but one could not expect to find ‘pure and undefiled virtue, among those people who were destitute of the instructions, the promises, and assistance of divine revelation. Unenlightened reason often errs: Unassisted virtue always deviates from the right path’ (Robertson 1755: 15–16; see also Ahnert 2010). The limitations of natural religion were particularly evident, Robertson believed, from the history of pagan societies in either Greek and Roman classical antiquity or non-European parts of the world. These societies offered case studies of communities that had, in some cases, achieved very high levels of refinement and sophistication, but did not enjoy the benefits of Christian revelation. Wherever pagan religion was used to support the practice of virtue, Robertson believed, it could only do so with the help of superstition and deceit, because the real threats of punishment in the afterlife were unknown. Robertson quoted the Greek geographer Strabo, who had said that the ‘thunder of Jupiter, the aegis of Minerva, the trident of Neptune’ were ‘fables, which the legislators who formed the political constitution of states employ[ed] as bugbears to overawe the credulous and simple’ (Robertson 1791: 333; Strabo 1917: 69–71). These fables served to keep order among the vulgar and unlearned, though they could not, in the long run, satisfy the educated and intellectually more sophisticated elites. On the whole, therefore, the Moderates’ attitude towards natural religion appears to have been remarkably close to Hume’s scepticism. But there is one significant difference between Hume and these Moderate clergymen, as well as Kames. This was their belief in a religious instinct or sentiment, which was part of human nature; which existed prior to any intellectual understanding of religious matters; and which explained the universal desire among humans for religious truths, even though their natural reason was unable to discover them unaided, purely by their own efforts. In his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, for example, Kames wrote that the power, wisdom, and benevolence of God were ‘intuitively certain’ (Kames 1751: 360; see also Mills 2016), because the deity had ‘not left us to collect his existence from abstract or uncertain arguments, 1788, on the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, survived in manuscript form, as did notes for a fast day sermon in 1778 on the American Revolution (Robertson 1996: 139–42, 175–87).

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but has made us feel, that he exists’ (Kames 1751: 386). Reason did not contradict this feeling; it could even help to reinforce it. But we were not directed to those truths or persuaded of them by reason (Kames 1751: 360; see also Ahnert 2014: 98–9). Thus, although we were conscious that the world was not ‘governed by chance or blind fatality’, as ‘Epicureans’ like the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius had maintained in his De Rerum Natura, and we were determined ‘by a principle in our nature, to attribute such effects to some intelligent and designing cause’, namely God (Kames 1751: 342), that principle was a feeling; it was not rational. Rational argument indeed would never suffice to persuade us of this truth, ‘because our reasonings upon this subject, must, at best, be abstruse, and beyond the comprehension of the bulk of mankind’ (Kames 1751: 348). Reason had some uses. It could give ‘its aid, to lead us to the knowledge of the Deity. It enlarges our views of final causes, and of the prudence of wisdom and goodness’. Yet on the whole it was ‘not so mighty an affair, as philosophers vainly pretend’, because it afforded ‘very little aid, in making original discoveries’. The conclusion from ‘beautiful and orderly effects to a designing cause’ was thus entirely a matter of ‘sense and feeling’, and of an ‘internal light’, not rational conviction (Kames 1751: 339–40). Hugh Blair also suggested that religious sentiments and desires were somehow hard-wired in the human constitution. In a 1750 sermon, for example, held before Scotland’s Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, Blair asserted that ‘[t]here is a strong Propensity in human Nature to Religion: A natural Preparation of the Mind for receiving some Impressions of Religious Belief ’ (Blair 1750: 29). Elsewhere he wrote that some religious sentiments were natural to humans, even if the understanding humans could acquire of God by their own efforts was extremely feeble: When he [i.e. man] looks up to that invisible hand which operates throughout the universe, he is impressed with reverence. When he receives blessings which he cannot avoid ascribing to divine goodness, he is prompted to gratitude. The expressions of these affections under the various forms of religious worship, are no other than native effusions of the human heart. (Blair 1777: 5)

The religious beliefs these sentiments engendered were incomplete and imperfect; they were also subject to variation across different human societies and over time, depending on particular circumstances and these societies’ levels of sophistication and refinement. But, as Moderates like Blair argued, the sentiments themselves were present everywhere and at all times. The universality of these sentiments was not proof that the beliefs they stimulated were true. The fact that they were universal, however, was an indication that they were placed there by the Author of Nature, with the purpose, presumably, of directing humans towards seeking religious truth, which, in its fullest and most reliable form, was communicated to them through divine revelation, such as the Scriptures.

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Hume did of course offer an explanation for religious belief founded in the passions and sentiments of human nature, but he did not do so in terms of an original religious instinct or sentiment. His account was based, rather, on the nonreligious human passion of fear, and it required a conjectural history in order to show how something as complex as religious belief would have emerged from that other, more basic feeling. This was the subject of his Natural History of Religion, first published in 1757, and which Hume was probably working on in the early 1750s, around the time when Kames’ Essays first appeared. The Natural History has been examined for its irreligious intentions (see Gaskin 1993: xxv), but Hume’s main purpose, it seems, was not to undermine religion by reducing it to human psychology; nor was he necessarily taking aim at ‘vulgar religion’, as has been suggested (Gaskin 1988: 189), though Hume was of course always very critical of that. His purpose, it seems, was to contradict the Moderates’ belief in a religious instinct, simply because, Hume thought, there was no clear empirical evidence for such a complex sentiment being part of original human nature. As Hume wrote in the Introduction to The Natural History of Religion: [s]ome nations have been discovered, who entertained no sentiments of Religion, if travellers and historians may be credited; and no two nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely in the same sentiments. It would appear, therefore, that this preconception springs not from an original instinct or primary impression of human nature, such as gives rise to self-love, affection between the sexes, love of progeny, gratitude, resentment; since every instinct of this kind has been found absolutely universal in all nations and ages, and has always a precise determinate object, which it inflexibly pursues. The first religious principles must be secondary; such as may easily be perverted by various accidents and causes, and whose operation too, in some cases, may, by an extraordinary concurrence of circumstances, be altogether prevented. (Hume 1993: 134)

Conclusion Hume’s scepticism about the usefulness of philosophy for religion is therefore closer to the Moderates’ outlook than has often been realized. Although Hume’s scepticism was more extreme than theirs, the difference between their respective standpoints appears to be one of degree rather than kind. Far from being stereotypically enlightened clergymen, who tried to place Christian theology on philosophical and rational foundations, the Moderates were in fact much more critical than their orthodox Calvinist opponents about the usefulness of philosophy in religious argument. This suggests that the widespread emphasis on the impact of natural reason and philosophy on religious belief in the mid-eighteenth century needs to be reconsidered. It has often been argued that the eighteenth century

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witnessed a synthesis of enlightened reason with Christian theology, whereby traditional religious beliefs were placed on rational, philosophical foundations that transcended confessional divisions (Sorkin 2008: 6).⁵ It seems, however, that philosophical, or natural, religion was perhaps less significant in changing eighteenth-century religion than has sometimes been argued, because enlightened clergymen, in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland at least, were not necessarily distinguished by a particularly strong commitment to ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion. Paradoxical though this may seem, the enlightened Moderate clergymen in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland were actually more sceptical about a natural, philosophical religion of reason than their more orthodox, traditional counterparts.

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (1755). An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments contained in the Writings of Sopho and David Hume, Esq. Edinburgh. Anderson, George (1753). An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion, personally and publicly stated. Edinburgh. Anderson, George (1756). A Remonstrance against Lord Viscount Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Religion. Edinburgh. Blair, Hugh (1750). The Importance of Religious Knowledge to the Happiness of Mankind. Edinburgh. Blair, Hugh (1777). Sermons, vol. 1. Edinburgh. Blair, Hugh (1780). Sermons, vol. 2. Edinburgh. Halyburton, Thomas (1714). Natural Religion Insufficient; and Reveal’d Necessary to Man’s Happiness in his Present State. Edinburgh. Hume, David (1975). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. SelbyBigge, 3rd edition, rev. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, David (1987). Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Hume, David (1993). Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kames, Henry Home, Lord (1751). Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. In two parts. Edinburgh. Kames, Henry Home, Lord (2005). Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, ed. Mary Catherine Moran. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Knox, John (1846–64). Works, 5 vols., ed. D. Laing. Edinburgh. ⁵ Jonathan Israel has offered a similar interpretation of the ‘religious Enlightenment’ though he has emphasized the instability of such a synthesis (Israel 2006: 11).

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Leechman, William (1758). The Wisdom of God in the Gospel Revelation. Edinburgh. Logan, John (1791). Sermons, vol. 2. Edinburgh. Robertson, William (1755). The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of his Religion Considered. A Sermon preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Edinburgh. Robertson, William (1791). An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India; and the Progress of Trade with that Country prior to the Discovery of the Passage to it by the Cape of Good Hope. London. Robertson, William (1996). Miscellaneous Works and Commentaries, ed. and introduced by Jeffrey Smitten. London: Routledge/Thoemmes. Strabo (1917). The Geography of Strabo, vol. 1, trans. Horace Leonard Jones. London: William Heinemann. Tindal, Matthew (1730). Christianity as Old as the Creation: or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. London. Witherspoon, John (1739). Disputatio Philosophica de Mentis Immortalitate. Edinburgh. Witherspoon, John (1804–5). The Works of John Witherspoon, 9 vols. Edinburgh.

Secondary Literature Ahnert, Thomas (2004). ‘The Soul, Natural Religion and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 2: 233–53. Ahnert, Thomas (2010). ‘Fortschrittsgeschichte und religiöse Aufklärung. William Robertson und die Deutung aussereuropäischer Kulturen’, in Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung, ed. W. Hardtwig. Special Issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23: 101–22. Ahnert, Thomas (2011). ‘The Moral Education of Mankind: Character and Religious Moderatism in the Sermons of Hugh Blair’, in Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds.), Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 67–83. Ahnert, Thomas (2014). The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Berman, David (1987). ‘Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying’, in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 61–78. Botterill, George (2002). ‘Hume on Liberty and Necessity’, in Peter Millican (ed.), Reading Hume on Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 277–300. Buckle, Stephen (2001). Hume’s Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gaskin, J. C. A. (1988). Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edition. London: Macmillan. Gaskin, J. C. A. (1993). ‘Introduction’, in David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Harris, James A. (2003). ‘Answering Bayle’s Question: Religious Belief in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in D. Garber and S. Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229–53. Harris, James A. (2005). ‘Hume and the Rhetoric of Calvinism’, in M. Frasca Spada and P. J. E. Kail (eds.), Impressions of Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 141–59. Harris, James A. (2015). Hume: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Israel, Jonathan (2006). Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, R. J. W. (2016). ‘Lord Kames’s Analysis of the Natural Origins of Religion: The Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751)’, Historical Research 89: 751–75. Russell, Paul (2008). The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sher, Richard B. (2004). ‘Logan, John (1747/8–1788)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16942. Sher, Richard B. (2015). Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sorkin, David (2008). The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, M. A. (2001). The Kirk and the Infidel, 2nd edition. Lancaster: Lancaster University Press.

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6 Moderate Theology and Preaching c.1750–1800 Stewart J. Brown

Moderatism, as a religious movement, flourished within the established Church of Scotland between the 1730s and the 1830s. It represented a sustained effort by a group of ministers and lay leaders to adapt Reformed theology to the distinctive flowering of intellectual culture that would later be termed the Scottish Enlightenment. Moderate ministers, including William Leechman, Patrick Cuming, William Robertson, Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, John Drysdale, Thomas Somerville, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, and George Hill, worked to uphold the Church’s role as interpreter of divine truth and educator of the nation in an age of improvement. They sought to distance the Church of Scotland from all forms of religious superstition and enthusiasm, and to encourage toleration, religious moderation, ethical behaviour, and polite manners. Acting as a party within the ecclesiastical courts of the Church of Scotland, Moderates worked to foster social harmony through the close cooperation of the Church and the landed classes in Scotland. Their policies included the strict enforcement of the civil law of patronage, by which lay patrons, mainly landowners or the Crown, were permitted to present candidates for the ministry of Scotland’s parish churches. By working with the patron class, Moderate leaders aimed to fill the pulpits of Scotland with learned, cultivated ministers, who would elevate the moral and intellectual tone of the Scottish nation. Although fervently opposed by more traditionalist or evangelical ministers and lay people—who viewed Moderatism as a threat to Scotland’s Reformation heritage and Calvinist theological standards—the Moderate party gained an ascendancy within the Church of Scotland by the 1760s. They used their power and influence to support a culture of improvement in Scotland, with an emphasis on practical ethics, religious toleration, freedom of speech and enquiry, ideals of universal benevolence, and social progress. Moderate ministers enjoyed friendships with such well-known sceptics as David Hume and Lord Kames, and shielded them from censure by the Church courts. They embraced the ideal of a learned clergy and promoted close relations between Scotland’s Church and universities. While they did not challenge the doctrines of the Westminster Confession, they did seek to restore what they viewed as a proper balance in

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Scottish Reformed theology, by emphasizing morality as well as doctrinal orthodoxy, and God’s revelation in nature and history as well as in Scripture. Eighteenth-century Scottish Moderate religious thought has received considerable attention from intellectual and cultural historians, including Richard B. Sher, M. A. Stewart, Alexander Broadie, Colin Kidd, and Thomas Ahnert and Jeffrey Smitten. These authors have shown how the Moderates played a vital role in the Scottish Enlightenment, helping ensure that the Church of Scotland not only did not oppose the spirit of cultural and intellectual innovation, but that the Scottish clergy participated in the Enlightenment project through their writings in philosophy, history, economics and social theory, and their membership of learned societies (Sher 1985; Broadie 2001: 113–50; Stewart 2003; Kidd 2004; Ahnert 2014: 78–86; Smitten 2017). This chapter will explore how the Moderates expressed their theology through their published sermons. The Moderate clergy did not leave many theological treatises, and the published sermon was arguably their main form of theological expression. Through these sermons, directed to the literate public, they endeavoured to express the essentials of the Reformed faith, while employing the discourse of natural and moral philosophy and the language of polite society. The Moderate sermons during the noontide of their ascendancy between about 1750 and 1800 gave particular attention to two major themes. The first was the promotion of a Christian moral culture, with emphasis on the habitual control of the passions through an innate ‘moral sense’ within each individual. The second was the belief in the providential ordering of society and direction of history.

The Moderate Sermon The sermon had assumed a central place in Scottish worship with the Reformation, which emphasized the regular preaching of the Word and saw the pulpit become the focal point of church interiors. Sermons, normally lasting an hour or more, were the main means of conveying the particular doctrines of the Reformed faith to the Scottish people. In the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the emphasis was on a direct, emotive manner of preaching, with simple, homely language, frequent repetitions, and a strongly evangelical tone; the sermons aimed at communicating the Reformed doctrines of God’s awesome majesty and omnipotence, human depravity, Christ’s atonement on the cross, and salvation by grace alone. Sermons were normally delivered extempore, as a sign that the preacher was speaking under the inspiration of the Spirit. The nature of sermons began to change in Scotland from the 1740s. The improving economy and growth of towns brought the emergence of a more cultivated urban population with refined literary tastes encouraged by critical literary reviews and by Scottish debating and dining societies. The Moderate

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ministers, with their commitment to close cooperation with the educated social orders, responded to this changing mood by endeavouring to bring ‘the highest standards of elegance and taste’ to their sermons (Mathieson 1995: 27). Moderate preachers looked to English models of pulpit eloquence, especially John Tillotson, the celebrated Anglican preacher, and they increasingly composed their sermons with an eye to structure and clarity of style. From the early 1740s, the Moderate William Leechman, a gifted preacher and newly appointed Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, began offering a course of lectures on sermon composition. At the University of Edinburgh, John Stevenson, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1730 to 1775, gave lectures on literary composition which had an immense influence on future ministers, including Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, William Robertson, and Thomas Somerville. The growing interest in the craft of sermon composition was further promoted by the lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres presented in Edinburgh from 1759 by the Moderate minister Hugh Blair, and by the lectures of the Moderate George Campbell, as Professor of Divinity at Marischal College, Aberdeen, from 1771. Campbell, according to Jeffrey Suderman, held that ‘a minister must use every rhetorical device’ and that effective preaching ‘demanded a familiarity not only with classical rules of discourse, but also with the power of the human mind’ (Suderman 2001: 66). All ministers of the Church of Scotland, observed the leading Moderate clergyman, Alexander Carlyle, in 1793, were by now expected to ‘be conversant in criticism and rhetoric, and every branch of the belles lettres’ (Carlyle 1793: 7). ‘As polite men of letters’, Richard Sher has observed, ‘the Moderates took it for granted that all forms of spoken discourse should be “correct”, “polished”, and “rational”, which is to say, free from the taint of enthusiasm, provincialism, and impropriety’ (Sher 1985: 168). There was a growing public taste for published sermons, especially sermons composed in an elegant style and appealing to refined sentiments. From the 1740s, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) hosted an annual sermon; it was an honour for a minister to be invited, and the published SSPCK sermons formed examples of Scotland’s finest pulpit eloquence. Sermons presented to other religious societies, at the opening of meetings of the General Assembly or Synods of the Church, or on Crown-appointed fast days, were also frequently published. In 1777, with the help of the English author Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair published a volume of sixteen sermons with a London publisher. They proved an immediate commercial success, gaining large sales in England as well as Scotland, and going into a fourth printing within six months. Blair published three more volumes of sermons during his lifetime, with a fifth volume appearing soon after his death. Described by the British Critic in 1807 as ‘the most popular work in the English language’, the sales of Blair’s collection of sermons were phenomenal, and made him one of the wealthiest ministers in the Church of Scotland (Brown 2016: 411, 417). A four-volume collection of sermons

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by prominent Scottish ministers was published in 1789 under the title The Scotch Preacher, and aimed to build on Blair’s commercial success. Other volumes of sermons, such as the two-volume collection of John Drysdale’s sermons, were published posthumously by the deceased minister’s friends, with the income from sales going to the widow and children. These published sermons were, of course, normally heavily revised, polished, and expanded versions of delivered sermons, and were not representative of regular Sunday sermons. Yet they formed a significant expression of Moderate theology during the second half of the eighteenth century. They were also indicative of the kind of sermons that Moderate ministers delivered to their congregations Sunday after Sunday.

The Passions, Conscience, and Moral Culture in the Moderate Sermon A major theme in the Moderate sermon was the power of the human passions and the role of Christianity in enabling individuals to control their passions and live a moral life in society. The eighteenth century was in many respects an ‘age of the passions’, when philosophers, authors, and poets recognized and explored the vital role of the human emotions, affections, feelings, and sentiments. The passions were viewed as vital aspects of human nature and activity in the world. At their highest level, the passions inspired love of family, country, and humanity and motivated selfless action on behalf of others. Passions, according to Hugh Blair, ‘rouse the dormant powers of the soul’; they ‘often raise a man above himself, and render him more penetrating, vigorous and masterly’ (1780: vol. 2, 55). But when the passions became disordered, when they became violent, tempestuous, and uncontrolled, they could be destructive of all private happiness and public peace. The religious and civic strife in seventeenth-century Scotland had demonstrated all too well the social evils of disordered, uncontrolled passions, and the importance of moderating the passions for social stability and improvement. In his Essay on the Passions of 1728, Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, classified the passions as selfish passions, which could be destructive of individual and social harmony, and ‘Publick Passions’, which inspired acts of benevolence and self-sacrifice and were vital to the well-being and improvement of society (1728: 58–125). David Hume devoted the whole of Book Two of his seminal Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) to a sustained exploration ‘Of the Passions’, demonstrating how the passions shaped human character and tended always to dominate reason, understanding, and the will. Here he famously advanced the proposition that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’ (Hume 1739–40: vol. 2, 248). While Moderate preachers were by no means students of Hume’s Treatise, they did recognize the power of the passions.

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Indeed, Moderate preachers devoted considerable attention to the passions—as vital forces behind all human actions and interactions, but also as the root of human sin and depravity. In his influential sermon ‘On the Disorders of the Passions’, Hugh Blair reflected on how human passions, when violent and uncontrolled, led to rebellion against the authority of both man and God and threatened social peace (1777: 172–202). The rebellious passions, he maintained, were engendered amid anger over injustices in the social order, and over the unequal distribution of wealth, hereditary status, native ability, health, strength, and physical attractiveness. Blair noted how envy over the prosperity, talents, and good fortune of others led to a brooding over the vicissitudes of fate, a gloomy preoccupation with minor slights, then to malice, hatred, and acts of violence. For Blair, envy was ‘universally admitted to be one of the blackest passions in the human heart’, which corrupted the ‘instincts of kindness and compassion which belong to our frame’ and undermined the foundations of social life (1780: 150–1). However, resentments over personal misfortune, undeserved suffering, and the death of loved ones could also lead to a dark craving for ‘fierce and cruel revenge’ (1780: 232–3). ‘The minds of bad men’, Blair observed, ‘are always disorderly . . . spleen and disgust pursue them through all the haunts of amusement. Pride and ill-humour torment them’ (1777: 414). The passions, Blair acknowledged, were integral to human nature and they shaped human society in all its diversity. But disordered passions were powerful and destructive, and all too often brought violence, cruelty, and suffering. Nor could the passions be controlled by reason— because passion, Blair insisted, ‘is loud and impetuous; and creates a tumult which drowns the voice of reason’ (1780: 345). Other Moderates shared this view of the disordered passions as the source of human depravity, sin, and unhappiness. Human passions, maintained George Campbell, were ‘inferior powers of the soul’, which brought evil when they broke free of ‘all restraint and controul’ (Campbell 1771: 14). According to the Edinburgh Moderate minister John Drysdale, the uncontrolled passions destroyed not only ‘the peace of a man’s own mind’, but also ‘that of others around him’ (1793: vol. 1, 291). In his sermon on ‘Heart-Bitterness’, the Moderate minister and historian Thomas Somerville explored how thwarted ambitions or a deep sense of ingratitude or betrayal often led to feelings of resentment and bitterness, which poisoned the mind with hate and plunged individuals ‘into an unfathomable abyss of misery and despair’ (1789: 103). Moderate preachers held that God provided humankind with two main guides for moderating and controlling their passions. First, following the teachings of Francis Hutcheson, they maintained that God had endowed each person with an innate moral sense, which showed them how to act in a virtuous manner in society. Moderate preachers described this innate moral sense, which was distinct from reason, sometimes as a ‘religious sense’, sometimes as ‘conscience’, or sometimes as the ‘natural sentiments of the human heart’. The moral sense,

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according to the Leith Moderate minister John Logan, was ‘instinctive in all its operations’ and ‘approves of virtue as being moral beauty and disapproves of vice as being moral deformity’ (1790: vol. 1, 247). In forming human nature, observed the Aberdeen Moderate Alexander Gerard, God had endowed each person with an inner ‘testimony of conscience’ and had ‘impowered conscience’ with powers ‘which are unaccountable to mere reason’. ‘You need’, Gerard insisted, ‘only attend to what passes in your own hearts when you reflect upon your conduct’ (1782: vol. 2, 281, 278). ‘What is commonly called the internal evidence of Christianity’, maintained Hutcheson’s friend William Leechman, ‘is nothing else but an appeal to the heart of man’ (1758: 26). George Hill portrayed the moral sense as an inner ‘dominion which we feel, which we acknowledge, which we reverence’ (1796: 73). According to the Moderate James Bryce: ‘that there is a sense of right and wrong implanted in the human breast, independent even of any religious belief, is a truth from which few who attentively consider the subject will be disposed to dissent’ (1818: 181). Moderate teachings on conscience were broadly in line with the first sentence of the Westminster Confession, which held that the ‘light of nature’ did ‘so far manifest the goodness, wisdom and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable’ for their evil actions. The second and far more important help in moderating the passions was God’s revealed word in Scripture. The innate moral sense, or ‘light of nature’, was on its own insufficient to control the human passions and ensure sustained moral behaviour. The Bible’s inspired teachings, however, could strengthen, guide, and inspire the innate moral sense so as to restrain the emotions. The calming of the ‘agitation of passion’, Blair insisted, ‘is no where to be found but under the pavilion of the Almighty’ (1777: 46–7). In Scripture, Blair observed, people would find God’s highest ethical teachings, as well as models of virtuous living to emulate, above all the example of Christ, who ‘holds forth to our imitation his steady command of temper amidst the highest provocations’ (1801: 63). The revealed Word, Leechman insisted, taught people to overcome their fear of death, and to be ‘calm and serene’ and ‘modest and unaffected’ amid the vicissitudes of the world; it steadied faithful Christians with ‘a kind of passive courage, or patience under suffering (1767: 23, 24). Christian revelation, argued George Campbell, taught believers the proper ‘government both of passion and appetite’, and thus imparted ‘a sound mind’ as ‘opposed to a frantic or disordered imagination’ (1771: 31). In reading Scripture, insisted George Hill, Moderate minister and Professor of Greek at St Andrews University, ‘our understanding is enlarged so as to receive the whole counsel of God’ for living the virtuous life (1787: 9). Scriptural teachings, Moderate preachers insisted, went beyond simply helping individuals subdue and control violent passions; the revealed Christian religion also directed people to active benevolence, the habitual practice of good works, and the pursuit of justice, mercy, and truth. Moderates sought to restore the place of good works in Scotland’s Reformed theology. For the Moderate minister and

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Edinburgh professor Thomas Hardy, Christ had ‘expressly announced’ that in determining who would come into his heavenly kingdom, ‘the last decision shall be founded on the expressions of attachment to him which men have made by their good deeds, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, [and] visiting the sick’ (1791: 9). ‘In every view’, insisted the Moderate Samuel Charters, ‘the christian life is active. We are here considered as servants to whom some work is committed in charge and trust. Those who are faithful in the few things with which they are now entrusted, will receive a crown from the master of the universe’ (1786: 321). ‘As the creatures of God’, Leechman maintained, all people were ‘the rational and immortal subjects of his moral kingdom’ and ‘accountable to him for their behaviour in that high character’. ‘In the Gospel a whole system of morality is delineated: a system so pure, so perfect and complete, that human imagination can conceive of nothing more excellent or elevated’ (1789: vol. 2, 91, 92). For Moderates, God’s purpose was that each individual would grow in righteousness by developing habits of moral behaviour through the example of Christ. Just as people tended to emulate the manners and morals of those with whom they associated in daily life, so through continual communion with God in piety and devotion, they would grow to emulate divine virtues. ‘Every repeated act of communion with God’, insisted John Drysdale, promotes the desire to advance ‘the holiness and happiness of the world with greater steadiness’. ‘Thus the natural effect of love and devotion to God is to grow like Him’ (1793: vol. 2, 142). Moderates strenuously opposed the view, advanced by such Enlightenment thinkers as David Hume, that moral culture could be separated from religion, and that it was possible to be truly moral without religion. ‘The grand errour of men’, insisted Drysdale, ‘is separating religion from righteousness’ (1793: vol. 2, 138). ‘Divorce religion from virtue’, asserted George Campbell, and ‘ye will find ye have deprived the latter of her steadiest friend, her best comforter, her firmest support’ (1779: 23). For Hugh Blair, Christ was ‘the Patron of the virtuous’. ‘A religious, and a thoroughly virtuous character’, Blair insisted, ‘I consider as the same’ (1790: 5). A distinctive attribute of Scripture, for Moderate preachers, was that it communicated profound truths to the understandings of all people, and not simply to an educated elite. Through the Christian Scriptures, proclaimed Patrick Cuming—Moderate minister and Edinburgh professor—‘the knowledge of wisdom and virtue’ was no longer ‘confined to the schools of philosophers, but laid open, in a short, clear, and intelligible manner, to the meanest capacity’. Using a ‘simplicity of style’, Christ ‘published his religion to the unlearned as well as the learned; to those of a low as well as of a high degree of understanding’ (Cuming 1760: 41, 42). It was no accident, insisted Campbell, that Christ chose his disciples, not from the educated and cultured, but from ‘the lowest class of the people, poor, ignorant, totally unacquainted with the world’; for this ensured that the manner in which they spread Christ’s teachings would be comprehensible to all (1789: 170).

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And as God had adapted scriptural truths to the understanding of all people, so it was now the duty of his ministers to direct their sermons to the understandings of all social orders within their society. ‘To the ministers of religion’, insisted Alexander Gerard, ‘is committed the important office of conducting all, as it were, into a happy region, and placing them in a favourable situation, where the beams of religion, pure and intense, may penetrate their hearts (1761: 27). Moderate ministers were aware of the emerging body of critical biblical scholarship, and while they venerated the Scriptures as God’s revelation, they did not take a literalist view or insist on the equal inspiration of every scriptural passage. The Edinburgh Moderate Robert Dick, for example, insisted that revelation in Scripture was progressive, adapted to enlarging the understanding of people within their developing historical contexts. The Genesis narrative, for example, had been intended to show ancient peoples that God had created everything in the universe, but it was not to be perceived as ‘the real system of nature’. Similarly, many teachings of the Old Testament, including animal sacrifice or rigorous Sabbatarianism, were no longer to be viewed as binding for modern society (Dick 1757: 25–6). Moderates also observed that scriptural texts were too often taken out of context and used by ‘enthusiasts’ to support ‘tenets they had previously adopted’ (Campbell 1771: 41). The Scriptures, Dick insisted, ‘were not designed to promote speculation and learning, but to advance the interests of piety and virtue’ (Dick 1757: 32). Although Moderate preaching focused on Christian moral culture in this world, some of their sermons did discuss an afterlife where virtue would be rewarded, the apparent injustices in this life redressed, and the moral balance restored. According to Alexander Gerard, each individual conscience bore an inner testimony to God’s righteousness, and this in turn supported ‘our expectation of approbation and reward from God’ in an afterlife (1782: vol. 2, 281). God’s plan, Moderate preachers further taught, was that individuals would develop habits of disinterested virtue in this life, and that the virtuous habits developed in this world would continue in a next life. In a sermon in 1760, William Robertson observed that ‘our behaviour here [in this life] is so connected with our reward hereafter that perseverance in virtue is necessary. Here we are to form habits for eternity’ (Smitten 2017: 69). For Thomas Somerville, the afterlife would be a place of ‘future union and intercourse’, where people would ‘live together and continue their friendship in a future state’ (1786: 350). John Drysdale maintained that the afterlife would be a realm of ‘continual progress towards perfection’ in ‘unseen regions of science and virtue yet unexplored’. The ‘ardent desire for further improvement’, he maintained, ‘cannot be gratified in this world, and therefore intimates that another is awaiting us, where perfect satisfaction shall be obtained (1793: vol. 2, 320–1). Drysdale insisted that this ‘future state of men shall be a social one’ and that there would be continuing social as well as individual progress, including opportunities for souls, ‘enlightened by the experience gained in this world’, to practise and perfect the social virtues (1793: vol. 2, 327–8).

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Other Moderates were more guarded in their expressions about the afterlife. In one of his best-known sermons, ‘On our Imperfect Knowledge of a Future State’, Hugh Blair insisted that God had in truth revealed very little about the afterlife, and this was for a good reason. The purpose of this life, Blair believed, was ‘the preparation for a better world’ through the ‘gradual purification carried on by steps of progressive discipline’. Individuals learned under the guidance of Scripture to control their passions and develop regular habits of ‘submission to the will of God, and charity and forgiveness to men’. But if they had a clear picture of the future life, they would be so dazzled by what was to come that they would give little attention to their moral duties in this world. For this reason, God gave only glimpses of the life to come. ‘The plan of Divine wisdom for man’s improvement’, Blair insisted, involved a focus on moral duty and progress in this world. While there was some attention to eternal reward in the next life, Moderate sermons were largely silent on the notion of eternal punishment or of a hell. Probably most Moderates followed John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity with its argument that the souls of reprobate sinners were simply annihilated at their deaths (1695: 3–6). Those who abused God’s goodness, Drysdale maintained, would simply be left ‘to final destruction, the natural end of their iniquities’ (1793: vol. 2, 159). What was missing from Moderate sermons was much attention to such Reformed doctrines as unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace, as these were expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Moderate preachers did not question these doctrines, but they tended to set them aside or view them as divine mysteries that were not appropriate to the pulpit. Moderate emphasis was on the dispassionate, disciplined Christian life, and on the habitual practice of self-control and virtue within society. There was little attention to God’s righteous anger, to God’s justice demanding Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, to election and limited atonement, or to salvation from eternal punishment. ‘We are not to imagine’, insisted Drysdale, ‘God an angry passionate being, who is to be appeased by bodily severities’ (1793: vol. 2, 159). For Leechman, Christ’s death was not the ‘cause of the Divine mercy’ for sinners; rather it was the ‘effect’ of that mercy. The atonement was an expression of God’s love and an example of perfect obedience to the divine will (Leechman 1758: 18). As Ian Clark observed, ‘Moderates tended to represent Salvation less as an abstract “state”, brought about by the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ, than as a “process” in which men are convinced and drawn, by the pattern of perfection provided by Christ, into an active pursuit of “virtue” and acceptance of the access to heaven which He had opened up’ (Clark 1963: 261).

Providence and History A second major theme in Moderate sermons, and one that Moderate preachers shared with the earlier Reformed tradition, was an emphasis on the role of divine

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providence in shaping the social order and guiding the progress of human civilization. Moderates portrayed God as active not only in directing individual growth through habits of moral behaviour, but also in directing the moral progress of societies and nations. For Moderates, the emergence and spread of Christianity were part of the divine plan for the civilization of the world, a plan that was revealed through history. In one of the most famous Moderate sermons, ‘The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance’, delivered before the SSPCK in 1755, William Robertson maintained that God had determined that the social, political, and economic conditions in the world at the time of Christ’s birth were most conducive for the early spread of the Christian message. More than this, God had also, through the Christian religion, planted the seeds of human moral progress towards more affectionate marriages, more equal relations between the genders, the gradual diminution of the evil of slavery, and a more humane conduct of warfare. The world was still in a process of improvement, and Christianity continued to show the way of progress, cosmopolitanism, and enlightenment. ‘What a wonderful and blessed change’, Robertson insisted, ‘hath Christianity produced in the face of the world! Together with the knowledge of its precepts, liberty, humanity, and domestic happiness, diffused themselves over every corner of the earth’ (1755: 36). In a sermon following the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hugh Blair argued that in directing human history, God used even ‘the unruly Passions of bad Men’, including rage, envy, and love of cruelty in order to advance, ‘in a secret way’, his providential purposes. Recent events, Blair insisted, had shown God to be directing Scottish history towards a higher form of civilization. In the Jacobite rising, God had allowed primitive Highlanders to overrun the civic society of Lowland Scotland, in order to convince the Lowlanders of the need to relinquish their self-indulgent love of ‘Luxury’ and return to a more socially responsible civic virtue, including the practice of disinterested service to others. We should not, Blair insisted, conceive of God ‘as removed from this World; sitting, a mere Spectator of his Creatures, in his high Abode’. Rather, God was imminent in history, ‘pervading, directing and regulating all’ (1746: 7, 26). According to Alexander Carlyle, ‘the Almighty governs the world, not merely by general laws, but by constant superintendence and frequent interposition’ and ‘that empires and kingdoms rise or fall . . . all depends on the secret designs and operations of Providence’ (1794: 3, 5). For William Leechman, God was not only directing the progress of the world, but ‘the Gospel is the great mean which the wisdom of Providence has chosen to enlighten, to sanctify, to bless, and to save mankind’ (1767: 32). Moderates believed that nearly every form of religion, including the polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome, provided moral teachings and helped maintain social cohesion by directing attention to a transcendent authority. ‘Religion’, insisted George Hill, ‘is the cement of civil society. It overawes many headstrong passions

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which know no other controul’ (1792: 18–19). Moderates questioned whether an atheist society could long exist. ‘There is reason to doubt’, observed Alexander Gerard, ‘whether a society would at all subsist for any considerable time, if its members were generally destitute of all religious impressions’ (1761: 9). Moderate preachers respected the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and they understood also that India and China were ancient civilizations with sophisticated systems of social ethics that had developed independently of Christianity. Nevertheless, they insisted that these other civilizations and their moral teachings were far inferior to Christianity. According to Patrick Cuming, there were many ‘noble and excellent sentiments’ to be found in ‘the writings of the ancient philosophers’, but such sentiments were ‘scattered’ and ‘mixed with idolatry and superstition’ (1760: 273). While the religious foundations of other world civilizations, George Campbell maintained, were superior to atheism, they could not compare ‘with that religion which alone has God for its author, and the greatest good of mankind, both temporal and eternal, for its object’ (1779: 5). Moderates claimed that by providential design Christianity was perfectly suited to preserve and uphold the social order. Practical Christian piety, insisted Alexander Gerard, served to curtail all ‘those crimes which disturb the peace, or obstruct the prosperity of a nation’; it was ‘the principal bond of social union’ (1761: 18, 30). Christianity restrained rulers from abusing their power; Christian oaths enabled law courts to administer justice. The Christian religion, John Drysdale maintained in an influential sermon, ‘On the Distinction of Ranks’, upheld the social hierarchy and subordination of social ranks that God had ordained as vital for an orderly and prosperous society. This distinction of ranks reflected the division of labour in society and ensured the maximum productivity from each inhabitant: ‘By the difference of their conditions, men are led to cultivate different virtues, and exert different talents, of which the whole society reap the advantage’. The Christian religion promoted contentment within the different social ranks; it restrained love of luxury and arrogance of power on the part of the upper social orders, and the passions of envy and discontent among the lower social orders. Above all, Christianity promoted a sense of mutual respect among people of all social ranks, so that ‘they acquire higher value and importance in one another’s eyes, and are united in a closer bond of mutual affection and attraction’ (Drysdale 1793: vol. 1, 299). In the larger world order, according to George Hill, God was the ‘Governour among the nations’ who ‘orders all the events which affect the largest societies of men, with the same sovereignty and the same ease, as those which respect any individual’ (1792: 4). Even when nations believed they were pursuing their own interests, they were in truth serving God’s plan. The global expansion of commerce and European empires, Robert Dick maintained, was all part of the divine plan for the spread of Christianity and enlightened civilization to the nonEuropean world. ‘The present course of empire and commerce’, he observed,

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‘opens a delightful prospect to every serious observer. It takes its rise from nations enlightened by true religion and valuable science’. While European nations believed they were pursuing their own ‘wealth and dominion’ by their global expansion, God was in truth using them as ‘the instruments of his own glory’ (Dick 1762: 17, 18). In a sermon of 1792 on the abolition of slavery, the Moderate Thomas Somerville portrayed the divine purpose as the union of all peoples of the world in ‘universal benevolence’. Somerville insisted that humankind was essentially one, with similar human needs, emotions, and aspirations. ‘As the Almighty has made of one blood all nations of the earth, so he has planted affections in the human breast, which refer to the happiness of mankind at large, and ascertain the universality of our kindred, and our common relation to the God and parent of the universe.’ For Somerville, the European Enlightenment and the spread of Christianity were part of the divine plan for ending slavery and bringing a new era based on universal, cosmopolitan values. ‘It is pleasing to remark, that, from the progress of philosophy, and the benign spirit of the Christian religion, more liberal sentiments begin to prevail with respect to the common interests, and common relation, of all mankind’ (1792: 9, 13).

Conclusion The Moderate sermons of the later eighteenth century conveyed an optimistic, world-affirming, and highly practical set of theological teachings, which resonated with Scotland’s age of improvement. For Moderate ministers, God had given individuals the innate capacity—in the form of the moral sense or conscience— that would enable them to respond actively to the divine guidance of Scripture. They could develop habits of moral behaviour that would allow them steadily to grow to be more like Christ. Although reason, as Hume had taught, could never be more than a slave to the passions, conscience and Scripture together gave individuals the means to control their selfish and disordered passions, to embrace religious moderation, toleration, and morality, and contribute to the progress of Scottish society and the wider world towards a universal benevolence. While they were largely silent on such Reformed doctrines as limited atonement, election, or eternal punishment, Moderate sermons did express the Reformed theological vision of the absolute sovereignty of God over Creation. They proclaimed that God was active in history, using human actors, often in ways not intended by those actors, to advance the divine plan for the world, which involved progress towards a future order of peace and freedom. Moderate sermons appealed to universal human feelings—the passions, affections, and sentiments that defined humanity—and these sermons serve as a reminder that the Scottish Enlightenment was as much an age of the sentiments as an age of reason. Reading one of these Moderate sermons, observed the celebrated evangelical preacher, Thomas

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Chalmers, in a review written in 1811 of a volume of Samuel Charters’ sermons, ‘may add nothing to our speculation, but it will fulfil its chief aim, if it adds to our practical wisdom; if it gives our mind a steadier and more habitual direction to the principles of good conduct’ and promotes restraint amid ‘the turbulence of this world’s passions’ (1835–42, vol. xii, 307).

Bibliography Primary Literature Blair, Hugh (1746). The Wrath of Man Praising God. A Sermon Preached . . . before His Grace the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: R. Fleming. Blair, Hugh (1777). Sermons. Vol. I. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Blair, Hugh (1780). Sermons. Vol. II. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Blair, Hugh (1790). Sermons. Vol. III. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell. Blair, Hugh (1801). Sermons. Vol. V. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Bryce, James (1818). Sermons. London: Underwood. Campbell, George (1771). The Spirit of the Gospel Neither a Spirit of Superstition nor of Enthusiasm: A Sermon. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech. Campbell, George (1779). The Happy Influence of Religion on Civil Society: A Sermon. Edinburgh: William Creech. Campbell, George (1789). The Success of the First Publishers of the Gospel a Proof of its Truth, in The Scotch Preacher, 4 vols. Edinburgh: T. Cadell, vol. 3, 157–81. Carlyle, Alexander (1793). The Usefulness and Necessity of a Liberal Education for Clergymen. A Sermon. Edinburgh: William Creech. Carlyle, Alexander (1794). National Depravity the Cause of National Calamities, A Sermon. Edinburgh: John Ogle. Chalmers, Thomas (1835–42). The Collected Works of Thomas Chalmers, 25 vols. Glasgow: Collins. Charters, Samuel (1786). Sermons. Edinburgh: J. Dickson and W. Creech. Cuming, Patrick (1760). A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Edinburgh: Alexander Kincaid. Dick, Robert (1757). The Simplicity and Popularity of the Divine Revelations, and their Suitableness to the Circumstances of Mankind. A Sermon Preached . . . at the Opening of the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour and Neill. Dick, Robert (1762). The Counsel of Gamaliel Considered. A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Edinburgh: W. Sands, A. Murray and J. Cochran. Drysdale, John (1793). Sermons, 2 vols. Edinburgh: E. Balfour.

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Gerard, Alexander (1761). The Influence of Piety on the Public Good. A Sermon preached . . . before his Grace, Charles Lord Cathcart, the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell. Gerard, Alexander (1782). Sermons, 2 vols. London: Charles Dilly. Hardy, Thomas (1791). The Benevolence of the Christian Spirit, A Sermon. Edinburgh: William Creech. Hill, George (1796). Sermons. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell. Hill, George (1787). The Advantages of Searching the Scriptures. A Sermon Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Edinburgh: Martin and M’Dowall. Hill, George (1792). The Present Happiness of Great Britain. A Sermon. Edinburgh: John Balfour and James Dickson. Hume, David (1739–40). A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols. London: John Noon and Thomas Longman. Hutcheson, Frances (1728). An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. London: F. Darby and T. Browne. Leechman, William (1758). The Wisdom of God in the Gospel Revelation. A Sermon, Preached at the Opening of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour and Neill. Leechman, William (1767). The Excellency of the Spirit of Christianity. Preached before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Edinburgh: Balfour, Auld and Smellie. Leechman, William (1789). Sermons, 2 vols. London: A. Strahan. Locke, John (1695). The Reasonableness of Christianity, as delivered in the Scriptures. London: Awnsham and John Churchill. Logan, John (1790). Sermons, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute. Robertson, William (1755). The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance, and its Connexion with the Success of His Religion, Considered. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour and Neill. Somerville, Thomas (1786). ‘Sermon XX’, in Samuel Charters, Sermons. Edinburgh: J. Dickson and W. Creech. Somerville, Thomas (1789). ‘Heart-Bitterness’, in The Scotch Preacher, 4 vols. Edinburgh: T. Cadell, vol. 2, 87–103. Somerville, Thomas (1792). A Discourse on Our Obligation to Thanksgiving, for the Prospect of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade . . . delivered in the Church of Jedburgh. Kelso: Union Press.

Secondary Literature Ahnert, Thomas (2014). The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment 1690–1805. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Broadie, Alexander (2001). The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Brown, Stewart J. (2016). ‘Hugh Blair, the Sentiments and Preaching the Enlightenment in Scotland’, Intellectual History Review 26 (2016): 411–27. Clark, Ian D. L. (1963). ‘Moderatism and the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland 1752–1805’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. Kidd, Colin (2004). ‘Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55: 502–19. Mathieson, Anne (1995). Theories of Rhetoric in the 18th-Century Scottish Sermon. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Sher, Richard B. (1985). Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smitten, Jeffrey (2017). The Life of William Robertson: Minister, Historian, and Principal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stewart, M. A. (2003). ‘Religion and Rational Theology’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–59. Suderman, Jeffrey M. (2001). Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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7 Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism John R. McIntosh

One of the striking features of evangelical publication in the eighteenth century is the relative sparsity of theological work. Apart from the notable figure of Thomas Boston, there are probably only about eight writers who made a contribution of any great substance to theological publication. As Torrance has suggested, ‘Due to the problematic course of Scottish Theology in the eighteenth century, there were notable churchmen, but only a few outstanding theologians were found in the leadership of the Kirk, although there were several very able ministers of the hyper-Calvinist school’ (Torrance 1996: 238). While not all would accept the latter designation—and in any case nowhere does Torrance define what he understands by hyper-Calvinism—there is much overall truth in the statement. In the period 1740–1800, for example, it is difficult to identify more than around twenty works of a clear doctrinal nature emanating from the Church of Scotland. But while that is the case with the Church of Scotland, the picture is proportionately different in the Original Secession Church and in its various divisions. In eighteenth-century Scotland the term ‘evangelical’ was used frequently, but usually in a relatively vague or imprecisely defined manner. Fifty years ago, Stewart Mechie (1967) identified a group of theologians present in the Church of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century, which he categorized as ‘Evangelical Calvinists’ and gave as examples Thomas Boston, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, John Willison, and John Maclaurin. While some recent scholars have given different descriptive titles to the group, these figures, with several additions, most notably those of John Erskine and John Russel, comprise the main luminaries whom scholars would accept as the most notable Scottish evangelicals of the century. Mechie (1967: 268) goes on to quote a fuller description of them given by James Buchanan, the nineteenth-century Professor of Divinity at New College, Edinburgh as being worthy of note: . . . their main object was to establish the warrant of every sinner to whom the Gospel comes to receive and rest upon Christ as his Saviour. This warrant they found, not in the unrevealed, but in the revealed will of God – not in His eternal decree, but in his inspired Word – not in His secret purpose, but in His public proclamation of grace. They knew that the unrevealed will of God forms no part

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of the rule either of faith or duty; that His eternal purpose, whatever it may be and however it may regulate His own dispensations towards His creatures, can in no way affect their duty to believe the Gospel . . . (Buchanan, 1867, 187–9)

Following the Marrow controversy in the early part of the century, and the theology of Thomas Boston, after around 1740 there seems, in the established church at least, to have been a departure from dogmatic debate. The causes of this are difficult to determine. Possibly the treatment of the Marrowmen discouraged doctrinal speculation along lines potentially divergent from what was taken to be Westminster orthodoxy; perhaps the Secession of 1733 and its growing strength made theologians wary of developing lines of thought which might cause division within the established Kirk. Without doubt conflict over patronage diverted intellectual energies from theological endeavour, but it may also have led to a certain mental weariness. There was certainly little evidence of a desire to campaign for doctrinal orthodoxy, though for some, such as John Willison of Dundee South Church (1716–50), and John Russel of Kilmarnock (1774–99) and Stirling (1799–1817), that was a matter of deep concern. There was, however, a widespread concern to promote evangelistic preaching and a confidence in its efficacy. John Willison’s Fair and Impartial Testimony is in many respects seminal for an understanding of what mid-century evangelicals saw themselves both as promoting and as testifying against. Much of what he emphasized went back to Act VII of Assembly 1736 which was composed at least in part by himself, and which he asserted emphasized ‘the preaching of Christ and regeneration’ and ‘pressing morality in a Gospel-strain’ (1744: 92–6). The Act stressed, first, the obligation of ministers to warn against heretical doctrines, and to draw attention to the importance of revelation, the nature of the Trinity, and the necessity of supernatural grace and faith in the righteousness of Christ. They were to make the objective of their sermons the leading of sinners from a Covenant of Works to a Covenant of Grace for life and salvation, and from sin and self to Christ. They were to handle the doctrines of God’s redeeming love and of his free grace in the justification and salvation of sinners, and also to note the blessings of Christ’s atonement in such a way as would lead to abhorrence of sin, the love of God and our neighbours, and personal holiness so that people would be taught to live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present world. Not only was faith in Christ necessary for salvation, but so too was repentance from sin and reformation from it, and obedience to God’s commands as evidence of gratitude to God but also to testify to the sincerity of our faith for the benefit of human society, and because without holiness no one can see the Lord. In pressing moral duties or obedience to the law, and to promote ‘Gospel-holiness’, preachers were to use not just the ‘Principles of Reason only’, but more especially to argue from Revelation. In doing so, they were to show the corruption and depravity of human nature as a result of the fall of Adam, and the natural aversion to spiritual good (Act concerning

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Preaching, 21 May 1736). Although there may have been different emphases in the eighteenth-century Scottish Church as to what preaching the gospel involved, this concept of preaching it in an evangelical manner was widespread. The paramount purpose of the Church was the salvation and edification of souls. Nothing could be allowed to hinder that. As a practical definition, what eighteenth-century evangelicals saw as defining them incorporates these emphases. In fact, the issue of evangelical preaching is central in arriving at an understanding of what would be regarded as evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. As well as John Willison, Robert Walker, minister of the High Kirk of Edinburgh from 1754 to 1783, is also revealing. Both identified a connection between preaching the gospel and sound doctrine. Forty years after Willison, Robert Walker identified the importance of evangelical preaching which was Christ-centred as an antidote to infidelity, that is, inconsistency between the professed faith of the Christian and lifestyle. It was inadequate for preachers to publish the laws of Christ unless they were published as his laws. The arguments advanced for obeying them were those ‘peculiar to his gospel’. The ‘great duties of morality’ should be preached as ‘the genuine effects and proper evidences of faith and love to God’. Ministers especially were to remind their hearers that they should not rely on any actions of their own for their justification, but that they should renounce all confidence in them and ‘seek to be found in Christ alone’. He stressed that preaching should involve highlighting the necessity of faith in Christ. Understanding the nature of faith was essential (Sermons on Practical Subjects, 1796: vol. 2, 73–80). There are grounds for suggesting, therefore, that what may have happened was that theological debate became more focused on the practical implications of doctrine; doctrinal debate became more experimental, to use the historic Scottish term. Possibly a more seminal role in eighteenth-century Scottish evangelicalism than has yet been appreciated was that of Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712). Dismissed as something of a transitional figure by Torrance but acknowledged by him as ‘an evangelical strongly opposed to legalistic religion’ (1996: 229), his influence has not yet been defined. Moreover, his works have only recently been reprinted in 2000–5. For ten years a parish minister in Ceres in Fife, and then for two years before his early death a Professor of Divinity in St Andrews, he is most commonly noted for his personal struggle with deism which he recorded in his Memoirs, and most systematically in Natural Religion Insufficient; and Reveal’d Necessary to Man’s Happiness in his present State (1714). Torrance asserts that Halyburton believed that faith in God could not be established on external grounds and only through a spiritual relationship to God deriving from revelation. Faith was not merely assent to doctrine, but a reliance on and surrender to Christ (An Essay on the Ground or Formal Reason of Saving Faith, 92; Torrance 1996: 231–2). There is extended, though negative, reference to John Locke, however, in Halyburton’s Nature of Faith; or, The Ground upon which Faith assents to the Scripture,

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appended to Natural Religion Insufficient, which is probably reflected in John Erskine’s later Dissertation on the Nature of Christian Faith, although Erskine was much more positive regarding Locke. It is probable that he influenced John Maclaurin of the Ramshorn Church in Glasgow (1723–54). It is at least possible that Halyburton was read more widely than has been realized. Halyburton presented the gospel in the context of the Covenant of Grace, salvation being consistently seen in a covenant setting. In Natural Religion Insufficient, he investigated natural religion’s inability to reveal the nature of the deity, its deficiencies regarding instruction in the right worship of God, and its failure to reveal the origins of true happiness. He noted its inability to deal with the question of original sin and how forgiveness is to be attained. To this last area he devoted much attention. He also defined faith as a cordial approbation of God’s way of saving sinners through Christ’s mediation and righteousness, an emphasis later found in John Erskine. In short, Halyburton wrote on the areas which were later to receive most attention in the works of those who shaped eighteenthcentury Scottish evangelicalism; namely, the relative status of natural and revealed religion, salvation from sin through the atoning death of Christ, and the nature of faith. His work seems in some ways to have set the parameters for much evangelical thought for the rest of the century. As well as evidence from the eighteenth century that John Maclaurin and John Erskine were acquainted with and utilized his works, Robert Burns of the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, who wrote the Introduction to the 1833 edition of his works, bracketed him with Owen, Baxter, and Edwards whose popularity he suggested indicated the developing theological taste of the period; John Duncan of the Free Church College declared in a prefatory note to the edition of one of Halyburton’s sermons that his piety and learning had procured for him a reputation such that it would be ‘superfluous’ and ‘arrogant’ to seek to add to his praise; and Hugh Martin commended in particular his ideas on the relationship between regeneration and justification, and named Halyburton and William Cunningham as the two greatest Scottish theologians (Ferguson 2011). The lines of Halyburton’s influence remain to be traced in detail.

The Secession Theologians Before turning to an analysis of the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland evangelicals, it is important to note that proportionately the Secession churches produced a greater volume of theological publication than did the established church. Probably as a result of a perceived need to explain or justify their secession, theological publication was a natural enterprise. They were concerned to stress that their cause was not just a result of the grievance of patronage, but also because of the doctrinal declension which they believed characterized the established church. Ebenezer Erskine is considered in another chapter in these three

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volumes.¹ Suffice it to say here that his main published works are sermons in which his distinctive emphasis is on God’s gracious dealings with men. While his theology was covenantal, his federal framework did not prevent a pervasive emphasis on the love of God. The much-quoted assertion of Adam Gib, his colleague and his erstwhile nemesis, to another Secession minister who had not heard Erskine preach, ‘Sir, you have never heard the Gospel in its majesty’, throws light on the nature of his preaching and teaching. Ebenezer Erskine’s brother Ralph, as well as sermons with a strong devotional emphasis, published Faith no Fancy, or, a Treatise of Mental Images (Edinburgh, 1745) which was a psychological and philosophical treatise as part of the Secession’s controversy with Church of Scotland ministers who supported the Cambuslang and Kilsyth revivals. In particular, it was a response to the evangelical James Robe’s claim that ‘we cannot think upon Jesus Christ really as he is . . . without an imaginary idea of him as a man’ (Cameron et al. 1993). Adam Gib, while most renowned as a controversialist, published two theological works: Sacred Contemplations (1786) which owed much to Thomas Boston’s teachings on the Marrow and especially highlighted Boston’s teaching on the warrant for faith in the gospel offer, and prior to that in 1774 he published The Present Truth: a Display of the Secession Testimony which was a determined defence of Anti-Burgher theology. He had earlier, in 1749, reissued John Owen’s Death of Death in response to the Seceder Thomas Muir’s republication of James Fraser of Brea’s Treatise on Justifying Faith earlier in the same year. John Brown of Haddington was probably the Secession’s most widely read author. In his earlier ministry he had incurred the suspicion of Gib and others of the Secession leadership because of the self-taught nature of his learning, and after that he had issues with Gib over the latter’s history of the Secession division over the Burgess Oath. He issued his systematic theology as A Compendium View of Natural and Revealed Religion (1782) which embodied orthodox federal Calvinism, and wrote critically of Hume’s views on natural religion. It was important for Brown to stress the Christological aspects of the Covenant of Grace, not differentiating between a Covenant of Grace and a Covenant of Redemption, and argued that the end of Christ’s offices and person was sanctification. He maintained that an orthodox Christology led to a right understanding of sanctification, which was both a privilege and a duty, and to practical godliness (1783). He was concerned to highlight the importance of these issues for candidates for the ministry as the Associate Synod’s professor, and possibly also as a counter to what he saw as deficiencies in Moderate ministry. He was also concerned to promote unity in the Christian Church.² His most popular work, of course, was his famous Self-Interpreting Bible (1778). James Fisher’s The ¹ For further discussion, see Stephen G. Myers, ‘The Marrow Controversy: Boston, Erskine and Hadow’, History of Scottish Theology, Vol. 1, 342–358. ² On John Brown of Haddington, see Israel Guerrero, ‘The Practical Implications of the Covenant Theology of John Brown of Haddington (1722–87)’, unpublished MTh dissertation, Glasgow University (2018).

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Assembly’s Shorter Catechism Explained by Way of Question and Answer (1753) was reprinted numerous times and was very much an eighteenth-century classic which found favour across the Presbyterian denominations. Other Secession ministers such as William McEwen in Select Essays (1767) which dealt with the principal heads of Christian doctrine, and William Wilson (1739), contributed substantially if conventionally in the Marrow-Erskine mould. While in recent years there has been erudite debate over the evangelical status of these Secession ministers, and while some of them may have displayed somewhat unattractive character traits to modern eyes, during their lifetimes they were usually accepted as warm Calvinist evangelicals (Mitchell 1998; Van Doodewaard 2011; Myers 2016). The latter half of the eighteenth century, from 1730 until the end of the century, was certainly not marked by a comparable volume of its theological publication by members of the Church of Scotland. Much published material by ministers dealt with the patronage dispute. In fact, total published works on issues of doctrine in this period appear to total only twenty-two titles (McIntosh 1989: 480–96). Of these, three were authored by ministers who voted with the Moderate party at the General Assembly and gave no signs in their works of having evangelical sympathies. Of the rest, not all published sufficiently to reveal where exactly on the theological spectrum they should be placed, but overall, the evidence indicates that probably they should be identified as at least evangelical in their inclinations. Some of them were clearly evangelicals in terms of the initial criteria suggested in this chapter. As suggested earlier, eighteenth-century Scottish theology can be analysed under three main areas: the relative status of natural and revealed religion, salvation through the atoning death of Christ and the nature of faith, and practical religion. The first of these three headings includes the nature of religious knowledge, the attributes of God, and the nature of man; the second includes the doctrines of sin, the atonement, and the nature of faith; and the third incorporates the nature of holiness or piety, and the requirements of apologetics. The latter two increasingly tended to merge into one category.³ This framework has the virtue of broadly following the subject areas of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the official subordinate standard of all the Scottish Presbyterian denominations throughout the century.

Natural and Revealed Religion In the wake of the Enlightenment there would appear to have been a considerable variation of opinion amongst Scottish evangelicals of the period as to what they

³ See Clark (1963), where it is argued that the characteristics of eighteenth-century Moderate theology are to be found at their clearest in the three areas of the relationship between natural and revealed religion, the person and work of Christ, and the connection between faith and works.

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actually understood by the terms involved in discussion of natural and revealed religion. From early in the century until its end there was a constant strand of criticism of natural religion. There was a consensus, though, that it conveyed truth about the nature of God as shown in the works of creation and providence, and about the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments for good and evil done in this life. There was, though, general agreement that the central truths of Christianity could only be known through revelation. As a result of this, many Scottish evangelicals, though especially so in the Secession churches, were wary of the whole concept of natural religion as they perceived it to divert from or dilute essential revealed truth. On the other hand, notable figures such as John Maclaurin of the Glasgow Ramshorn church (1723–54), John Witherspoon of Beith (1745–57) and Paisley (Laigh Kirk) (1757–68) who went on to become the President of the College of New Jersey, later to become Princeton Seminary, and John Erskine, latterly of Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh (1767–1803), were more sanguine about natural religion as they saw it as drawing attention to the divine perfections and divine providence as leading men to honour and adore God. John Erskine in ‘The Law of Nature sufficiently promulgated to Heathens’ (1741) saw natural religion as teaching not just the existence of God but also the immortality of the soul. John Maclaurin in ‘An Essay on Christian Piety’ (1755) and John Witherspoon in 1757 noted that natural religion led men to honour God’s perfections revealed in the work of salvation and redemption (Erskine 1765: 213–14; Maclaurin 1860: vol. 2, 64; Witherspoon 1757: 64). It was not infrequently remarked that the Christian religion was differentiated from natural religion by the doctrine of the atonement and its concomitants which led to piety towards God, charity towards man, and sober, righteous, and godly living. Evangelical writers had little in general, though, to say about natural religion, but, by the same token, they said little about revelation either, though they were clear that natural religion could not provide a saving knowledge of God. Ideas about the divine attributes, however, led to discussion of the atonement. It is noteworthy, though, that while writers of an evangelical colour were often in disagreement about the value of natural religion, Moderate thinkers were much more careful to delineate the respective spheres of both natural and revealed religion, and to emphasize that the latter provided the only satisfying answers to the problems unsolved by the first, rather than rejecting the value of natural religion as the evangelicals were more inclined to do by comparison (Clark 1963: 251).

The Divine Attributes Evangelical thought on the attributes of God revealed some surprising emphases and omissions. In general, there were three strands of emphasis. There was, first,

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an intellectual emphasis—as opposed to a theological or devotional one—in which analysis started from an analysis of God as Creator and its implications for human happiness and for divine involvement in the world; secondly, a devotionallyorientated emphasis based on perceptions of God as benevolent and loving; and a third one which was more theologically focused and which stressed divine justice, holiness, and hatred of sin, as well as the love of God. This third approach was markedly Christocentric. Both this approach and the second led to a discussion of the Atonement. In the first half of the century, there was quite a stress on ideas of God as the supreme Mind, the Head and Father of the Rational System, or as the ‘Universal Governor’. This emphasis and terminology seems to have derived from the influence of Principal William Wishart of Edinburgh who cannot be categorized as an evangelical, but who was nonetheless influential in his role as a teacher of divinity students. The sort of terminology used by Wishart was used and applied by figures such as Robert Walker and John Dun of Auchinleck (1752–67), the tutor of James Boswell the biographer. Dun possibly made the most noteworthy use of the approach when, in one of his sermons, he produced a developed theory of causation in response to the question of how the divine government operates. He later used the theory to argue in support of the doctrine of free will against suggestions that divine foreknowledge prejudices free will and asserted that foreknowledge is not the same as causation (1790: vol. 1, 73–8, 181–2). While there were writers whose theological views were closer to those of the Moderates who on the whole followed Wishart in regarding love as the most important attribute of God, there were also evangelicals who stressed love in that sense but reached their conclusion by derivation much more directly from Scripture. Robert Walker declared that the purpose of everything in Scripture was to prove that ‘God is love’. The ultimate proof lay in God’s pardoning sin in redemption by Christ. In 1807, David Savile of the Edinburgh Canongate Chapelof-Ease (1799–1810) maintained that from the goodness and graciousness of God proceeded the atonement. Much more numerous, however, was a third group of men including Alexander Webster of the Edinburgh Tolbooth, Robert Dick of the Old Kirk of Edinburgh, John Witherspoon, John Russel, and John Love (the founding Secretary of the London Missionary Society and minister of Anderston after 1800). These men stressed the need to view the divine attributes in relation to each other and not in isolation. Possibly the most important single work in this tradition is John Maclaurin’s famous sermon Glorying in the Cross of Christ. It is in the Cross of Christ that we see God’s wisdom, power, love, and mercy. This is what constitutes the essence of the character of God. He is fundamentally holy, and his love is to be seen as mercy rather than as benevolence or something much vaguer. They mentioned divine love, justice, and holiness, but, of these, justice was perhaps the key element. Some would argue that their influence led to a distortion in the

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traditional balance between love and justice in the deity, but it is difficult to find clear examples of this being the case. Though John Maclaurin in his Essay on Christian Piety could write of redemption as displaying with peculiar lustre God’s justice, power, and wisdom, but especially his mercy and love, he could also at the same time interpret the essence of the atonement as the satisfaction of divine justice (1860: 80, 99). Towards the end of the century, though, there may have been a change of emphasis amongst those who adopted this position. For example, John Russel in an 1801 sermon identified the greatness of God, the holiness of God, and the mercy of God as being the three elements in ‘just views of the divine perfections’ (Russel 1801: 7–13). When it came to the nature of man, the key issue was the question of the extent of the consequences of the Fall, especially in relation to the human conscience. Were the conscience and the affections totally depraved and to what extent did this mean they were reliable or not? Was reason also affected by the Fall? Most evangelical writers and preachers, unlike Calvin for example, were relatively sanguine regarding the latter. Witherspoon and Daniel Macqueen (in his response to Hume’s History of Great Britain, 1756: 55, 67) argued that religion was ‘rationally grounded’, as did Alexander Webster (1741: 18) and John Erskine (1779: 28). Significant evangelical figures, therefore, would appear to have been influenced to some extent by the pressure of ideas originating in the Enlightenment towards a cautious qualification or explanation of the relationship between reason and revelation and the light they threw on the nature of man.

Atonement and Faith Despite the strictures of Robert Burns on preoccupation with sin in his ‘Holy Fair’, for example, evangelicals in eighteenth-century Scotland were more concerned with the doctrine of the Atonement than they were with questions about the nature of sin. Where sin was discussed, most writers accepted straightforward definitions relating to breaking the commandments, grieving and provoking God, defiling or polluting the soul, things which led to spiritual anguish or to further involvement in sin. While there was much greater interest in the subject of the atonement, it does need to be noted that many who spoke of it were remarkably flexible about the terms they used. The majority spoke of sacrifice, propitiation, and mediation but also appearing were intercession, substitution, and redemption. Sacrifice and propitiation, however, were the most common and this is not without significance. Consideration of the atonement raises the question of the nature of faith. It is surprising that relatively few evangelicals wrote much about it. Only John Willison, John Maclaurin, his son-in-law John Gillies (Glasgow Blackfriars, 1742–96), and John Erskine made more than a passing reference to it. Using Boston’s

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Fourfold State as his model, John Gillies wrote about conversion and about repentance, but few others seem to have done so. Possibly Boston’s Fourfold State, which was in most reading homes, was regarded as having said the last word, and his analysis of the sinner’s progress from conviction of sin to conversion and faith was rarely developed. Conversion was perceived as in essence repentance and belief in the redemptive office of Christ. There was throughout the period from 1720 onwards evidence of a powerful influence on evangelical thought of an intellectual description of faith. Willison reasoned from the inadequacy of natural religion to the ability of revelation to supply the former’s deficiencies, to demonstrate not only Christianity’s truth, but infidelity’s unreasonableness (An Example of Plain Catechising, 1731) (1844: 594–8). Even the ‘experimental demonstration’ of the gospel’s truth does not come from the individual’s inward experience, but from the united testimony of Christians to the operation of the Holy Spirit. It was an important aspect of the theological contribution of John Maclaurin and John Erskine that they took particular care to integrate their perceptions of the role of the Holy Spirit in their descriptions of the nature of faith. John Maclaurin was a central figure in the life and thought of Scottish evangelicalism around the mid-century. His sermon Glorying in the Cross of Christ is still regarded as the epitome of eighteenth-century Scottish evangelical preaching. While most of his works were published posthumously, he was very influential: he was a founder member of the Concert for Prayer, a central figure in the transatlantic correspondence network of the period which involved Jonathan Edwards and others, and he significantly influenced other leading figures especially in Scotland. I have suggested elsewhere he linked earlier figures such as Boston and Willison to later ones such as John Erskine who was a personal friend (McIntosh 1998: 50). Most influentially for the present purpose, he wrote extensively on the nature of faith in his Essay on Christian Piety (1860, vol. 2) in which he focuses on acknowledgement of Christ’s redemption as the life and soul of practical Christianity. Faith gives the believer a right to eternal life and all the benefits of the Covenant of Grace. Repentance, which includes a sincere sorrow for sin, turning from sin to God, and holiness is inseparable from true faith and of equal necessity with it, although not of the same influence as our interest in Christ’s mediation. Acknowledgement of that mediation is the ‘immediate effectual means’ of salvation (1860: vol. 2, 64–5). Overall, Maclaurin was an orthodox Calvinist who reflected certain ideas which circulated in the Scottish Enlightenment. But there were aspects of Maclaurin’s thought which were distinctive and worthy of note. Acceptance of Christ with the whole heart implies ‘sincere persuasion of the divine offers and promises’, and dependence on them, and also a ‘cordial esteem’ of them. In turn, this leads to having ‘just apprehensions’ of the object of our faith, and of the end of our faith, namely, our glorying of God’s

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perfections shown in the redemption. This is a main feature of a life of faith in Christ, and is the main purpose of the work of the Holy Spirit. Faith in Christ is a faith characterized by love and this leads to the believer’s focus on deliverance from sin itself. This faith produces not just desire for the favour of God as a means of happiness, but for the enjoyment of God himself, and an active glorifying of God as the principal effects of God’s favour and as the most valuable objects of the desires central to the nature of holiness. These desires included in love of God and the nature of repentance meet their full satisfaction in the promises of the Covenant of Grace. John Maclaurin, therefore, was in the mainstream of Scottish evangelical thought regarding faith in seeing it as a matter of intellectual assent. In doing so, he utilized epistemological ideas drawn from John Locke which were typical of Scottish Enlightenment terminology. He differentiated between acknowledgement of the ‘meritorious cause’ of salvation which was Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, the acknowledgement of his redemptive role which he saw as the principal ingredient of faith, and the acknowledgement of his mediatorial role which he described as the ‘immediate effectual means’ of faith. Furthermore, while he defined human sanctification as being the chief end of faith, he stressed the idea of the ultimate end of faith as being the glorification of the divine perfections. He also seems to have seen the whole nature of faith as being comprehended in the Covenant of Grace. In this last, he stands somewhat apart from the majority of his evangelical Church of Scotland peers who tended to say little about covenant. Maclaurin was also concerned to keep the work of sanctification associated with the act of faith. Possibly this was a response to the Moderate tendency to connect sanctification to the example of Christ (McIntosh 1998: 50–4). This type of thought is carried over into evangelical ideas about the nature of piety. While some evangelical writers tended to emphasize piety as an act of worship, it did not of itself involve performance of acts as such; instead, they argued that it contributed to the development of the Christian’s disposition to virtuous actions. It related principally to the believer’s relationship to God, and only indirectly to his or her relationship to fellow human beings. This emphasis is to be found in the works of Daniel Macqueen (1756), David Blair of Brechin (1744), and John Bonar of Perth (1750). But there was a second school of thought, appearing as early as the work of Alexander Webster in 1741, but also in those of John Witherspoon in 1757, Patrick Bannerman of Kinnoull in 1751, and John Erskine. This group of writers sought to blend devotion and practice. Witherspoon put it succinctly when he wrote: ‘Now we glorify God by cultivating holy dispositions, and doing pious and useful actions’ (1757: 14). This was probably the basic motivation for the most significant theological work produced by an evangelical Church of Scotland minister in the latter half of the eighteenth century, John Erskine’s Dissertation on the Nature of Christian Faith. This is an unusually erudite work. Erskine drew from the works of Jonathan

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Edwards, John Owen, John Locke, the Glasgow professor William Leechman, and others, and, while little else on the subject was published after its appearance until the evangelical revivals of the nineteenth century, it does seem to have influenced the sermons of a number of other evangelical writers of the eighteenth. While Erskine stood in the mainstream of eighteenth-century Scottish evangelicalism in seeing the term ‘faith’ as signifying intellectual persuasion or assent, as leading to increased knowledge of God, and as leading to the sanctification of the believer, and while he ascribed the efficacy of all these beliefs to the operation of the Holy Spirit, he does show an independence of mind. He saw that the mainstream perception of faith, as involving a fundamentally intellectual assent to the truths of the gospel, could lead to a faith which might not be ‘saving faith’. He was concerned to explain the reason why so many Scots could affirm the truths of Christianity and still lead lives which did not evidence the outworkings of faith. To retain the orthodox Calvinist perception of faith as ‘saving knowledge’ and also to explain the inconsistency, he brought contemporary Enlightenment insights relating to the operation of the understanding, the will, and the senses. He almost certainly had access to Maclaurin’s as yet unpublished Essay on Piety, and in a way he modified the understanding of faith to be found there, and developed insights which Maclaurin had gleaned from Locke. He was clear that ‘faith is not to be found in the generality of those who call themselves Christians’ (Erskine 1765: 198). He quoted Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity as ‘largely and unanswerably’ proving that the proposition that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God’ was the only proposition belief in which was necessary in order to be a Christian (Erskine 1765: 198, 152). Following Locke, he argued that believing the proposition was of no value unless one understood what it meant ‘in the fullest and most emphatical sense of the word’. The requisite knowledge lays the foundation for an unlimited trust in Christ. The nature of the faith required has a strongly devotional emphasis. But although Erskine went into detail about the different aspects of this faith, he still had to differentiate the faith of self-deceivers from genuine faith. For Erskine the difference was the operation of the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit works within the true believer, he or she cannot resist assent. Saving faith is, therefore, ‘A persuasion that Jesus is the Son of God, flowing from spiritual views of such a glory in the gospel, as satisfies and convinces the mind, that a scheme so glorious could have none but God for its author’. And this assent, founded on a discovery of the glory of the gospel, is impossible without ‘the special saving operation of the Spirit’ (Erskine 1765: 182–5). True faith, however, is also distinguished from counterfeits by the way it affects the affections and conduct. Truths of revelation contribute to the improvement of the believer’s spiritual life. God enlightens the understanding so that the will may be attracted to a right choice. Christian doctrines and their right perception, particularly those relating to God’s plan of redemption, promote holiness of heart and life and are the origin of both.

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More could be said of the relationship between Locke and Erskine, and between Maclaurin, Erskine, and Jonathan Edwards. Suffice it to say that Erskine was persuaded that faith could be rationally defended, but at bottom he embodied the evangelical assumption that saving faith results in changed life which is evidenced by the fruits of that faith, resulting from the Spirit’s involvement. A survey of publications in the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland evidences an increasing evangelical emphasis. While there was a move away from focus on the principles of high federal theology as the century progressed, there was a concurrent emphasis on core evangelical doctrines involved in the atonement, the nature of faith, the importance of a living relationship or union with Christ, and of Christians leading day-to-day lives which were consistent with their professions of faith. Perhaps rather than study of the eighteenth-century evangelicals being heavily focused on their relationship to what came before them, more attention should be devoted to the theologians of the eighteenth century in their own right but also as forerunners of the great evangelical developments of the nineteenth. For example, was there a connection between Dr John Love of Anderston, the first Secretary of the London Missionary Society and Thomas Chalmers during the latter’s years in Glasgow; and between Love and the Arran brothers Finlay and George Cook, who became central figures in the development of Highland spirituality in the nineteenth century? What was the nature of the transmission of evangelical faith to the fathers of the Free Church in the midnineteenth century? In what ways did the development of Secession theology influence that of the other Scottish denominations? The influence of the eighteenth-century Scottish evangelicals is yet to be fully traced.

Bibliography Primary Literature Dun, John (1790). Sermons, 2 vols. Kilmarnock: J. Wilson. Erskine, John (1765). Theological Dissertations. London: Edward and Charles Dilly. Erskine, John (1779). ‘Prayer for those in civil and military office recommended from a view of the influence of Providence in their characters, conduct, and success. A Sermon. Preached before the Election of the Magistrates of Edinburgh, Oct. 5, 1779’. London. Halyburton, Thomas (2000–5). Halyburton’s Works, 4 vols. Kincorth, Aberdeen: James Begg Society. Maclaurin, John (1860). The Works of the Rev. John Maclaurin, ed. W. H. Goold. Edinburgh: John Maclaren. Macqueen, Daniel (1756). Letters on Mr Hume’s History of Great Britain. Edinburgh: Kincaid & Donaldson.

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Russel, John (1787). The Reasons of our Lord’s Agony in the Garden, and the Influence of Just Views of them on Universal Holiness. Kilmarnock: John Wilson. Russel, John (1796). The Nature of the Gospel Delineated, and its Universal Spread founded upon the Declaration of Jesus Christ: A Sermon. Ayr: J & P Wilson. Russel, John (1801). ‘True Religion the Foundation of True Patriotism. A Sermon preached in the High Church of Stirling to the Loyal Stirling Volunteers, Yeomanry, etc., on the Fast Day, February 1801’. Stirling. Savile, David (1807). Dissertation on the Existence, Attributes, Providence, and Moral Government of God: and on the Duty, Character, Security, and Final Happiness of His Righteous Subjects. Edinburgh: no publisher. Walker, Robert (1796). Sermons on Practical Subjects, 4 vols. London: Thomas Kay. Webster, Alexander (1741). Supernatural Revelation the only sure Hope of Sinners. Edinburgh: Fleming and Alison. [Webster, Alexander] (1742). Divine Influence the True Spring of the Extraordinary Work at Cambuslang and Other Places in the West of Scotland. Edinburgh: Lumisden and Robertson. Willison, John (1844). The Practical Works of the Rev. John Willison, ed. W. M. Hetherington. Glasgow: Blackie. Witherspoon, John (1757). A Serious Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage. Being an Attempt to show, That contributing to the Support of a Public Theatre, is inconsistent with the Character of a Christian. Glasgow: Bryce and Paterson. Witherspoon, John (1804–5). The Works of John Witherspoon, D.D., 8 vols. Edinburgh: Ogle & Aikman, et al.

Secondary Literature Bebbington, D. W. (1989). Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman. Cameron N. M. de S., et al. (eds.) (1993). Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Clark, I. D. L. (1963). ‘Moderatism and the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland, 1752–1805’. PhD thesis, Cambridge University. Clark, I. D. L. (1970). ‘From Protest to Reaction: The Moderate Regime in the Church of Scotland, 1752–1805’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200–24. Ferguson, John C. A. (2011). ‘The Atonement in its Relations: The Doctrine of Salvation in the Federal Theology of Hugh Martin (1822–1885)’. PhD thesis, Aberdeen University. McIntosh, John R. (1989). ‘The Popular Party in the Church of Scotland, 1740–1800’. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

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McIntosh, John R. (1998). Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740–1800. East Linton: Tuckwell (Scottish Historical Review Monograph Series). Macleod, John (1946). Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History. Edinburgh: Knox Press and Banner of Truth. Mechie, S. (1967). ‘The Theological Climate in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in D. Shaw (ed.), Reformation and Revolution: Essays presented to the Very Reverend Principal Emeritus Hugh Watt, D.D., on the Sixtieth Anniversary of His Ordination. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 258–72. Mitchell, Christopher Wayne (1998). ‘Jonathan Edwards’s Scottish Connection and the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Evangelical Revival, 1735–1750’. PhD thesis, St Andrews University. Myers, Stephen G. (2016). Scottish Federalism and Covenantalism in Transition: The Theology of Ebenezer Erskine. Cambridge: James Clarke. Torrance, Thomas F. (1996). Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John Macleod Campbell. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Van Doodewaard, W. E. (2011). The Marrow Controversy and Seceder Tradition: Atonement, Saving Faith, and the Gospel Offer in Scotland, (1718–1799). Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage. Walker, James (1982 [1888]). Theology and Theologians of Scotland, 1560–1750. Edinburgh: Knox Press. Yeager, Jonathan (2011). Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeager, Jonathan (2012). ‘Nature and Grace in the Theology of John Maclaurin’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60/4: 435–48.

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8 Reformed Theology in Gaelic Women’s Poetry and Song Anne Macleod Hill

In exploring the reception of Reformed theology in Gaelic Scotland as seen in Gaelic women’s songs, the temptation is to look primarily to recognized spiritual poets and overtly spiritual songs. This, however, would be to impose a distinction rarely observed by poets who themselves see no clear separation between physical and spiritual worlds. Each is interpreted in the light of the other. Individual songs show how the poet imagines reality, the values she holds, how she explains pain, sorrow, and injustice, how she understands life and death. Spiritual songs may be contextualized in the physical world, naming individuals and discussing contemporary events, while songs on secular subjects often carry a subtext, a complementary narrative framed in biblical references to either disguise or justify the poet’s stance on societal or ethical issues. Taken together, they offer insights into the theological understanding prevailing at any particular time or place. Tunes carry messages just as words do, and in the Gaelic tradition, where tunes and refrains are freely shared, no song is heard in isolation, each is evocative of another. Adam’s expulsion from Eden and the loss of his inheritance, for example, is all the more poignant when it arouses personal and communal memories of emigration, dispossession, and exile. What becomes evident in a broad study of Gaelic women’s songs, whether spiritual or secular, is that poets assume a direct correlation between what they learn from the Scriptures and their own experience. They draw parallels between their own world and that of their biblical predecessors, opening up a dialogue with biblical texts to show that what they and their communities experience has been experienced before. The Clearance landlord had his antecedent in the wealthy man who ‘lays field to field’; while war and the loss of yet another generation of young men brings memories of Ramah, and of Rachel who wept and would not be comforted. The most pressing problems in extending Reformed teaching to the Gaelicspeaking Highlands and Islands of Scotland were those of language and literacy. These were to some extent addressed in a succession of Gaelic publications: John Carswell’s translation of Knox’s Book of Common Order, 1567, which included a catechism loosely based on Calvin’s Little Catechism, but omitted the Metrical

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Psalms; Calvin’s Catechismus Ecclesiae Genevensis, 1631; The Shorter Catechism, 1651; the first fifty Metrical Psalms, 1659; the complete Psalter, 1694; The Confession of Faith, with Larger and Shorter Catechisms, 1725; the New Testament, 1767, and the complete Bible, 1801 (MacLean 1915). Long before the Bible was translated into Gaelic, and when practical literacy was confined to ministers, schoolmasters, and an educated elite, there is clear evidence in vernacular song that extensive passages from the Scriptures were being committed to communal memory. These were learned from extempore translations from English or Irish made by ministers, catechists, and church ‘readers’, or even from young children whose schooling was in English. This informal indigenization of the literary language of the Bible allowed of local variations, some of which became so deeply embedded that when the authorized Gaelic translation appeared, many preferred the versions familiar from the teaching of their own minister and elders. The example of The Confession of Faith and The Catechism, which offer biblical texts as validation for each point of doctrine, and the convention in Gaelic sermons and prayer that every assertion made is supported by scriptural references, contributed to an ever-growing lexicon of biblical imagery and allusion. Poets played their part by almost invariably associating their songs with texts of higher authority, whether the Scriptures, The Catechism, or works such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Boston’s Human Nature in its Fourfold State. Land Rights campaigner Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, for example, though unable to read or write, confidently cited ten biblical instances of injustice and betrayal in a song complaining of her own imprisonment in 1872 (Nic a’ Phearsain 1998: 60–4). Though an adherent rather than a member of Inverness Free Church, Màiri also expressed strong views on issues such as Higher Criticism and contemporary disputes over The Confession of Faith, accusing theologians of denying the Creed and rejecting the teaching of their fathers. With literacy in Gaelic always the exception rather than the rule, poems were composed orally and transmitted as song, a medium open to all quite independent of written texts. Interpreting biblical teaching in local dialects, attaching it to familiar tunes, and delivering it in familiar voices has given Gaelic spiritual song an accessibility which has been its greatest strength. By locating teaching in the home rather than the pulpit, doctrine can be understood in ways inaccessible to reason alone. Exemplars lose none of their canonicity when carried in song, but may come to be more deeply embedded in the collective subconscious, more authoritative than any amount of reasoned exposition could make them. As spiritual songs were neither expected nor intended to be sung in formal worship, they are unconstrained by considerations of length or subject matter. With the ‘gift of poetry’ seen as a spiritual gift, often accompanying conversion and carrying a responsibility to pass on what has been given, regardless of opposition, there are songs of all types. They range from what are effectively sermons in verse, as ordered as any delivered from the pulpit, to intensely introspective penitentials.

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There are passionate love songs to Christ, and bitter arguments between body and soul. There are songs arguing for and against Secession, Disruption, and Union, and denunciations of theologians accused of valuing learning over inspiration. There are evangelical lullabies and work-songs, professions of faith, and personal testimonies. Servants of the Church are remembered in affectionate laments. The precentor’s favourite tune, the elder’s faithful care of his charges, the minister’s most notable sermons, all are recorded in song. The evangelical message which these laments invariably contain, is delivered in the voice of the late minister himself, respectfully avoiding the prohibition on women preaching. This communal involvement means that Gaelic women’s songs carry a record of the spiritual, cultural, and domestic life of Highland Scotland which is unique. Providence is unquestioned, with divine presence and direction assumed in every aspect of life. In 1843, for example, a St Kilda mother, seeing her son swept out to sea, appeals to the King of the Universe to claim him before he is overwhelmed by his sins. In 1908, again in St Kilda, an elderly lady grieves over the drowning of a thirteen-year-old boy, asking that the King of Grace send His own Son to the parents in place of the son they have lost. A young mother in Bernera, Uig, losing her five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son within two days of each other in the influenza epidemic of 1919, sadly accepts that the One who had given the children into her charge had a prior right to them, and it was He who had ordained that they be taken from her. In 1942 in Vatisker, a woman sings of Europe at war—its ruined cities and devastated families—warning that it is not the human enemy which we should fear, but One who is stronger, for if God himself is angry, there is no place of safety for Man. In Stornoway Sanatorium in 1947 a young woman in the last stages of tuberculosis sings of the cold emptiness of her heart, but her regret is not for the loss of her life, but for the loss of the spiritual assurance she had as a sixteen-year-old convert. The information which songs such as these carry would be all but impossible to retrieve from any other source. Songs which survive in the oral tradition are of particular interest as they do not simply reflect one person’s experience. They may be of individual or composite composition, but the very fact of their survival indicates that others have related to them, committed them to memory, and passed them on. Though taking the voices of a few individuals as representing the mind-set of their generation is problematic, we have little option when dealing with a poetic tradition where publication was by word of mouth rather than print. The earliest evangelical songs positively attributed to a woman are those of the mideighteenth-century poet Ann Campbell of Barr, known as Bean a Bharra. She is followed by Mary MacPherson, known as Bean Torra Dhamh, then towards the end of the century, by Mairearad Ghriogarach, a poet whose secular songs illustrate the pervasive influence of Reformed doctrine. Their work is of particular interest, in that it offers the earliest evidence of Reformed theological ideas being discussed in Gaelic women’s songs.

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Bean a Bharra, Mrs Ann Campbell of Barr ( fl. 1745) That so few evangelical songs have survived from the eighteenth century is no reflection of the regard in which they were held. The inclusion of seven of Bean a Bharra’s songs in Duncan Kennedy’s 1786 collection, Co’- chruinneachadh Laoidhe agus Chantaicibh Spioradail, le Ughdairean Eagsamhail, is in itself an indication of her status as a poet. In 1745, the Jacobite poet Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair had directed a series of vicious satires against her, accusing her of shameless immorality and of attempting to usurp the office of the minister by presuming to preach the Gospel. Her ‘immorality’, so far as is known, consisted of opposing his political views, while her ‘preaching’ took the form of composing spiritual songs. Bean a Bharra was the daughter of Duncan Campbell, Notary Public in Lorne, married to Duncan Campbell, tacksman of Barr in Morvern. She was literate in English and Gaelic, and well-read in both Old and New Testaments. From this privileged position, she passes on her understanding of Reformed teaching in a series of didactic songs. In ‘Gèillibh do Lagh an Àrd-righ’ (Yield to the Law of the High King), she explains the First Covenant with Adam, the Old Covenant of the Law, and the New Covenant of Grace (1786: 65–8). Christ’s act of atonement, she assures us, had covered countless generations, and all would be reconciled with Him in the House of God. In examining Bean a Bharra’s song it is important to bear in mind that the surviving text may not exactly represent the poet’s original, nor can it necessarily be taken as a considered statement of belief. It is not clear whether her assurance that Christ’s sacrifice was made for all was a declaration of belief in universal atonement, a rejection of limited atonement, or simply an encouragement to her companions. In another song on the same theme, she shows that even as God sentences Adam to exile and death, He promises that ‘some of his descendants’ would be saved. Whether she intended this as a reference to the elect, or how it was understood at the time, is now impossible to say. In small Highland communities, widely scattered over immense parishes, religious life had a strong domestic focus, with those able to attend services memorizing and repeating the main points of the sermon for discussion around the fireside. Amongst the subjects discussed were the ‘marks of Grace’, those qualities seen as distinguishing the conduct of a true Christian from one who was a Christian in name only. Though setting out ‘the marks’ formally was a privilege reserved to elders attending the Question Day meeting on the Friday of the Communions, women were understandably anxious to determine whether they themselves were truly in a state of Grace, and many songs show the poet searching her heart for inward signs of renewal. Understanding their concern, Bean a Bharra repeats the elders’ teaching. Quoting the Book of Proverbs’ warning that only a fool accepts no authority but his own, she reminds them that they must be diligent in prayer and pay attention to the sermon. They must study God’s word, attend the Ordinances, avoid evil works and dubious company, never treat

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the poor with contempt, and remember that all return to the dust from which they came. In another song, ‘Glòir do ’n Lèigh da ’n lèir mo lotaibh’ (Glory to the Physician who sees my wounds), Bean a Bharra and those whom she addresses are no longer observers, but part of the overarching narrative (1786: 75–7). They are included amongst those who were loved and from whom love is required, whose Salvation was prophesied and for whom the sacrifice was made. The Physician who heals her asks no payment but love. He is the Prophet who foretold their Salvation, the Priest who sacrificed himself for the people, the King who scatters His enemies as though shaking snow from a branch. Terrified by her vision of a hell of bitter cold and burning heat, she is a deer pursued by hounds, a boat with no sail adrift in a stormy sea. Her plea to the One who redeems her from death is that He count her amongst His children, and that He plead her cause: Mar long gun seòl mi ann an cuan, Doinnean mhòr ri bòrd a’ strìth; Fhir a dh’fhuasglas air gach cas, Glachd an acair, sàbhail mi.

I am like a ship at sea with no sail, Great storms lashing the decks; Oh Lord who relieves every distress, Secure the anchor, save me.

With both The Confession of Faith and The Catechism in common use as schoolbooks, she had no need to contextualize the honorifics, Prophet, Priest, and King, nor to explain the role of Christ as Mediator who would plead her cause, or to elaborate on the concept of Adoption. These are taken as irrefutable fact.

Bean Torra Dhamh, Mary MacPherson, Badenoch (1740–1815) Mary MacPherson, known as Bean Torra Dhamh, was the daughter of Ewan MacPherson, a schoolmaster in Laggan. She married a Mr Clark, tenant of a poor hill farm in Glentruim, but was widowed early in life and left with a young family. Though physically disabled and close to destitution, her cheerful disposition and unshakeable faith in divine providence supported her in adversity. Like Bean a Bharra, she was literate in both English and Gaelic, but where Bean a Bharra’s songs taught biblical history and Reformed doctrine, Bean Torra Dhamh’s songs discuss how this teaching applies to personal and public life. In her best-known song, ‘Togarrach a bhi maille ri Crìosd’ (Longing to be with Christ), she addresses Christ as the Prince of Peace who mediates between God and Man (2001: 504). On earth He is a warrior of royal descent, the Flower of Jesse, Hero of the Tribe of Judah. He is also the elusive lover of the Song of Solomon, the Rose of Sharon. Coming closer to her own life and times, He becomes the Breast Jewel of the Columban church and later Catholic poets. To the impoverished widow in eighteenth-century Badenoch, He is Friend, Husband and Elder Brother. He is

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the one who makes excuses for her, stands up for her rights, pays all her debts, provides for her on her journey, and at whose table when she reaches home, none will go hungry: ’Se m’ àilleagan broillich, ’Se mo charaid ’s m’ fhear-pòsta, ’Se mo bhràthair as sine Tric ’s minig gam chòmhnadh.

He is my breast jewel, He is my friend and husband, He is my elder brother Often and often protecting me.

Knowing of her disability, her widowhood, her poverty, and the precarious relationship between tenant and landlord as the Clearances got under way, it is tempting to see this as the Mediator of The Catechism, having taken on a real physical presence. He stands between her and the landlord whose rent she cannot pay, just as He stands between her and the Lord whose justice cannot be satisfied by anything that is in Man’s power to give. The debt which He pays for her is paid with His own blood. The table at which she will never go hungry is the Lord’s Table, both at the Communions and in Heaven. He had sought her out, made reparation for her debts, reclaimed her from the Enemy, and taken her as one of His own children. For Bean Torra Dhamh, Christ concerns Himself with both temporal and spiritual needs, caring for her in this life as in the next. The survival of this song in the oral tradition for at least fifty years before publication, and the fact of its still being popular today, indicates that her understanding of the humanity of Christ as being inseparable from His divinity, has been shared by many generations in Gaelic Scotland. In traditional Gaelic culture, poets exerted considerable influence over the ruling classes by the judicious use of praise and satire. Long after this was a practical reality, poets were still expected to speak out against immorality and injustice. In a second song, ‘Beachd Gràis air an t-saoghal’ (Thoughts on Grace in the world), Bean Torra Dhamh does just this, showing how the Moral Law of the Commandments and the New Testament should be applied in public life (2001: 308–17). She herself, she says, has been given her daily bread, as promised, and needs no more than that. All around her people struggle to become richer, but this brings little satisfaction. The rich prey upon the poor. They twist justice and truth, persecute widows and orphans, execute summary judgement on the innocent: Chuir iad cas air reachd na Fìrinn, ’S ghluais iad dìcheallach san droch-bheart, ’Claoidh nam bochd ’s gan lot le mìorun Banntraich ’s dìlleachdain gun choiseachd.

They distorted the decrees of the Bible, And diligently pursued their evil works, Oppressing the poor and spitefully ill-treating Disabled widows and helpless orphans.

Under her model of ethical government, if the ruling classes were governed by Grace and justice, the poor would be provided for. The rule of justice would

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extend beyond national boundaries, bringing world peace. Teachers would share their knowledge with the poor, and the Spirit would give them the gift of belief. In her mind, belief is not a matter of chance or of personal choice. It cannot be acquired simply by studying the Scriptures, but is given as a gift, just as she received it herself.

Mairearad Ghriogarach, Rannoch (d. 1820) Conversion was a constant preoccupation for the evangelical poets, but for young Mairearad Ghriogarach in late eighteenth-century Rannoch there seemed no clear way to attain it. She is, she says, over twenty years old, yet still unable to control her wayward thoughts. The daughter of Para Mòr Griogarach, a proscribed MacGregor chieftain, Mairearad was well educated and well connected, but after her marriage to Dòmhnall Ruadh Ghobha faced constant domestic difficulties, with six children and an absentee husband. The idea that conversion can be willed or brought about by one’s own actions appears repeatedly in Mairearad’s songs. In ‘Òran do bràthran bha an cog America’, a song for her two brothers who were serving in the British Army during the War of American Independence, she considers the causes of war, and instructs them in the ethics of the battlefield (1831: 3–7). Though they are being offered land in New York as payment for military service, they must never, she warns, be tempted to use violence for its own sake. They must never use more force than is necessary to subdue their enemies, never become bitter, malicious, and vengeful. As leaders of men they must be scrupulously honest, and never abuse their position. In this way they may gain the highest inheritance of all. King George, she says, has been at war for five years wreaking vengeance on those who claim rights over his territory. In the same way, the King of Heaven has ordained war to punish a generation who defy His authority. Accepting the justice of His anger, she does not presume to ask the King of Heaven to spare her brothers’ lives, only that He gives them a moment to repent before they die: Ma chuir thu mach do shlat sgiùrsaidh, Chum an t-aitim chiùrr Ga robh na cridheachan dùbailt ’S nach dèana dhut ùmhlachd, Na lean do dhìoltas gu chùlthaobh, Ma d’ thig am bàs, thoir dhoibh ùine gu tionnda.

If you raised your rod of affliction, To scourge the generation Whose hearts are deceitful And do not honour you, Do not pursue your vengeance to the uttermost, Before death comes, give them time to repent.

Mairearad’s perception of war as being a punishment is exactly that seen in Gaelic women’s evangelical songs of the Boer War, the Great War, and the Second World

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War. War is seen as an evil which is above and beyond individual human beings, but in which all are implicated. It is a direct consequence of their actions, but there is no possibility of any individual or nation affecting its outcome. Neither the human enemy, nor evil itself, can be overcome by military force, and no peace is possible until God wills it. The mothers, sisters, and wives of men on active service in both World Wars do just as Mairearad does, resigning themselves to the loss of their menfolk, hoping only that they be reconciled with Christ before their death.

Màiri NicDhòmhnaill, Ross of Mull (1789–1872) Throughout the nineteenth century, despite increasing literacy and the growth in Gaelic publishing, most women’s songs still depended on the oral tradition for survival. Màiri NicDhòmhnaill’s ‘Leanabh an Àigh’ (Infant of Glory), one of the few Gaelic spiritual songs familiar to English-speaking congregations, offers an object lesson in how songs may be altered in transmission (2003: 266–9). Màiri herself spoke only Gaelic, and rather than writing out her songs, relied on Fionnghal bean Nèill MhicGhilleathain to memorize them and pass them on. ‘Leanabh an Àigh’, with its traditional tune ‘Bunessan’, was first taken down by a musician in Paisley who heard it from Màiri’s daughter. It is now widely known as ‘Child in the Manger’, an English adaptation made by Lachlan MacBean for Hymns and Songs of the Scottish Highlands (1888). The published version has superseded the original to the extent that the abridged ‘Leanabh an Àigh’, sung in Gaelic churches, is commonly associated with MacBean’s Christmas carol rather than with Màiri’s song contrasting the power of the lords of the earth with that of the Lord of Heaven. Where the sons of earthly rulers glory in their wealth and heroism in battle, their power is fleeting, unlike that of the Son of God, whose strength is made manifest in gentleness and humility and whose power is eternal: Ged a bhios leanaban aig rìghribh na talmhainn Le greadhnachas garbh ’s le anabarr mùirn; ’S geàrr gus am falbh iad, ’s fàsaidh iad anfhann, An àilleachd ’s an dealbh a’ searg san ùir.

Though children of the lords of the earth Enjoy great splendour and excessive indulgence; They soon pass away, their bodies grow frail, Their form and their beauty decay in the grave.

Màiri’s reflection on power and humility was to some extent informed by her own experience, as she and her husband Niall Dòmhnallach had been cleared from their farm in Siaba to Àird a Lainis, then to Àrd Thunna. As Baptists, they also suffered under the Earl of Argyll’s decree that no Baptist meeting-houses be allowed on his land, forcing them to hold services on the seashore.

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Anna NicFhearghais, Kintyre (1796–1879) Anna NicFhearghais also experienced arbitrary injustice, as in 1803 her parents and eight neighbouring families were evicted from their farms in Carradale for attending evangelical meetings. Her father, Duncan Ferguson, was lost overboard as they left home, leaving seven-year-old Anna and her mother to fend for themselves. Spending her formative years in Kintyre when the Haldane missionary movement was at its height, Anna grew up with the newlypublished Gaelic Bible. This allowed her to use far more complex biblical referencing than had been possible for earlier poets. Twenty-one of her spiritual songs survive in a notebook held in the National Library of Scotland (NLS MS 14987). One song, ‘B’ fheàrr leam là ann do chuirt’ (I would rather one day in Your court), describes how for her, conversion came in spite of her efforts to avoid it (1841, No. 12). It was, she says, as though the seed had been sown, but could find no place to take root. Christ was casting his line to draw her to shore, but she would break away and hide herself in the seaweed to avoid capture. She would weep as she sat in church, but the tears never reached her heart. She would take Communion, but as soon as it was over, she would go back to her old ways: Dh’òlainn samhladh t-fhuil bhruit,

I would drink the symbol of your spilt blood, ’S cha bhiodh mùchadh beachd ann, Yet there was no subduing my thoughts, ’S nuair dh’fhàgainn do chuirt, And as I left your court, Fhilleadh sugradh peacach. Sinful distractions would return. Over her twenty-one songs she makes many references to inborn sin, and to a personal sin which she deeply regrets, her consciousness of having gone along with the forms of Christianity whilst despising its essential message, of being the one the elders warn against—a Christian in name only. Searching for an explanation for Man’s separation from God, Anna interrogates Adam, asking whether what she has read about him is true (1841, No. 19). In ‘Cia maiseach èibhinn bha Adhamh air èideadh’ (How beautifully Adam was clothed), she asks how it is possible that he who had enjoyed the trust and companionship of the King of Kings, could have become so debased? He had been brought up free of intense desires; deceit was unknown to him, so how could it happen that he had been led by his own inclinations to reject God? In this Anna addresses questions which perplexed many evangelical poets. If Man were made in God’s image, how could he have sinned? How had Satan found his way into Eden? As Adam makes no reply, she cannot avoid the conclusion that he had acted of his own free will. She turns on him, scolding him like an irresponsible husband, reproaching him for the misery and degradation he has brought upon himself and his descendants. Eve is not even mentioned.

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Adam, whom she appears to address, and those whom she is actually addressing, inevitably share the same fate. She explains that by his actions they too have come under sentence of death, but for them there is hope. A Sacrifice has offered Himself on their behalf. A Physician has come to heal their wounds. She cannot refuse to speak out, she says, like one who has no hope. It would show contempt for Christ’s sacrifice to conceal His word from those dying for the want of it. She reassures her companions that they need not be like the fig tree which once cursed, died for ever. There is no knowing when the dew of the Gospel may bring them new life. Even at the brink of the grave, there is hope. Though she speaks of ‘the few’ and ‘the number’, terms generally used of the elect, she maintains that the Gospel is freely offered to all, and that no one can say who will be changed by it. Anna has no doubt that the whole of Creation is a manifestation of divine Grace and Providence. In ‘Thoir neart dhomh’ (Give me strength), she dares to answer where Job had remained silent, acknowledging God’s omnipotence by echoing His own words: ‘’S tu ’leag a’ chlach-oisinn ’s a shocraich an cuan / ’S tu ’dhruid e le dorsaibh o’ amar nach gluais’ (It was you that laid the corner-stone and established the sea / It was you that shut it up with immovable doors) (1841, No. 9; Job 38:4–12). When the elements unite in praising God, she asks, how can Man remain defiant and uncomprehending, carelessly trampling Christ’s blood beneath his feet? Incredulous at their lack of concern, she concludes that some are predestined for death. ‘Cha tuig e le gheireid an seud ’th’ ann an gràs’ (He cannot clearly understand what Grace is). Following The Catechism’s teaching, she explains that those who receive Grace will never return to their former state. ‘’S ge d’ fhàillnich air uair iad, cha dual doibh am bàs’ (Though they sometimes fail, death is not their inheritance). Anna’s complex biblical and doctrinal referencing is typical of nineteenth-century Gaelic evangelical song, and her contemporaries would have had little difficulty in following the chains of interlinked allusions with which she provides context and scriptural authority for each point she makes.

The Bridegroom Gaelic evangelical poets, both male and female, from the eighteenth to the twentyfirst century, have drawn on the poetic imagery of the Song of Solomon to express the soul’s longing for Christ. They describe fleeting encounters between lover and beloved in bothies, gardens, and dark city streets. The lover pursues the beloved yet is always inaccessible. She searches the streets for him, yet refuses to admit him when he waits at her door. In the Song of Solomon, the woman is perfect and unblemished. In evangelical songs she is flawed, obstinate, wilfully selfdestructive. These songs depict a love which is absolute, where the lover claims

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his bride in spite of her imperfections; an allegory of Salvation by Grace, where Christ’s love cannot be deserved, but is freely given. It is easy to understand the appeal, particularly for women, of the portrayal of Christ as the Beloved, the Bridegroom, the Husband with whom there would one day be perfect union of mind and spirit. The Protector of the widow and Father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5) was a familiar figure in evangelical discourse, comforting bereaved families when there was little else that could be given. Dr John MacDonald of Ferintosh’s famous 1814 sermon on Isaiah 54:5, ‘Thy Maker is thy husband’, for example, was hugely influential. The headings of his sermon can be traced in songs to this day, from the soul being bound to Satan, in constant enmity with her true husband, to Christ offering Himself in marriage (NicDhòmhnaill 2010: 96): Is mise d’ fhear-pòst’, ’s tha mo ghràdh dhut toirt bàrr Air gràdh athar no màthar, piuthair no bràth’r.

I am your husband, my love for you excels The love of father or mother, sister or brother.

In Gaelic evangelical songs the persons of the Trinity are described in literally hundreds of titles. While God is honoured as Creator and King of the Elements, Christ is closer to the family: the elder brother, companion, lover, and husband. He is the physician, the friend in court, the captain, steersman, and pilot, the herdsman, and shepherd of the soul—affectionate domestic names which in no way diminish His standing as the Son of God. The soul’s longing for union with Christ is matched by a corresponding horror of union with Satan. In both sermons and songs, Satan is a very real presence with unmistakably human vices; a plausible liar, an unwelcome suitor, a seducer, a thief, but with additional powers belonging to the supernatural world. Divorcing Satan, in preparation for marriage with Christ, is a constant preoccupation.

Catrìona Thangaidh, Catrìona NicAoidh, Barbhas (d. 1871) Living alone in the abandoned village of Tangaidh on the exposed west coast of Lewis, Catrìona Thangaidh was a greatly respected poet and visionary, and an important figure in the early years of the Evangelical Movement in Lewis. She longs for union with Christ, but her soul is constantly drawn to Satan (NicAoidh 1917: 9–12). Flattered by his attention, blind to his deceit, she follows wherever he leads with no thought for the consequences. Though she prays for the strength to resist him, Satan is relentless in his pursuit, confident that he will one day catch her unawares and win her hand. Her song is a warning that Satan must be resisted every moment of every day as inborn sin leaves human nature irresistibly drawn towards him:

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Tha mo chòirean briste, Cha ’n urrainn mo mhisneachd bhi slàn; Ma tha ’m fear tha ’n tòir orm, An dòchas gu faigh e mo làmh;

My claims are worthless, My assurance cannot be sound; If the one who is pursuing me, Hopes to win my hand.

This is a theme to which Catrìona regularly returns, explaining the struggle between assurance and self-doubt as an inescapable part of spiritual life. She has absolute confidence that if the soul is bound to Christ, there is no power on earth that can dissolve that marriage. Despite her conviction, Satan does not let go his grip, continuing to play upon her fears that his power over her will never finally be broken while she remains in this world.

Conclusion Where publication, for both male and female poets, has traditionally been by word of mouth, with printed texts very much the exception and translation a rarity, Gaelic evangelical song has remained largely unknown outside the communities which engender it. Depending only on mind, voice, and memory, subject to no editorial control other than that of popular acceptance, it has long provided a forum for personal spiritual expression and public debate. It is evident that from the mid-eighteenth century, and possibly long before, Highland women have been using their songs to supplement the work of the minister. They repeat, paraphrase, and explain, interpreting biblical teaching in the light of contemporary events. Though women are widely assumed to have had little influence in the Reformed churches, in the Gaelic context, this could hardly be further from the truth. They have never, as yet, given up the traditional role of the poet as commentator and mentor. For many, their influence was confined to family and close neighbours. Others were pioneering social and educational reformers in the great religious and political movements of their day. Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, for example, was a major figure in the Land Agitation of the 1880s. Her songs document abuses of power by landlords and factors, the judiciary, the police, and the military; Sabbath-breaking by commercial fisheries and the Highland Railway Company; neglect of their charges by some local clergy; and the heroic stand taken by others in supporting crofting communities (Nic a’ Phearsain 1998: Nos. 1; 2; 3; 4; 28; 29; 33). Though none is as well-documented as Màiri Mhòr, she was just one amongst the many poets whose songs discuss matters of faith and doctrine; issues of personal responsibility; of how far the individual should go in confronting authority; questions of national responsibility, and of how Christian ethics should be applied in government and in wartime. Their songs show women, even those with the barest minimum of formal education, actively engaging in biblical exegesis, supporting their arguments with apposite quotations, enquiring into

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questions never satisfactorily explained from the pulpit, reluctantly accepting that for some, no explanation is possible.¹

Bibliography Campbell, Ann, Bean a Bharra (1786). ‘Gèillibh do lagh an Àrd-righ’; ‘Glòir do ’n Lèigh da ’n lèir mo lotaibh’. In Co’- chruinneachadh Laoidhe agus Chantaicibh Spioradail, le Ughdairean Eagsamhail, ed. Duncan Kennedy. Glasgow: D. MacCnuidhein, 65–8; 75–7. Ghriogarach, Mairearad (1831). ‘Òran da’n bràthran ’san cog America’. In Cochruinneach dh’òrain thaghta Ghaeleach nach robh riamh roimh ann an clò-buala, ed. Donncha MacIntoisich. Edinburgh: John Elder, 3–7. MacLean, Donald (ed.) (1915). Typographia Scoto-Gadelica: Books printed in the Gaelic of Scotland from the year 1567 to the year 1914 with bibliographical and biographical notes. Edinburgh: John Grant. MacPherson, Mary, Bean Torra Dhamh (2001). ‘Togarrach bhi maille ri Crìosd’; ‘Beachd Gràis air an t-saoghal’. In An Lasair: Anthology of 18th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse, ed. Ronald Black. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 504; 503–7; 308–17. NicAoidh, Catrìona, Catrìona Thangaidh (1917). ‘Laoidh’. In Laoidhean agus òrain le Catrìona Thangaidh, ed. Alasdair MacRath. Edinburgh: W. F. Henderson, 9–12. NicDhòmhnaill, Catrìona (2010). ‘Mo Chalaman’. In A’ chreathall, an crann ’s an crùn. Staffin: Cranagan Books, 96. NicDhòmhnaill, Màiri (2003). ‘Leanabh an Àigh’. In Caran an t-saoghail, ed. Donald E. Meek. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 266–9. NicFhearghais, Anna (1841). ‘B’ fheàrr leam là ann do chuirt’; ‘Cia maiseach èibhinn bha Adhamh air èideadh’; ‘Thoir neart dhomh’. Nos. 12; 19; 9. In NLS MS 14987. National Library of Scotland. Nic a’ Phearsain, Màiri (1998). ‘Luchd na Beurla’; ‘Clò na cùbaid’. In Màiri Mhòr nan Òran: Taghadh de a h-òrain, ed. Dòmhnall Eachann Meek. Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 60–4; 68–70.

¹ This study is based on a research corpus of 635 Gaelic women’s spiritual songs. See Anne Macleod Hill, ‘The Pelican in the Wilderness: Symbolism and Allegory in Women’s Evangelical Songs of the Gàidhealtachd’. PhD thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 2016).

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9 Literate Piety John Witherspoon and James McCosh James Foster

Introduction The biographies of John Witherspoon (1723–94) and James McCosh (1811–94) bear a striking resemblance. Born into evangelical families in Lowland Scotland, both finished their schooling at University of Edinburgh and became Church of Scotland ministers in their early twenties. Both became leaders of the Evangelical party in the Scottish Church, and both eventually moved to America to serve as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Even the circumstances of their calls to Princeton are similar. Though separated by a century, Witherspoon and McCosh were elected president of the College of New Jersey in the hope that their combination of piety and erudition would heal divisions between evangelical and traditionalist Presbyterians in America. Most importantly, however, Witherspoon and McCosh were united by a fundamental theological outlook. For both men, the chief intellectual work of their lives was to unite the realism of the Scottish Enlightenment with the thoroughgoing Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. The result of this marriage was a literate piety, in which scientific and philosophical sophistication not only accommodated, but buttressed orthodoxy.

The Intellectual and Religious Context of Witherspoon and McCosh The careers of Witherspoon and McCosh are inextricably bound with the complex and protracted debate between the ‘Moderate’ and the ‘Evangelical’ or ‘Popular’ parties in the Church of Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To understand the theology of each, it is necessary to spend a little time establishing the contours of this debate. For both Witherspoon and McCosh, as well as the Moderate/Evangelical debate at large, there are three key factors: the contested polity of the church, the Calvinist theology of Westminster Standards, and the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment.

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The debate concerning the first can be traced to the Solemn League and Covenant. In 1643, the Covenanters of Scotland pledged military support to the English Parliamentarians against Charles I in exchange for a reformation of the English Church in accordance with Presbyterian polity and theology. To the considerable consternation of the Scots, however, this agreement was largely ignored in England. Although the Presbyterian polity of the Scottish Church was reaffirmed after the Glorious Revolution in 1690, the 1707 Act of Union raised Scottish concerns that the united Parliament of Westminster would weaken church autonomy. This fear was partially realized in 1711 with the passage of the ‘Patronage Act’, which undermined the right of congregations to choose their ministers by allowing wealthy landowners greater power to fill the pulpits of churches under their authority (Lyall 2016: 4–21). The second key point—the Calvinist theology of the Westminster Confession— is closely related to the first. In the eyes of many Scottish Presbyterians, the problem with the Patronage Act was not only that it took authority from congregations and gave it to patrons, but that it limited parishioners’ ability to ensure the orthodoxy of their ministers, according to the Westminster Standards (Ahnert 2014: 70–8). One of the chief points of contention regarded the extent of human moral perfection. According to the Westminster Confession, although human beings have free will, all agency with respect to justification and sanctification is to be attributed to God because of humanity’s sinfulness (see Westminster Confession, chapters 5–14). In other words, we are free enough to be blamed for our sin, yet so bound by it that we cannot improve morally without God’s direct influence. The third key factor is the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although its origins and endpoints are debated, it is undeniable that Scotland experienced an intellectual flowering during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To list only one statistic, it is striking that Scotland had five universities to England’s two by 1800, despite serving a much smaller population. The continuing influence of Hume, Smith, and Reid represent only a small portion of its contributions to science, art, and culture (Broadie 2007: 6–13). In general, Moderates were those members of the Scottish Church who accepted the right of patronage, held only loosely to the Calvinism of the Westminster Standards, and approved of philosophical innovation, scientific discovery, and cultural progressivism. The Evangelicals, by contrast, were those who rejected patronage, subscribed rigorously to the Westminster Standards, and were suspicious of the Scottish Enlightenment. Applied to Witherspoon and McCosh, these generalities require qualification. Both men were not only products of the university culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, they promoted scientific and philosophic inquiry and encouraged the cultivation of polite manners.¹ This apparent variation from Evangelical form ¹ Although, see Witherspoon’s ‘A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage’ in Witherspoon (1802: III.121–90).

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has sometimes led to charges of hypocrisy, or at least moderation in old age. It is more correct, however, to see them as advocates of fervent and educated Calvinist piety; intending not to reject, but to sanctify the Scottish Enlightenment.

John Witherspoon Minister in Scotland John Witherspoon was born in 1723 in Gifford, East Lothian to Rev. James Witherspoon and Anne Walker, reportedly a descendant of John Knox. In 1743 he finished his ministerial studies at Edinburgh and in 1745 became minister of Beith, Irvine. While at Beith, he was swept up by Jacobites during the rising and imprisoned briefly in Doune Castle. Following his release, Witherspoon married Elizabeth Montgomery in 1748, and in 1757 moved to the parish of Paisley, Ayrshire. During this time in ministry Witherspoon became the leader of the Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland (Mailer 2017: 61–72). Three documents published during his ministerial career are particularly revealing of Witherspoon’s theology: two related treatises and his famous satire, Ecclesiastical Characteristics. All three share the same goal of defending rigorous Calvinism from the attacks of the Moderates. In a letter to Rev. James Hervey, prefaced to his Essay on Justification (1756), Witherspoon lists two challenges to orthodoxy. First, a culture of luxury has inclined the public to give their attention only to amusing and flattering messages. Second, the ‘philosophical principles which have late been published among us’—i.e. those of the Moderates—have supplied such messages by perverting the Gospel (Witherspoon 1802: I.44). The Essay on Justification is a short work, written to defend orthodoxy against the charge that the doctrine of imputed righteousness weakens virtue by undermining motivation for improvement. Against this charge, Witherspoon lays the authority of Scripture and his own experience that ‘the imputed righteousness of Christ is so far from weakening the obligations to holiness’, but rather ‘must make men greater lovers of purity and holiness, and fill them with a greater horror of sin’ (Witherspoon 1802: I.47). Witherspoon expands his thoughts on the practical effects of salvation in his longer Treatise on Regeneration (1764). For Witherspoon, regeneration is no small amendment of life. It is a moral and spiritual revolution, effected by God, in which a person comes to see two truths: first, that the chief end of man is ‘to serve and glorify God’; and second, that God is the soul’s ‘chief happiness’ (Witherspoon 1802: I.145). These echoes of the first question of the Larger and Shorter Catechisms led Witherspoon to an obvious question: what counts as regeneration? Raise the bar too high and the confidence of even the most faithful Christians will be strained. Place it too low and the Moderates have good reason call Calvinists

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antinomians. Accordingly, Witherspoon takes a middle road. For Witherspoon, the behaviour and conscience of a person provide clear evidence of their regeneration or lack thereof. Yet, for difficult cases, he writes ‘I am far from denying or dissembling that it is a matter of great difficulty in many instances . . . in which it is altogether impossible to come to any certain determination’ (Witherspoon 1802: I.179). Despite the indeterminacy of these edge cases, Witherspoon’s account is clearly distinguished from the Moderates’. Some Moderates ‘found [virtue] upon the present prevailing tendency of our own dispositions’, others ‘make it consist in benevolence of heart’ (Witherspoon 1802: I.75). Witherspoon does not list his targets, but we may confidently include Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume among them. No two held exactly the same account of virtue, but for Witherspoon all erroneously attributed moral excellence to the efforts of human beings. They therefore impart a false confidence in human moral faculties and deny the importance of Christ’s mediation between God and humanity, deadening the sense of sin necessary for true repentance. Witherspoon thus diverged from the Moderates on important points of theology and philosophy. Yet, for Witherspoon, the difference between Moderatism and Calvinist orthodoxy was also practical. In 1753 Witherspoon published his famous Ecclesiastical Characteristics, a lampoon of Moderate behaviour (Witherspoon 1802: III.209–61). Spoofing the name of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1737), Witherspoon provides thirteen maxims of Moderatism that give a clear, if inverted, picture of proper Christian conduct. Witherspoon accuses Moderatism of being a mutual appreciation society (Maxim I), treating vice as good humour (Maxim II), ignoring the Westminster Confession (Maxim III), and preferring politeness to orthodoxy, devotion, and plain speaking (Maxims IV–VII). Further, the proper Moderate also undermines church governance by empowering patrons over congregations (Maxims VIII–X), denigrates Evangelicals as idiots (Maxim XI), promotes atheists and deists (Maxim XII), and places partisan loyalty over truth and unity (Maxim XIII). Although his Characteristics were published anonymously, Witherspoon owned its authorship in a 1763 pamphlet entitled A Serious Apology for the Ecclesiastical Characteristics. Acknowledging the acid of his prose, Witherspoon rejected the charge that his satire weakened confidence in the Scottish Church. If confidence has been lost, and Witherspoon is sure that it has, it is the fault of the Moderates he depicts, not his depiction of them. It is true, he admits, that the Church has not experienced the revival he hoped to promote. More than this, the Church exhibits ‘[c]orruptness in doctrine, looseness in practice, and slavish submission in politics’ (Witherspoon 1802: III.310). Yet this is no reason for despair. The role of the faithful is simply to work and pray for revival, leaving the rest to providence.

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President of the College of New Jersey Witherspoon did not stay in Scotland to see his hopes fulfilled. At the urging of Benjamin Rush, Witherspoon moved to Princeton in 1768 to take up the presidency of the College of New Jersey. Upon arrival he instituted several reforms, including the purchase of books and scientific equipment and the replacement of faculty sympathetic to Berkeleian idealism with those who promoted the realist epistemology of the Scottish Enlightenment. The college at Princeton was a small institution in Witherspoon’s time; and in addition to his presidential duties of administration and fund-raising, Witherspoon lectured on various topics (Morrison 2005: 2–14). Seeking Witherspoon’s theology in his ‘Lectures on Divinity’ is, in one sense, unenlightening. With respect to major doctrines, including sin, salvation, Scripture, the Trinity, its members, and the church, Witherspoon repeats, sometimes explicitly, the theology of the Westminster Standards. Yet here and there— especially in his introductory lecture—Witherspoon provides insight into his understanding of the relation between piety and learning. According to Witherspoon, ‘every good man has a conviction of the truth of the gospel, for its power and efficacy upon his own heart, distinct from, and superior to all speculative reasoning’ (Witherspoon 1802: IV.22). At the same time, however, ‘[p]iety without literature, is but little profitable; and learning without piety is pernicious to others, and ruinous to the possessor’ (Witherspoon 1802: IV.11). A good Christian, in other words, is not just pious but learned. And among those topics particularly useful to the Christian minister are moral philosophy and eloquence. Witherspoon’s ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’ are sometimes characterized as borrowing so much from the Scottish Moderates as to constitute plagiarism, hypocrisy, or a serious change of heart (Scott in Witherspoon 1982: 27; Sloan 1971: 119–26; Tait 2001: 9). Two factors, though, mitigate such judgements. First, Witherspoon never intended his lectures for publication, using them more as a syllabus for discussion than a textbook. Second, although Witherspoon does at times write as if the conscience is, as the Moderates had it, perfectible by human effort, he makes clear that this perfection is always to be understood from within the perspective of Calvinism (Mailer 2017: 149, 165). For Witherspoon, the conscience is ‘the law that the Maker has written on our hearts, and both intimates and enforces all duty, previous to reason’ (1802: III.379). Any virtuous acts ought therefore to be ascribed to God’s agency and providence. A similar orientation infuses his ‘Lectures on Eloquence’. Despite ridiculing the excessive polish of his opponents in Characteristics, Witherspoon’s lectures bear a striking resemblance to those of Thomas Reid and Hugh Blair. Even Hume receives admirable mention for the elegance of his prose (Witherspoon 1802: III.529). If his Calvinist theology slips into the background, though, it never

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entirely disappears. Writing of pulpit eloquence, Witherspoon advises his students that ‘a minister ought to have extensive knowledge’ of rhetoric not because it is improving, but because everything—whether it be rhetoric, moral philosophy, or natural science—‘may be made subservient to theology’ (1802: III.568).

American patriot Although both a successful evangelical minister in Scotland and college president in America, Witherspoon is most famous for his support of the American Revolution. Witherspoon’s support, once given, was never in doubt. Yet, despite John Adams’ assessment that he was ‘as high a Son of Liberty’ as anyone, Witherspoon’s stance toward American independence was surprisingly nuanced (1961: II.112; Tait 2001: 16). Although he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, he initially urged Americans to stay loyal to the crown while seeking independence from Parliament. Further, though convinced of the rightness of the American cause, Witherspoon rejected any implication that the Americans themselves were more righteous than the British (Mailer 2017: 217–84). Witherspoon’s position is evident in two sermons that bookended the war: ‘The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Man’, given in May of 1776; and the sermon typically called ‘Sermon Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving after Peace’, given in 1783.² Both are unusual in Witherspoon’s pulpit corpus for their explicit address of political concerns. Both were given on national days of observance and both enlarge on the same two themes: the active and continuing providence of God in history, and the symbiotic relationship between piety and liberty. Witherspoon begins ‘The Dominion of Providence’ with a comforting message. God, being just, merciful, and omnipotent, bends even the most evil events to good ends. Yet before his congregation becomes too comfortable, he reminds them that God’s purposes are not always our own. Not only is there an ‘unsearchable depth in the divine counsels’, God uses violence and war to heighten the sense of sin and bring sinners to repentance (1802: III.20). While Witherspoon assures his hearers that ‘if your cause is just—if your principles pure,—and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitude of opposing hosts’, he cautions against overconfidence (1802: III.36). ‘I look upon ostentation and confidence’, he writes, ‘to be a sort of outrage upon providence . . . it is a forerunner of destruction’ (1802: III.35). A similar warning pervades the ‘Thanksgiving Sermon’. In the first half of the sermon, Witherspoon provides a long list of unexpected successes during the war. None, though—not the victories at Trenton and Princeton, the intervention of the French, nor the unity of the colonies—ought to be attributed to the colonists

² For the debate on the dating of the latter, see Morrison (2005: 113–15).

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themselves. The victorious United States ‘owe to Divine providence the course of the present war’ (1802: III.65). Although given in different circumstances, the latter halves of both sermons reflect on the virtuous connection between piety and liberty. ‘There is not a single instance in history’, he writes in ‘Divine Providence’, ‘in which civil liberty was lost and religious liberty proved entire’ (1802: III.37). Similarly, near the end of the ‘Thanksgiving Sermon’, Witherspoon writes of ministers that, while they have previously been oppressed by the British government ‘they are well secured in their religious liberty’ in the United States. ‘The return which is expected from them to the community is, that by their influence of their religious government, their people may be more regular citizens, and more useful members of society’ (1802: III.81). In the same way that Witherspoon, the college president, placed all learning in the service of theology as an advocate for political independence, he likewise makes civil and ecclesial liberty subservient to piety.

James McCosh Ministry in Scotland and the formation of the Free Church James McCosh was born in 1811 at Patna, in Ayrshire, to a farming family of Covenanting heritage. McCosh’s father encouraged him to become a minister from an early age, supporting his schooling at Glasgow and Edinburgh. At Edinburgh especially, McCosh experienced the confluence of two intellectual movements: the waning of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the rising tide of Scottish evangelicalism. Two men in particular exemplify these competing influences in McCosh’s life. While completing an MA at the University of Edinburgh, McCosh was strongly influenced by William Hamilton and Thomas Chalmers, who respectively occupied the chairs of Moral Philosophy and Divinity (Hoeveler 1981: 33–65). Hamilton, who is best known as the editor of Thomas Reid’s complete works, was a subtle and perceptive metaphysician. Chalmers, on the other hand, was a fierce proponent of Puritan-inspired revivalism and social reform. According to Hoeveler, McCosh’s intellectual life may be seen as an attempt to unite the philosophy and theology of these two men; or, to take a larger view, to reach an accord between the philosophical sophistication of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Calvinism of the Westminster Standards (Hoeveler 1981: 47–8). After graduating from Edinburgh in 1834, McCosh was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Ayr, and was soon elected minister in the rural parish of Arbroath, on Scotland’s east coast. In 1839, McCosh moved inland to the larger Cathedral Church in Brechin. The battle lines in church politics having changed little since Witherspoon’s departure, the two most important issues remained the importance of the Westminster Standards and the authority of local patrons to

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appoint ministers. Like Witherspoon before him, McCosh quickly established himself as a leader of the Evangelical faction and, along with his former teacher, Chalmers, rallied considerable support among the parishes and presbyteries. Yet the Moderates, though their star had dimmed, had two advantages: they remained influential at the highest levels of the Church and retained the support of the civil government. At the General Assembly of 1843, the long-simmering disagreements between the church parties finally came to a head in the ‘Disruption’, when over four hundred Evangelical ministers left the established church in order to form the Free Church of Scotland. As one of the Free Church’s most prominent members, McCosh was not only instrumental to its establishment, but responsible for much of its initial success. In the eight years following the Disruption, he raised money to build several churches, served in various capacities in his new synod and presbytery, and travelled all over eastern Scotland preaching in rural churches. A late collection of McCosh’s sermons gives a flavour of his pulpit ministry. In many ways McCosh was a prototypical evangelical preacher, stressing sin, salvation, and the providence of God. Against what he saw as the excessive moral optimism of the moderates, McCosh placed the authority of St Paul, Augustine, and the Reformers, who teach that the Christian life is a work, it is a warfare . . . It consists in the conquest of sin in a sinful nature, in the attainment of holiness in an unholy heart . . . It is a conquest between the lower principles of man’s nature and the higher, quickened and sanctified by the Spirit of God. (McCosh 1888: 158, 160)

The Method of Divine Government The period between 1843 and 1851 was remarkably productive for McCosh. Not only did he help ensure the success of the fledgling Free Church, he married, started a family, and published his first major work, The Method of Divine Government. Although written during his ministry, this book may be considered part of his academic career for two reasons. Firstly, it was successful enough that, within a year of its publication, McCosh was invited to take a professorship in philosophy at the newly established Queen’s College, Belfast. Secondly, it is the most comprehensive statement of his religious and philosophical views (Hoeveler 1981: 100–7). Indeed, the majority of his later academic publications can be considered, with little exaggeration, to be philosophical expansions on this work. The Method of Divine Government is divided into four books. The first establishes the work’s goal; to show that natural theology points toward and is consonant with Christianity. According to McCosh, there are four categories of evidence for God’s existence and character: the order of the natural world, the adaptation of nature and history to human beings, the human mind, and the

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conscience (1882: 1–13). What makes his approach distinctive is the breadth of the phenomena observed, and his unflinchingly honest tabulation of both good and ill. ‘Taking a wider range than the writers on natural theology’, he writes, ‘we hope to rise by means of the very works of God to a grander and more elevated conception of the Divine character’ (1882: 23). McCosh addresses the first two categories of evidence—the order of nature and its adaptation to human beings—in book two. Though the universe is incredibly diverse in particulars, it seems, according to McCosh, to run according to regular and discoverable laws. Further, these laws and the uncountable entities governed by them are so adapted that intelligent beings not only exist, but prosper. Yet mixed with these pleasant aspects, there is also much in nature that is not immediately beneficial to human beings. Indeed, there is much in nature and history, from disease to war, that seems directly opposed to human happiness. In the third book, McCosh takes up the last two categories of evidence to show the similarly mixed nature of the human mind. On the one hand, it is a marvel; it is rational, undetermined, and, under providence, self-moved by its various faculties. The most wondrous of these is the conscience, which authoritatively recognizes the rightness and wrongness of actions according to objective and selfevident moral laws. Further, the conscience is not left alone. It is aided by naturally arising and pleasant emotions, which add force to its judgements. That human beings are naturally induced to virtuous conduct by these diverse faculties is the best evidence, according to McCosh, of the ‘infinite benevolence and infinite righteousness’ of God (1882: 333). While McCosh owes both his faculty psychology and his conception of the active, rational conscience to the Scottish Enlightenment, his understanding of human error and limitation affirms a Calvinist anthropology (Hoeveler 1981: 101). Whereas Moderates often attributed the common phenomenon of moral failure to a weakness of conscience, McCosh attributes it to corruption: It is a common way of accounting for the anomalies in man’s moral state to say . . . that the conscience has lost its control over the other faculties of the human mind . . . On the contrary . . . [i]t works not the less powerfully because it works destructively. (1882: 379)

The mixture of good and evil in nature, history, and humanity lead McCosh to a disturbing observation: This world is not in the state in which the intelligent and benevolent mind would have expected it to be a priori. Let the problem be: given a God of infinite power and wisdom . . . man’s solution would present a very different world from the actual one. (McCosh 1882: 27)

According to McCosh, there are four types of reaction to the alloyed character of nature. Those who focus too much on the evil in nature and not enough on the

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good become atheists, convinced that the universe is without government. Those who take the inverse position and ignore evil while delighting in the good, become pantheists. The third class are the superstitious, who, avoiding the myopia of the former positions, see good and evil in nature as competing forces, and attempt to influence their courses. The last are the faithful. These, according to McCosh, see the right of things. The beneficial and the harmful in nature are not opposed, but part of the same divine providence. They are both the decree of an all-knowing and all-powerful God, who is not only benevolent, but just (1882: 207–9). And what is the object of God’s providence? McCosh’s answer is foreshadowed in book one. The good and evil in nature, along with the simultaneously exalted and corrupt character of human beings, is best explained by the thesis that the world is a school of virtue of a particular kind. In an evocative passage, McCosh describes a traveller observing Napoleon on St Helena. The traveller sees that he is free to wander the isle and is honoured by his guards. At the same time, he is confined to the island and everywhere watched. Soon the traveller comes to realize that the man he observes is both a king and a prisoner. Such is the state of humanity (1882: 37–9). Through the first three books, McCosh largely avoids appeal to Scripture. In book four he reverses himself. For McCosh, revelation teaches that God’s purpose is both to vindicate divine justice and restore humanity: From the day on which man fell, God is presented to man under the double aspect of a just God and a great Saviour. The sentences pronounced on the guilty parties in Eden tell of an offended God, who has, however, provided a means of reconciliation. (1882: 489)

Through the mediation of Christ and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, both of these tasks are accomplished. God’s righteousness is upheld, and humanity, along with all creation, is healed. Calvinism, it turns out, explains the world.

President at Princeton and the debate over evolution One of the most remarkable aspects of The Method of Divine Government is McCosh’s understanding of the relationship between theology and natural science. He is suspicious of those who would use one against the other, discounting the importance of either, writing: We are not lowering the dignity of science when we command it to do what all the objects which it looks at and admires do, when we command it to worship God. Nor are we detracting from the honour which is due to religion, when we press it to take science into its service . . . Let not science and religion be reckoned as opposing citadels. (1882: 451)

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When, in 1868, McCosh was elected to the presidency of the College of New Jersey, he immediately began to reform the curriculum and the faculty in accordance with this understanding. Throughout his twenty-year tenure, McCosh expanded and improved the faculty and facilities, replacing uninspiring professors with lively teachers, and building modern laboratories to facilitate research. He also cultivated a distinctly Christian culture at Princeton. Attendance at daily chapel, Sunday services, and a Sunday afternoon Bible lecture, initially given by McCosh himself, were required of students during his presidency (Hoeveler 1981: 215–53). McCosh’s reforms, combined with his energetic fund-raising, did much to increase the prosperity and reputation of the college. They were also the practical application of McCosh’s position in an ongoing debate regarding the relationship between education and religious faith. In response to the rapidly changing social and scientific landscape of the nineteenth century, peer institutions Harvard and Yale took nearly opposite paths. Under Noah Porter, Congregationalist Yale remained staunchly conservative both in religion and curriculum. Under the Unitarian leadership of Charles Eliot, by contrast, Harvard relaxed religious and curricular requirements. Neither were acceptable to McCosh. In 1885, and again in 1886, McCosh met Eliot to debate the proper course of study in a college. In the first debate, McCosh attacked the extreme eclecticism of Harvard’s elective system and the disorder of its non-compulsory classes (Hoeveler 1981: 198, 236–53). In the second debate, McCosh defended strict religious requirements on two grounds. First, the inculcation of Christian values is good for society because it ‘promotes the common arts and industries, and stir[s] every form of benevolent action’ (1886: 11). Second, it is good for individuals because it gives them purpose and provides moral education. Although focused on the context of a college, McCosh’s understanding of the reciprocal relationship between religious liberty and societal benefit is close to Witherspoon’s. Piety and liberty require each other, but they are not comparable goods. Piety is liberty’s true end. Beyond his efforts to promote a thoroughly modern yet Christian curriculum, McCosh’s attempt to unify science and theology is most clearly evident in his reaction to Darwin. In 1874, Charles Hodge, the most prominent theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, published a short book entitled What Is Darwinism? His answer, in short, was atheism (Hodge 1874: 177). Hodge attacked Darwin along two lines. First, he found the theory simply incredible and lacking scientific evidence. Second, it was opposed to what Hodge saw as clear evidence of design in nature. In a series of lectures, published in 1888 as The Religious Aspect of Evolution, McCosh disagreed with Hodge on both points. Complications aside, McCosh is largely convinced that Darwin’s theory is well-supported by scientific investigation.³

³ McCosh’s most significant deviation is his demurral on the question of the origin of human bodies. On the question of human souls, he is a full supernaturalist. See McCosh (1890b: 102–19) and Gundlach (1997: 91).

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Further, although he agreed with Hodge that nature clearly contains evidence of design, he also believed that, properly understood, evolution is not opposed to but is itself a type of design. According to McCosh, ‘The status quaestionis, as the scholastics expressed it, is here not between God and not-God, but between God working without means and the means being created by God’ (1890b: 7). The common mistake of both the atheistic friends and evangelical enemies of Darwinism is to remove all notion of final cause from natural selection. Reinterpreted in the light of his theology, evolution, for McCosh, is yet another striking example of God’s majestic providence.

Legacy In 1889, at a rededication of a statue of Witherspoon, McCosh gave an address entitled ‘John Witherspoon and his Times’. McCosh used the occasion to praise Witherspoon and exhort others to follow his quintessentially Presbyterian example. According to McCosh, there are two defining features of Presbyterianism. The first is its fidelity to Scripture. The second—by which Presbyterians spread and defend orthodoxy—is a genius for organizing (McCosh 1890a: 6). Both Witherspoon and McCosh were consummate organizers, and so it seems apposite to ask how successful their efforts to unite learning and piety were, both from a practical and intellectual standpoint. From one perspective, their practical efforts may be seen as a failure. Within a few years of McCosh’s retirement, Princeton was already losing its religious character. Today it is a Christian institution in heritage only. Beyond Princeton, however, the continuing prospects for their vision of Christian education are promising. Not only are there are over one hundred Christian colleges in the United States at present, but religiously affiliated schools are growing at a faster rate than their secular counterparts (Marsden 2014: 271). Some schools, no doubt, would seem too reactionary or lax to Witherspoon and McCosh; however, the project of uniting sincere Christian piety with rigorous academic study and research remains vital in America. A similar assessment may be made of religion in America generally. Both Witherspoon and McCosh believed that the exercise of civil authority over church polity could only diminish piety. The divergent paths of America and Britain seem to bear out their thesis. According to sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, the separation of church and state partly explains why nearly twice as many American adults regularly attend church as their British counterparts (~35%/~18%), and nearly three times as many people in Britain say they ‘never pray’ as do in America (54%/18%) (Putnam and Campbell 2010: 9–10, 550). Beyond these practical successes, though, there remains the question of Witherspoon’s and McCosh’s shared intellectual project of uniting Scottish Common Sense Realism with Calvinist theology. As promoters of Common Sense Realism

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and the tradition of Scottish philosophy in general, Witherspoon and McCosh had limited success. Witherspoon’s students Archibald Alexander and Samuel Stanhope Smith—one of the founders of Princeton Theological Seminary and Witherspoon’s successor at the College of New Jersey, respectively—provide representative examples. Both seriously engaged with and promoted the tradition of Scottish philosophy in their academic careers. Yet neither they, nor any of Witherspoon’s other students, managed to make Scottish philosophy a significant, let alone dominant, force in American intellectual life. McCosh’s failure in this regard is even more striking. In 1875, McCosh published The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton, a ‘labor of love’ undertaken during his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey, tracing the development and nature of the Scottish philosophical tradition (1875: 1). McCosh’s avowed object was to convince the publics of Britain and American to pay less attention to German idealism, and more attention to the Scottish philosophical tradition. According to McCosh, the latter’s extensive use of the inductive method and quest for first principles made it particularly suited to inspire the ‘metaphysics of the future’ in an age of rapid scientific discovery. Yet it was not to be. The ‘pragmaticism’ of C. S. Peirce perhaps excepted, nearly all trace of the Scottish philosophical tradition disappeared from American intellectual life by the early years of the twentieth century (Graham 2015: 195). According to Sydney Ahlstrom, it was largely Witherspoon and McCosh’s attempt to marry Evangelical Calvinism with Scottish philosophy which was to blame. The two were not only incompatible, but reciprocally enervating. On the one hand, the optimistic anthropology of Scottish Moderatism ‘veiled the very insights into human nature which were a chief strength of Calvin’s theology’. On the other, the confident reasonableness of Scottish Common Sense Realism drove Presbyterian theology to a ‘rationalistic rigor mortis’ (Ahlstrom 1955: 269). There is no doubt some truth to Ahlstrom’s diagnosis. Yet, there is reason to question it both as an account of Scottish philosophy’s decline in America and as an evaluation of Witherspoon’s and McCosh’s shared project. With respect to the first, it is worth noting that the eclipse of Scottish philosophy in the early twentieth century was not a distinctly American phenomenon. On the contrary, it is in no small part due to the influence of Witherspoon and McCosh that Scottish philosophy remained influential in America longer than it did in its home country, or Europe at large. Further, the inherent difficulty of sanctifying the Scottish Enlightenment may have less to do with the particulars of Evangelicalism and Moderatism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, and more to do with the Augustinian origins of Calvinism itself. According to Augustine in the City of God: [W]e are in no way compelled either to abolish free will when we keep the foreknowledge of God, or blasphemously to deny that God foreknows the future

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because we keep free will. Instead we embrace both truths; with faith and trust we assert both. The former is required for correct belief, the latter for right living. (Book 5.10)

Perhaps the literate piety of Witherspoon and McCosh may be seen most clearly as an attempt to embrace both these holy mysteries.

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (2007). The Westminster Confession of Faith, Including the Larger Catechism and Shorter Catechism with Scripture Proofs. Lawrenceville, GA: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Adams, John (1961). The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, L. C. Farber, and W. D. Garrett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Augustine of Hippo (1963). City of God, ed. J. Henderson. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hodge, Charles (1874). What Is Darwinism? New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company. McCosh, James (1875). The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. McCosh, James (1882). The Method of Divine Government. London: MacMillian and Co. McCosh, James (1886). Religion in a College: What Place It Should Have. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. McCosh, James (1888). Gospel Sermons. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers. McCosh, James (1890a). John Witherspoon and His Times. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-School Work. McCosh, James (1890b). The Religious Aspect of Evolution. Enlarged and Improved. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (2016). Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. D. den Uyl. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Witherspoon, John (1802). The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, 2nd edition. Philadelphia: William W. Woodward. Witherspoon, John (1982). An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. J. Scott. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press.

Secondary Literature Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (1955). ‘The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology’, Church History 24: 257–72.

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Ahnert, Thomas (2014). The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Broadie, Alexander (2007). The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Graham, Gordon (2015). ‘Scottish Philosophy Abroad’, in Gordon Graham (ed.), Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 182–204. Gundlach, Bradley J. (1997). ‘McCosh and Hodge on Evolution: A Combined Legacy’, Journal of Presbyterian History 75: 85–102. Hoeveler, J. David (1981). James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lyall, Francis (2016). Church and State in Scotland: Developing Law. New York: Routledge. Mailer, Gideon (2017). John Witherspoon’s American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Marsden, George (2014). ‘A Renaissance of Christian Higher Education in the United States’, in Joel Carpenter, Perry L. Glanzer, and Nicholas S. Lantinga (eds.), Christian Higher Education: A Global Reconnaissance. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 257–76. Morrison, Jeffry H. (2005). John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Putnam, Robert D. and David E. Campbell (2010). American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sloan, Douglas (1971). The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal. New York: Teacher College Press, Columbia University. Tait, L. Gordon (2001). The Piety of John Witherspoon; Pew, Pulpit, and Public Forum. Louisville, KY: Geneva Press.

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10 Dissenting Theology from the 1720s to the 1840s David Bebbington

Between the early eighteenth century and the middle years of the nineteenth century, Scotland generated more Dissenting groups than is normally recognized. Because the established church was Presbyterian, the breakaway bodies belonged chiefly to that persuasion, but there were non-Presbyterian bodies as well. On the Presbyterian side there were the descendants of the seventeenth-century Covenanters, sometimes called the ‘Old Dissenters’, together with the Seceders who dated from the 1730s and the Relief Church which arose in the 1760s (Hutchison 1893: 184). On the non-Presbyterian side, the original Dissenters were the Glasites, springing from the writings in the 1720s of John Glas, who provided a large measure of the inspiration for the subsequent emergence of the Old Scots Independents (1760s) and the Scotch Baptists (1760s) and, in lesser degree, the Bereans (1770s) and the new types of Independents and Baptists (1800s) led by Robert Haldane. Later on the Evangelical Union (1843) was created in the same year that the Free Church of Scotland broke away from the established church. The Free Church self-consciously differentiated itself from the Dissenting traditions, claiming to be the Church of Scotland Free, but all the others were Scottish bodies that at the time were labelled ‘Dissent’. Each produced contributions to theology. Because so much of the content of the writings was polemical, a high proportion of the theological output was peculiar to the denominations concerned. Partly for that reason, the most helpful way of setting out the Dissenting theology of the period is to take the groups one by one. A review will reveal common themes, often arising from the dynamic of the Evangelical Revival and the progress of the Enlightenment, but each of the bodies held distinctive principles. The Covenanters were those unbending Presbyterians who refused allegiance to any government of Scotland that failed to acknowledge its duty to maintain the National Covenant with the Almighty forged in 1637 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. Like contemporary Episcopalians, the heirs of the Covenanters would not accept the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession. They met in scattered groups, the ‘United Societies’, which were pastored by John Macmillan during the early eighteenth century, giving the movement the nickname of ‘Macmillanites’. The accession of a second minister made it possible to establish

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a Reformed Presbytery in 1743, a decisive step since it meant that the members were, for the first time, formally separating from the national church. Soon a theological controversy broke out. In 1749 a posthumous work by an earlier Covenanter, James Fraser of Brea (d. 1698), called A Treatise on Justifying Faith, appeared, claiming that Christ died for all in the sense that the Atonement brought salvation to the elect and temporal benefits followed by ‘gospel wrath’ for reprobates. The Reformed Presbytery reasserted that, on the contrary, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ represented and died upon the cross only in the room and stead of a select number of mankind’ (Hutchison 1893: 198). A minority departed from the denomination in 1753 to form a separate Reformed Presbytery of Edinburgh, which lasted into the nineteenth century. The mainstream, however, was not to be dislodged from the received formulas of scholastic Calvinism. Its Act, Declaration, and Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation (1761), the doctrinal part of which was written by the son of John Macmillan, another John, was if anything more insistent on the inherited teaching of the Redeemer’s headship over the church and nations. The traditionalism was also evident in the subject for a Latin discourse assigned in 1778 to the second John Macmillan’s son, a third John, as a candidate for the ministry, De Predestinatione. When this third Macmillan served as the denomination’s first theological professor from 1803 to 1819, his teaching consisted of oral commentary on the articles of the Westminster Confession in their printed order (Ormond 1897: 97, 52). In 1837 a new Testimony of the body, now known as the Reformed Synod, still adhered rigidly to the Confession, though it conceded that ‘in certain states of the Church and the world’ the extent to which a ruler could promote the interests of the true religion might be limited (Hutchison 1893: 288). The Reformed Presbyterians were just beginning to moderate their backward-looking stance, but in principle they still insisted, as a theological conviction, on the perpetual obligation of the covenants. The Secession of the 1730s also appealed to the past. Its adherents objected to the exercise of patronage by great men in the interest of ministers attached to refined as against heart-felt religion, but their concern was broader. The leading figure of the Secession, Ebenezer Erskine, denounced declining standards of doctrine and discipline in the sermon of 1732 that led the General Assembly in the following year to rebuke him and, when he protested, to expel him and three supporting ministers from the Church of Scotland. The outcome was the creation of the Associate Presbytery in December 1733, though Erskine continued to minister in his charge at Stirling until he was finally excluded in 1740. The early Secession members were therefore reluctant Dissenters. Despite their treatment, the four original ministers protested in 1733 that ‘we still hold communion with all and every one who desire with us to adhere to the principles of the true presbyterian, covenanted Church of Scotland’ (Macpherson 1903: 125n.). Because they looked back to healthier times in the past, the Seceders clung to the covenants. Unlike the Reformed Presbyterians, however, who held that obedience to

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government was based on unvarying scriptural commands, the Seceders argued that it was founded on the light of nature and so conditioned by circumstances (Hutchison 1893: 207). The practical consequence was immense: whereas the Reformed Presbyterians repudiated an uncovenanted government, the Seceders believed that whatever government providence endorsed was to be accepted. Like the ‘qualified’ Episcopalians, they were therefore loyal subjects of the house of Hanover. The fundamental theological convictions of the denomination were in line with the teaching of the ‘Marrowmen’, the more gospel-orientated section of Presbyterian opinion in the 1720s, holding that simple faith, prior to repentance, is the sole condition of acceptance by God. Erskine had attracted suspicion in the 1720s by championing the Marrow position. For systematic divinity, the denomination turned to Johannes a Marck (Marckius), who had taught Ebenezer Erskine at Leiden. Marckius’ Christianae Theologiae Medulla Didactico-Elencticae (1690), a summary of Dutch Reformed dogmatics, was used by the Secession’s professors of theology for training candidates for the ministry (McKerrow 1845: 778–84). Although Marckius so simplified his exposition as to gain a reputation for broadmindedness, his principles were framed by the federal Calvinism of the seventeenth century. Secession theology was definitely conservative. Yet there was an early split in the Secession between conservatives and ultraconservatives. The less extreme party allowed lay members to take the oath qualifying them to become burgesses of the nation’s cities, but the sterner section of opinion insisted that it was wrong to accept the oath’s clause endorsing the religion ‘presently professed within this realm’ because that meant the corrupt Church of Scotland (McKerrow 1845: 210). As a result, the Secession divided into separate bodies, the ‘Burghers’ and the ‘Antiburghers’. The more moderate Burgher party showed signs of a slightly broader theology. One of its spokesmen, Archibald Hall, cited common sense in favour of the Burgher position and appealed to the authority of Philip Doddridge, the Northampton Independent who was deeply swayed by Enlightenment influences (McKerrow 1845: 212–14). Subsequently the Burgher minister James Fisher prepared an exposition of the Shorter Catechism that won an audience much more extensive than his own denomination, and John Brown of Haddington, who served as the denomination’s professor of theology from 1767 to 1787, published The Self-Interpreting Bible with elaborate cross-references, for many years one of the most widely used versions of Scripture. The Antiburghers, though more numerous, were narrower. Adam Gib, their leading champion, was of a deductive cast of mind, contending that the case against the Burghers spoke for itself. ‘Explication’, he declared, ‘instead of argumentation, is all that the present case properly requires’ (McKerrow 1845: 211). His most substantial work, Sacred Contemplations in Three Parts (1786), shows no traces of the newer currents of thought of the age. Archibald Bruce, the theology professor from 1786 to 1805, still clung to Marckius’ Medulla, ‘the system’ as he called it, also translating from French the work True

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and False Religion Examined (1797) by the highly orthodox Genevan divine Bénédict Pictet (d. 1724). The Antiburghers dwelt in an intellectual world largely unsullied by the Enlightenment. That was certainly untrue of the Relief Church, which came into being in 1761. The denomination represented the rising tide of Evangelicals who wanted to ensure that the Scottish people could hear gospel truth rather than the moral discourses often preferred by patrons. It was designed to give ‘relief ’ to those ministers who were consequently excluded from Church of Scotland pulpits through the enforcement of patronage. Thomas Gillespie, the leading figure, had been deposed from the ministry in 1752 for refusing to endorse a patron’s presentee in his presbytery and had set up his own meeting house in Dunfermline. Originally trained at Doddridge’s academy in Northampton and ordained as an Independent, Gillespie encouraged mild oversight by the higher courts of his church, which was enlarged to become the Relief Synod in 1772. Gillespie voiced the liberal outlook of his denomination in the dictum that ‘I hold communion with all that visibly hold the Head, and with such only’ (Struthers 1843: 123). All who professed Christ were welcome at the Lord’s Table. Gillespie published only a couple of minor works, and it was left to Patrick Hutchison, once an Antiburgher minister, to expound the denomination’s standpoint in A Compendious View of the Religious System maintained by the Synod of Relief (1779). It denounced legal preaching and the patronage system, but then went on to profess distinctly Enlightenment opinions about toleration. Secular rulers, argued Hutchison in a subsequent work, Messiah’s Kingdom (1779), might show favour to the church, but only ‘without abridging the rights of conscience, and private judgment, in matters of religion’. There was no question of endorsing the covenants, because ‘it is unlawful, under the gospel, to force even the true religion upon men by civil pains and penalties’ (Struthers 1843: 274, 276). Even the Westminster Confession was open to question because it showed no understanding of the difference between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of the world. ‘The Israelitish church’, Hutchison held, ‘was not a voluntary society, but the Christian church is’ (Struthers 1843: 274). Hutchison was expounding what became a central contention of the Relief Church—that religion is a personal matter and therefore beyond the province of the state. The denomination adopted the politico-theological doctrine of Voluntaryism. The same issue of the responsibility of the civil magistrate in religion arose for the Secession. As Enlightenment ideals circulated more widely, and in the wake of the convulsions of the French Revolution, its ministers became increasingly uncomfortable with the Confession’s backing for state involvement in the church. They were confronted with the question which had been addressed by Dissenting ministers in England at the Salters’ Hall conferences of 1719, of whether they should continue to subscribe to a Confession or rely exclusively on the Bible as their authority. In Scotland there was no question of dropping the Confession

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altogether, but the form of subscription might be adjusted. Could New Light (the phrase used at the time) illuminate the sacred page? George Lawson, the Burgher professor of theology from 1787 to 1820, believed in free enquiry and a less abstruse form of theology than the Church had inherited from the seventeenth century. He urged that, since ‘the principles of toleration are now almost universally approved’, ministers should not have to embrace the principle of compulsion in the Confession (Lawson 1797: 31). Two years later his denomination resolved that candidates for the ministry, while subscribing to the Confession as a whole, need not accept its clauses about the duties of the civil magistrate. Likewise the Antiburghers, going further than the Burghers, adopted a new Narrative and Testimony (1804), which announced that ‘no human composure, however excellent and well expressed, can be supposed to contain a full and comprehensive view of divine truth’. Hence they were permitted to embrace ‘any further light which may afterward arise from the word of God’ (McKerrow 1845: 443). The teaching of the Westminster Confession could be modified. Traditionalists could not accept the shift of ground in either denomination, forming the small Associate Presbytery and the Constitutional Associated Presbytery to perpetuate loyalty to the Confession and (at least nominally) the covenants too. As a result the main bodies of both Secession denominations were freed from what they felt to be outdated encumbrances and soon saw no reason for remaining apart. In 1820 they merged as the United Secession Church. The United Secession could boast two theologians of particular weight. One was John Dick, the denomination’s theological professor from 1820 to 1833. In 1800 Dick published An Essay on the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, the most popular treatment of its subject in his generation. Like Philip Doddridge, whose view Dick respected but modified, he posited three different levels of inspiration— simple guidance, ‘elevation of thought and style’, and, as the highest form, revelation—but even at the lowest level the biblical authors were ‘infallibly preserved from error’ (Dick 1812: 22). Dick argued that inspiration is plenary in the sense that no part of Scripture is uninspired, and verbal in the sense that more than the ideas were supplied by the Holy Spirit. Dick’s posthumously published set of lectures on theology also gained a wide currency, in the United States as well as in Britain. He was firmly Calvinistic, contending that ‘God did actually choose, before the foundation of the world, some of the human race to eternal life, and he left the rest to perish in their sins’. Holding that ministers ‘must study Theology as a science’, Dick was as systematic as his older contemporary George Hill, professor at St Andrews, and, like Hill and Thomas Chalmers at Edinburgh, he placed the evidences of Christianity (in ten chapters) at the start of his lectures before he launched into an exposition of the doctrines of the faith (Dick 1834: vol. 2, 179; vol. 1, 1). Despite his resolute Calvinism, here was a man of his century, not, like so many of his Secession predecessors, a man harking back to the seventeenth century.

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The other eminent theologian, John Brown, was appointed to a United Secession chair in the year after Dick’s death in 1833. Brown’s forte was detailed biblical exposition, on which he published several volumes, but he became embroiled in two significant public debates. One was the Voluntary controversy, occasioned by the conjunction in the 1830s of attempts by the Church of Scotland to obtain state help for its extension with mounting clamour among the Dissenters for an end to all public support for religion. From 1836 to 1838 Brown led Dissenting opposition to the Edinburgh annuity tax, imposed on all inhabitants of the town centre for the maintenance of the ministry of the established church. In 1837 he published The Law of Christ respecting Civil Obedience, an attempt to show from Rom. chapter 13 that ‘neither the doctrine nor the law of Christ has any affinity to slavish principles’ (Brown 1839: ix). The book was a sophisticated vindication of ‘passive resistance’, a phrase Brown coined that was to echo down later generations. The second debate was a further Atonement controversy. One of Brown’s favourite students was James Morison, who by 1841 was moving towards the Arminian position he embraced shortly afterwards. Brown, like other modified Calvinists of his generation, taught a theory of the Atonement which, while maintaining that election was of a chosen number, conceded that Christ died for all, and so he was perceived by conservatives in the United Secession as the pernicious source of Morison’s errors. Brown contended before the synod in 1843 that the death of Christ ‘opens the door of mercy to all mankind’ as well as securing the salvation of the elect. He was consequently attacked by the conservatives for asserting ‘the salvability of the non-elect’ and for a while the outcome of the dispute seemed uncertain (Robertson 1846: 180, 226). In 1845, however, he was exonerated by the synod and continued in office with growing prestige until his death thirteen years later. This result was decisive for the theological direction of his church. The denomination, which in 1847 amalgamated with the Relief Church to form the United Presbyterian Church, had abandoned the confessional Calvinism of its tradition. Although its ministers were expected to profess their adherence to the Westminster Confession down to 1879, in practice they held broader views long before that. The non-Presbyterian Dissenters were even more diverse than their Presbyterian counterparts. Although there had been Independents, Baptists, and Quakers in Scotland during the Commonwealth, many of them associated with Oliver Cromwell’s army, the earliest expression of non-Presbyterian Dissent in the eighteenth century sprang from the fertile brain of John Glas. Originally a minister of the Church of Scotland with assertive Covenanters in his parish, Glas repudiated the basis of their position, the view that the civil magistrate was to enforce the Reformed faith. In his work The Testimony of the King of Martyrs (1725) Glas drew a sharp contrast between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of Christ. In the same year he set up his own religious society and from 1730 he ministered to a large congregation in Dundee, where, apart from an interval in

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Perth, he remained until his death in 1773. Glas was a learned man, publishing the first English version of the critique of Christianity by the second-century pagan philosopher Celsus. His ecclesiology was carefully worked out. The Church in the New Testament, he argued, was either the Church Invisible of all true believers or a local church, ‘visibly joined together in the profession of the Christian faith . . . and assembling together in one place’. He had reached a form of classical Independency, holding that such a gathered church should exercise its own discipline and be ‘subject to no jurisdiction under heaven’ (Glas 1782: vol. 1, 432, 188). The great problem with a national church, he asserted, was that it mingles believers with unbelievers, nullifying the fellowship of faith that ought to mark the Lord’s Supper. A state church also used compulsion instead of the Word to gather congregations and offered inducements to worldly men to enter the ministry. There was little to differentiate Glas’ basic ecclesiology from that of John Owen, the seventeenth-century English Independent whom he had read. But Glas added some distinctive principles, all derived from a close reading of the New Testament. The elders (there was no distinction between teaching and ruling elders) must always be a plurality in any church; the Lord’s Supper ought to be held weekly; and congregations should also observe lovefeasts, kisses of charity, and foot-washing. Perhaps most strikingly, Glas insisted that church decisions should be taken not by majority votes but ‘by agreement and consent of the whole’ (Glas 1782: vol. 5, 188). He was a pioneer of consensus decision-making. Glas was prepared to set out on entirely new paths. The views of Glas on the nature of faith were to become particularly influential. The late seventeenth-century fashion for encouraging a prolonged and anguished quest for true faith dismayed him, so that he formulated a simple definition: ‘the scripture-notion of faith agrees with the common notion of faith and belief among men, a persuasion of a thing upon testimony’ (Glas 1782: vol. 1, 142). There was no need for spiritual distress if individuals simply accepted God’s testimony that he had raised his Son from the dead. Glas’ son-in-law, Robert Sandeman, elaborated on the same theme. Sandeman was troubled by a different version of teaching about faith associated with the Marrowmen and the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, ‘those called gospel-preachers’ (Pike and Sandeman 1762: 17). Sandeman was particularly irritated by Theron and Aspasio (1755), an exposition in dialogue form of Evangelical religion by an Anglican clergyman James Hervey, and so two years later published a discursive reflection on the themes of the book. Sandeman denounced those who thought like Hervey for recommending a way ‘to go to hell by a devout path’ (1803: vol. 2, 436). The problem, as Sandeman saw it, was that the Evangelicals commonly supposed that saving faith brought its own assurance. That was to confuse the effects of faith with faith itself, and was even to turn the exercise of faith into a work. Faith, he insisted, was passive, not active, a mere impression on the mind. This analysis is discernibly an empiricist understanding of faith with a heavy debt to the thought of John Locke. Sandemanian faith was an

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intellectual affair, a matter of the head not the heart. A person, Sandeman claimed, who ‘obtains a just notion of the person and work of Christ . . . is justified and finds peace with God simply by that very notion’ (Pike and Sandeman 1762: 8). It was not a formula designed to foster rapid growth, and the Sandemanians, as the Glasites were called in England and the colonies, did not become a major force in the religious world. The Old Scots Independents were inaugurated through Glasite inspiration. James Smith and Robert Ferrier, ministers of the Church of Scotland at Newburn and Largo in Fife, read Glas and Sandeman, finding their vindication of Independency convincing. In 1768 the two ministers resigned their charges in the established church and launched a separate congregation. David Dale, one of the founders of New Lanark, led a seceding group in Glasgow into affiliation with the Fife church, briefly securing Ferrier as an elder before he became fully identified with the Glasites. The Independents who remained outside the Glasite fold nevertheless adopted the Sandemanian view of faith. Smith and Ferrier, in a statement of their principles published in 1768, declared that saving faith is not ‘a train of mental actings’ but is ‘that knowledge which we get of a truth or fact by means of testimony’ (Smith and Ferrier 1768: 57). The Glasite influence extended to holding communion weekly. Smith and Ferrier expounded a New Testament justification of Independency with verve. ‘The first Christian churches’, they wrote, ‘ . . . are in no instance called the church of that province or country, but always churches there’. Any presbytery was exercising ‘an usurped power in the house of God, and an encroachment upon the sacred rights of Christians’ (Smith and Ferrier 1768: 5, 7). The talk of ‘rights’ is part of a discourse which shows signs of Enlightenment affinities. Believing that the mysteries of religion should be expressed in Scripture language only, the Old Scots Independents repudiated the convictions that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God, according to James McGavin of Paisley in 1813, is ‘most gross and unscriptural, and tending, although unintentionally, to rob him of his dignity’ (1814: 38). So a dislike for metaphysics that was characteristic of the age of reason carried the denomination beyond the bounds of Trinitarian orthodoxy. The Bereans, taking their name from the Christians who, according to the book of Acts, searched the Scriptures to see ‘whether those things were so’, were part of the same milieu as the Old Scots Independents. For a while, the founder of the Bereans, John Barclay, was active in the Glasgow congregation of David Dale. While serving at Fettercairn in Kincardineshire between 1763 and 1772 as a probationer of the Church of Scotland, Barclay developed personal views that led to his presbytery refusing to accept the wish of his parishioners that he should become their full minister. When the General Assembly confirmed the decision, Barclay left the established church and became minister of a Berean congregation in Edinburgh from 1773 until his death in 1798. Barclay developed an aversion to

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the standard natural theology of the time, believing it was too close to the opinions of the deists. His chief work, Without Faith, Without God (1769), insisted that God could not be known through nature, but only through revelation. ‘If any one ask me’, he wrote, almost in anticipation of Karl Barth, ‘how I know the scriptures to be the word of God? . . . I answer, that God himself speaking in that very word, is the only witness I have, or can have for those particulars’ (Barclay 1852: 216). Here, at the heart of the age of reason, was an assertion of fideism. Evidences were useless for demonstrating to reason what only the Bible can reveal to faith, that God is three in one. Barclay was so concerned for the honour of the Trinity that he published a letter to Smith and Ferrier, pleading with them to abandon their denial of the eternal Sonship of Christ. He also held distinctive views on the nature of faith. Whereas Evangelicals supposed saving faith required an appropriating act and Sandeman denied it, Barclay put forward a third scheme. Faith was bare belief, just as Sandeman claimed, but, as the Evangelicals held, belief carried its own assurance. That was because ‘it is written, “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God.” . . . Wherefore I cannot believe that Jesus is the Christ, without believing as certainly that I am born of God.’ Barclay therefore supposed that ‘my particular interest in the atonement’ is firmly established by simple belief (1852: 220, 204). Barclay, though attracting only a small number of followers, was a theologian of some originality. The Scotch Baptists formed another denomination with a single master in theology. The central figure in this case was Archibald McLean, a Glasgow printer who was first roused to question the established church by Glas, briefly joined the Independents and was baptized as a believer in 1765. He acted as an elder of the Scotch Baptist Church in Edinburgh from 1768 until his death in 1812. McLean’s work The Commission given by Jesus Christ to his Apostles (1786) was the charter of the denomination. In the book he explained the gospel, defended believer’s baptism, and set out the commandments and instructions delivered to the apostles at the ascension. McLean’s view of faith readily betrays its Sandemanian origins. Saving faith is no different in kind from ‘faith or belief, in the ordinary sense of the word’ and that is the ‘CREDIT which we give to the truth of anything which is made known to us by report or testimony’. Faith must be distinguished from its effects because otherwise seekers suppose that they must attain ‘good dispositions and holy affections’ before they possess the real thing. Yet McLean’s position was not simply Sandemanian because he upheld, like Barclay, a much more robust doctrine of assurance than Sandeman. When the gospel shines into a person’s mind, ‘it does not leave him in painful uncertainty either as to his faith or state’ (McLean 1847: 58, 66, 82). Against Barclay, however, he considered that personal justification is founded not merely on the testimony of God, but also on the testimony of conscience. Furthermore, McLean was willing to move with the times. To a subsequent edition of The Commission, issued in 1797, he added an epitome of Christian evidences such as the systematic theologians of the early

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nineteenth century would incorporate in their works (McLean 1847: xxv). Thus McLean, though deeply affected by Glas in his ecclesiastical theories (favouring unanimity and plurality of elders), showed intellectual independence in matters that extended beyond baptism. Scottish non-Presbyterian Dissent was transformed into a much larger movement by the efforts of Robert Haldane, the owner of a substantial country estate at Airthrey near Stirling, and his younger brother James. Both were converted in 1795 and became zealous in spreading the faith. James went on a series of annual preaching tours round the Highlands, the pair of them inaugurated the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home and Robert used the proceeds of selling his estate to establish a training institution for the Society’s itinerant evangelists. In 1799 James became pastor of an Independent congregation in Edinburgh, thus marking a break with the established church. In 1802 Robert absorbed Glas and Sandeman and soon the brothers were advocating weekly communion and other ideas from that source, though they never adopted Sandemanian notions of faith. In 1808 they both became Baptists. When the Napoleonic Wars were over, Robert visited Geneva, and, horrified by loose theological opinions in the city of Calvin, lectured on the book of Romans, stirring an enduring revival in Francophone Switzerland. He published the lectures, but more important was his work The Evidence and Authority of Divine Revelation (1816), designed to confute low views of scripture. Haldane dismissed the theory of different levels of inspiration such as that expounded by Dick, and contended that the Scriptures make ‘a claim of infallibility and of perfection’ (1816: 134). He published a further series of works defending the Bible during and after the Apocrypha controversy of the later 1820s in which he insisted that non-canonical books should not be circulated by the British and Foreign Bible Society. James Haldane, who was also a prolific author, championed the traditional version of Calvinism against its modern revisers. ‘Liberalism’, he wrote in 1842, ‘is the boast of the age in which we live’. There was therefore ‘a strong temptation to mould the religion of Jesus to the prevailing taste’ so that it becomes acceptable to ‘carnal reason’ (Haldane 1842: 8). His deepest worry was that the Atonement was being distorted by the governmental theory that interpreted the cross primarily as a vindication of public justice and by the belief that Christ died for all even if the elect alone receive the benefits of his sacrifice. If the Haldanes’ practical measures for the spread of the gospel bore fruit in the creation of many Independent and Baptist churches, their dogmatic writings represented an early phase of the hardening of conservative theology in the English-speaking world that gathered force later in the century. The Independent, or Congregational, wing of the movement was spearheaded by Greville Ewing. In 1798 Ewing resigned his ministry in the Church of Scotland and became its stern critic. By 1800 he was denying that it was a church of Christ at all ([Matheson] 1843: 267). While leading the Haldanes’ academy for itinerants, he argued vigorously for Independency, yet showed no sympathy for Glasite

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dogmatism about church order. The plurality of elders in each congregation, for example, he believed to be a waste of manpower. In a book of 1807 he argued that ‘our heavenly Father has not thought it proper to give a minute detail of the formation and practice of his primitive churches’ (Ewing 1807: 291). Infant baptism, however, was not an issue on which he was willing to compromise, and so, when in 1808 the Haldanes turned to believer’s baptism, Ewing broke with them in an ugly dispute that destroyed the unity of the movement they had been creating. In 1812 Ewing was the architect of the Congregational Union of Scotland, a denominational body that anticipated the creation of an equivalent body in England and Wales by nearly two decades. The denomination’s leading theologian was Ralph Wardlaw, trained as a Burgher minister but an Independent pastor in Glasgow from 1803 onwards and theological professor in the Congregational academy from 1811 down to his death in 1853. Wardlaw shared the doctrinal position of the Welsh Independent Edward Williams, who popularized a moderate form of Calvinism influenced by New England theology. Wardlaw’s chief statement of his position was delivered in his Discourses on the Nature and Extent of the Atonement of Christ (1843). The first of two purposes of the Atonement, he held, was ‘to provide for the honourable extension, on God’s part, of pardoning mercy to the sinner’, a careful statement of the governmental theory (Wardlaw 1844: 13). Wardlaw was one of the chief agents for the spread of this theory in England as well as Scotland. During the early nineteenth century Dissent was becoming even more diverse. Niel Douglas, a Relief minister, left his church in about 1800 to set up several universalist societies, some of which turned into Unitarian churches. A small number of Quakers were found in Scotland. During the 1830s the Scotch Baptists spawned a few Churches of Christ, followers of the American Alexander Campbell, who had absorbed some of his principles from Greville Ewing in 1808–9 while lingering in Glasgow during his emigration from Ulster (Gorman 2017: 146–50). Baptists of the ‘English’ order, with a single minister and none of McLean’s peculiarities, were introduced into Scotland from 1806, when Christopher Anderson gathered a church in Edinburgh that was to become Charlotte Chapel. Wesleyan Methodism had been brought into Scotland by John Wesley, but it never became a major force except in the Shetland Isles, and its ministers, who received no formal training before the 1830s, made no significant contribution to theological literature in Scotland. There was a Primitive Methodist incursion led by John Bowes, the author of Christian Union (1835), but he followed up the book’s aspirations after broader fellowship in the gospel by becoming from 1841 an adherent of the Brethren (Dickson 2002: 36). This movement had recently begun in Edinburgh and was to grow in later years on the rising tide of revivalism. The Catholic Apostolic Church, though beginning in England, owed its existence to Edward Irving, the idiosyncratic minister expelled from the Church of Scotland for Christological heresy in 1833, and by 1835 had six

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congregations in Scotland. One of the leaders of this strange church, that combined adventism with elaborate liturgy, was Henry Drummond, who acted as apostle for Scotland (Flegg 1992: 71). The one substantial new indigenous Scottish denomination during this period was the Evangelical Union led by James Morison, who as a United Secession minister in Kilmarnock became a keen exponent of revivalism and saw Arminian theology as its natural counterpart. The Almighty, according to the Union’s statement of principles, had a character of ‘Infinite Benevolence’ ([Guthrie] 1843: 7). The Evangelical Union was launched on exactly the same day as the Free Church of Scotland. Dissent had become a much larger presence in Scotland. It has been estimated that by 1826 roughly 38 per cent of the Scottish population were Dissenters (Brown 1987: 31). That umbrella term covered a great variety of theological opinion during the period. The Reformed Presbyterian Church remained attached to the convictions of the past, but the Secession, which began as hardly less backward-looking, turned in both of its branches into an enlightened and expansionist body, altering its theology in the process, especially on questions of church and state. The Relief Church held similar evangelistic priorities and made equivalent adjustments, reaching a Voluntaryist conclusion. John Dick and John Brown were the outstanding theologians of Presbyterian Dissent. John Glas was the most creative non-Presbyterian mind, his views on faith as well as on church polity influencing later generations, especially among the Old Scots Independents and the Scotch Baptists. The Bereans were recognizably part of the same intellectual world in which precision was the chief concern. The Haldanes and Greville Ewing, however, belonged to a movement in which the spread of the gospel took precedence over exact church order. The denominations entering Scotland in the early nineteenth century added to the heterogeneous religious scene. This review suggests that, notwithstanding the diversity, there were common features. One was the inheritance from the seventeenth century of the Westminster Confession, together with the catechisms and the covenants, which those in subsequent years had to adopt or adapt. Another was the influence of the Enlightenment, with its premium on rights, simplicity, evidences, and toleration. And a third was the Evangelical Revival, with its overriding imperative to spread the gospel. The mingling of these three elements generated the main themes of Scottish Dissenting theology.

Bibilography Primary Literature Barclay, John (1852). The Works of John Barclay, A. M., Pastor of the Berean Church, Edinburgh. Glasgow: Robert Jackson. Brown, John (1839). The Law of Christ respecting Civil Obedience, especially in the Payment of Tribute. London: William Ball.

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Dick, John (1812). An Essay on the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. Glasgow: Steven & Frazer. Dick, John (1834). Lectures on Theology, 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons. Ewing, Greville (1807). An Attempt towards a Statement of the Doctrine of Scripture. Glasgow: W. Lang. Glas, John (1782). The Works of Mr John Glas, 5 vols. Perth: R. Morison and Son. [Guthrie, John] (1843). Evangelical Union: Its Origin, and a Statement of its Principles. Kilmarnock: William Muir and John Davie. Haldane, James Alexander (1842). Man’s Responsibility; The Nature and Extent of the Atonement; and The Work of the Holy Spirit. Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co. Haldane, Robert (1816). The Evidence and Authority of Divine Revelation. Edinburgh: A. Balfour. Hutchison, Matthew (1893). The Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland: Its Origin and History, 1680–1876. Paisley: J. and R. Parlane. Lawson, George (1797). Considerations on the Overture . . . respecting Some Alterations in the Formula . . . Edinburgh: J. Ritchie. McKerrow, John (1845). History of the Secession Church. Edinburgh: A. Fullarton and Co. McLean, Archibald (1847). The Commission given by Jesus Christ to his Apostles Illustrated. Elgin: Peter MacDonald. [M’Gavin, James] (1814). Historical Sketches of the Rise of the Scots Old Independent and the Inghamite Churches. Colne: H. Earnshaw. [Matheson, Jessy J.] (1843). A Memoir of Greville Ewing. London: John Snow. Ormond, D. D. (1897). A Kirk and a College in the Craigs of Stirling. Stirling: Journal and Advertiser Office. Pike, Samuel and Robert Sandeman (1762). An Epistolary Correspondence between S. P. and R. S. relating to the Letters on Theron and Aspasio. Glasgow: James Duncan. Robertson, Andrew (1846). History of the Atonement Controversy. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons. Sandeman, Robert (1803). Letters on Theron and Aspasio, 2 vols. Edinburgh: J. Turnbull. Smith, James and Robert Ferrier (1768). The Case of James Smith, Late Minister at Newburn, and of Robert Ferrier, Late Minister at Largo, Truly Represented and Defended. Edinburgh: A. Donaldson. Struthers, Gavin (1843). The History of the Rise, Progress and Principles of the Relief Church. Glasgow: A. Fullarton and Co. Wardlaw, Ralph (1844). Discourses on the Nature and Extent of the Atonement of Christ. Glasgow: James Maclehose.

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Secondary Literature Brown, Callum (1987). The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730. London: Methuen. Dickson, Neil T. R. (2002). Brethren in Scotland, 1838–2000. Carlisle: Paternoster. Flegg, Columba (1992). ‘Gathered under Apostles’: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gorman, James L. (2017). Among the Early Evangelicals: The Transatlantic Origins of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press. Macpherson, John (1903). The Doctrine of the Church in Scottish Theology. Edinburgh: Macniven & Wallace.

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11 The Influence of the Scots Colleges in Paris, Rome, and Spain Tom McInally

The tradition of Scots studying abroad is of long standing. David Innes, Bishop of Moray, as a young man attended the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. Although not the first to do so, he established a lasting link between Scotland and the university. At a time when there were no Scottish universities, as Bishop of Moray in 1325, he funded bursaries in Paris for four students in Arts and Theology. Initially recipients were drawn from his diocese. Later eligibility was widened to include all Scotsmen and the College of Grisy, as it was known, continued for three hundred years (Dictionnaire Historique de la Ville de Paris 1779: 189). Among many who benefited from the bursaries were the historian Hector Boece, and the Calvinist tutor of James VI, George Buchanan (SCA-CA 1/1 Book of Grisy). Following the establishment of universities in Scotland in the fifteenth century scholars continued to travel to the continent to study due to the perception that Scottish universities provided an inferior level of education to their continental counterparts. This was the prevailing situation when the Penal Laws against Catholicism were passed by the Reformation Parliament in 1560, but fundamental changes in education were under way. Within ten years all regular religious orders and the schools they ran in Scotland had ceased to exist. Dominicans and Franciscans formally merged their Scottish provinces with those of Ireland. With the fortunate exception of Benedictines, Scots who wished to join a religious order had to do so in the province of another country. It also became difficult—and eventually impossible—for Catholics to attend university in Scotland and over the following seventy years four separate colleges were set up in Catholic Europe for Scots. Paris became the preferred destination for many and, because of the changed circumstances in Scotland, the bursaries of the College of Grisy from 1575 were reserved solely for Catholics. The last pre-Reformation Archbishop of Glasgow, James Beaton, was responsible for this decision. The archbishop had gone into exile in 1560 in Paris and had been appointed Scottish ambassador to the French court by Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1580, together with John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, he persuaded the queen, imprisoned in England, to provide funding for a college in Europe for the exclusive use of Scottish Catholics. Training candidates for the

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priesthood was their primary concern, but all Scottish Catholic scholars were to be admitted. It was the archbishop’s wish to base the college in Paris but the relationship between the Duke and Cardinal of Lorraine, the queen’s uncles, and her brother-in-law, the Valois king, Henry III, was acrimonious and when given approval by Pope Gregory XIII the college was established instead in Pont-àMousson in Lorraine. Mary’s uncles had set up a Jesuit-run university there, and the Scots college was placed under their protection. The Jesuits were the acknowledged leaders in Europe in the provision of higher education and the association between the Scots and the Society of Jesus in education was to last for two hundred years, ending only with its dissolution in the 1770s. The college in Pont-à-Mousson was successful; however, political repercussions, following the execution of the queen and the assassination of both her uncles, forced its removal to Douai in the Spanish Netherlands where it remained for two centuries as the Scots College of St Andrew. Archbishop Beaton’s collaborator, John Leslie, continued to promote the need for colleges and in 1597, together with another exiled Scots cleric, William Chisholm, Bishop of Vaison, he petitioned Pope Clement VIII to fund a seminary for Scots in Rome. At the time the pope had a keen interest in Scottish affairs due to the expected accession of James VI to all of the thrones of the British Isles. The papacy hoped that James would declare himself Catholic and restore the ‘Old Faith’. At times James had encouraged this idea in his attempts to gain the support of continental powers for his claim to the English throne. By the end of the sixteenth century he felt he no longer needed their backing, but the pope had not entirely lost hope. Accordingly Scots Catholics looked for papal patronage and James had proposed Bishop Chisholm for a cardinal’s hat, although, since the king remained Protestant, the hat never materialized. Nevertheless, the pope dealt sympathetically with the petition regarding the seminary. We have learned that in the most noble Kingdom of Scotland – numbered among the first to have accepted the Catholic faith, but now for many years violently disturbed by heresy – there are many Christian faithful who, though afflicted by the greatest calamities, outlawry, or liability to punishment, hold on to the Catholic faith . . . [b]ut until now there has been no place [in Rome] for the receiving and educating of boys and youths of the Scottish nation who, as orphans or exiles or robbed of their goods, have lacked the means of sustaining life and spiritual growth – in sum, a place dedicated to the promotion of piety and Christian living, and the study of letters. (SCAR-59 Clement VIII’s Bull of Foundation, see translation in McCluskey 2000: 151)

With these words as part of the jubilee celebrations of 1600, Clement provided funding to set up the Pontifical Scots College of St Andrew in Rome which continues as a seminary for Scotland. Shortly after its foundation it too was put under Jesuit supervision.

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The Scots colleges in Rome and Douai proved to be successful and attracted a substantial number of students. In its first twenty years the college in Pont-àMousson and Douai enrolled nearly one hundred students. In the next decade, with the opening of the college in Rome, a further seventy Scots enrolled at the colleges (McInally 2008: 76). Their success was due in part to the quality of education that the Jesuits provided. They had developed a structured approach to teaching, which they formalized as Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies). When Ignatius Loyola opened the first Jesuit college in Rome, Collegio Romano (now the Gregorian University), in 1551 he pinned a notice to its door saying ‘School of Grammar, Humanities and Christian Doctrine. Free’. The Council of Trent (1545–63) was still in session at the time, although one of Loyola’s reasons for accepting the papal challenge of providing higher education was to help enact the provisions formulated by the council regarding the training of priests (Schroeder 1941). From their inception the new Scots colleges were reformed institutions teaching their students according to the precepts laid down by the Council of Trent. Ratio Studiorum was their guide and in it the Jesuit masters ruled that students should keep firm and constant their resolution to apply themselves to their studies. Just as they must take care that in their zeal for study their love of solid virtues and of religious life does not become lukewarm, so too they must persuade themselves that while they are in the colleges they can do nothing more pleasing to God than to devote themselves wholeheartedly to studies. (Farrell 1970: 95)

Church orthodoxy as defined by the council was fundamental to education in Jesuit colleges but its success was due to the pragmatism which underpinned their curricula. Jesuit courses were carefully structured, with students subject to firm discipline. At the end of each year students were examined on their mastery of the subject before they were allowed to progress to the next stage. Failure required them to repeat the course. On the other hand, those who were exceptionally gifted were given extra tuition and encouraged to attempt more demanding studies (Farrell 1970: 5). Their education was separated into two stages. Trivium, the lower stage, lasted five years with new entrants being aged about twelve years. The first three years were devoted to Latin and Greek grammar, the fourth to rhetoric, and the final year to higher humanities such as classical poetry and logic (Farrell 1970: 62–91). On successful completion of the Trivium the students could begin the higher studies of the Quadrivium. The four faculties suggested in the name were Arts (Humanities), Medicine, Theology, and Canon Law. It was extremely unusual for anyone to study all of these disciplines, each of which could require four years to complete. However, it was required that candidates for the priesthood take at least two. First they gained a thorough grounding in Arts, which laid great emphasis on mathematics and natural philosophy. Reflecting this, the college in Madrid had a small observatory for advanced studies as early as the

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1640s, a facility which was unusual in universities of the time. On completion of the Arts course candidates studied Theology, by which stage even the youngest students had reached manhood. The Jesuits believed a degree of maturity was necessary before engaging in theological studies. The Theology course was laid out in two main sections—Moral (Scholastic) Theology and Sacred Scriptures. Moral Theology was firmly based on the works of the Dominican philosopher Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas) and Aristotle. Although Aristotle’s Ethics had been denounced by Luther, moral philosophers—both Protestant and Catholic—continued to value and use the work (Luther 1517: theses 41–4). Nevertheless, Ratio Studiorum stressed that the Jesuit professor taking the metaphysics classes was ‘to understand that it is not at all his concern to digress into theological questions. He should follow his text and explain briefly and in a scholarly and serious manner the principal topics of moral science as contained in the ten books of Aristotle’s Ethics’ (Farrell 1970: 45). The Jesuit intention was to ensure students understood the Church’s view of the limitations of Aristotelian philosophy by presenting the Scholastic philosophy of Aquinas as an enhancement of the ancient Greek’s arguments. Along with Aristotle’s ten books of Nicomachean Ethics, the Editio Piana of Aquinas’ Summa became the standard theological text in Jesuit colleges ensuring, as was the intention, that students were taught Christian precepts in addition to the pure philosophy of the pagan Aristotle. To reinforce this point Ratio Studiorum laid down that the professor of Moral Theology should be of firm Thomist convictions and ‘follow the teaching of St Thomas in scholastic theology’ (Farrell 1970: 33). The second section of the Theology course comprised the study of Sacred Scriptures. The Jesuits recommended the study of earlier texts, rather than later, possibly corrupted, Latin translations. All Jesuit colleges were trilingual—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—although not all students would become proficient in Hebrew. The records of the college in Valladolid show that one-third of the students met the required standard in Hebrew (ARSC, Box 41, Item 17). The teacher was instructed to ‘cite pertinent examples from the Hebrew and Greek versions . . . when some discrepancy between them and the Vulgate must be harmonised . . . or when idiomatic expressions of the Hebrew or Greek versions afford clearer meaning and insight’. Professors were expected to be knowledgeable of Chaldaic and Syriac in addition to the Tres Linguae Sacrae (Farrell 1970: 30). Through their instructors’ greater understanding of the available ancient texts, the students’ reading of the Scriptures became more complete than a study of the Vulgate alone would have provided. Jesuit teachers set high standards both for the students and themselves. It was not always possible for the Society to provide staff with such advanced capabilities and colleges had to work on a collaborative basis, which was the case with the Scots colleges. The college in Douai specialized in teaching the Trivium using its

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own staff. Students who wanted to progress to the Quadrivium needed to transfer to another college. The Pontifical Scots College in Rome also taught the Trivium, but most of its students were mature and had come for higher studies. Quadrivium students attended classes at the Collegio Romano while the Scots College looked after their material and spiritual welfare. By having their formal education conducted at the premier Jesuit college in Rome they received the highest level of teaching that the Society had to offer which was the best available in Europe. The colleges in Douai and Rome provided a full range of educational opportunities for Scots Catholics. Nevertheless, two additional Scots colleges were established in Paris and Madrid. The Parisian college was founded in 1603 through the bequest of Archbishop Beaton, who left his house and substantial wealth to allow his countrymen ‘to study either in Humanities or Theology’ (SCA/GC 13/1, Avery, 44). His legacy was supplemented by the revenues from a farm at Grisysur-Suines, which provided bursaries for the Grisy scholars who became the new college’s first students. The college provided them with accommodation while they studied at the University of Paris, usually in the College of Navarre. Beaton’s intention was that the college should not be restricted to seminarians, a policy reaffirmed by Louis XIV in 1688 when he gave the college a Royal Charter stating that it was ‘just as much for the education and formation of ecclesiastical missionaries to be sent to the Kingdom of Scotland as for the education of the youth of the said country in science and virtue’ (SCA/GC 13/1, Avery, 152). The college functioned for nearly two centuries, but, like many institutions of its kind, it did not survive the French Revolution. The Scots College in Madrid was founded by another exiled Scots Catholic, Colonel William Sempill, who had been a mercenary in the Netherlands, first in the service of William of Nassau before switching allegiance and fighting for Spain. The Spanish rewarded him with pensions and property in Madrid, where he settled and married a wealthy widow. As an old man in 1627, at the instigation of his nephew, Hugh Sempill, a Jesuit professor of mathematics at the Colegio Imperial de San Isidro in Madrid, he gifted his house to be used as a college. Neither Pope Urban VIII nor the Jesuit Provincial in Spain approved, but Sempill used his influence at the Spanish court to gain the backing of Philip IV. The colonel had been supporting the Scots college in Douai financially and in 1633 he induced the principal of Douai to send a group of students to Madrid. The new college received grudging papal approval and opened with Sempill’s nephew as its first principal. The students were taught at the Colegio Imperial; however, from its beginning the college struggled both financially and in enrolling students. When the Spanish Jesuits closed the Colegio Imperial in 1681 it became impossible for the Scots to continue and the college closed. Spanish Jesuits took over the administration of its property for the next thirty-two years. The Scots returned in 1713 but withdrew again in 1734, leaving Spanish Jesuits in control until their expulsion from Spain in 1767. Fr. John Geddes petitioned the Spanish king,

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Charles III, for its return, but the college buildings had been appropriated by secular clergy and tenanted. A compromise was reached whereby the Scots received their rents and possession of the confiscated Jesuit Colegio de San Ambrosia in Valladolid for their own use. This new Scots college opened in 1770, enrolling Highland and Lowland students. Apart from interruptions for the Napoleonic and Spanish Civil Wars, it continued until 1988, when it transferred to Salamanca where it continues to flourish as a Scots educational establishment. In Paris, Beaton’s college thrived from its beginning. This was due in part to the funding provided, but also because of its location. The city continued to attract visitors and exiles from Scotland. The British community in Paris expanded greatly during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The college provided education for the sons of exiles and, in the twenty years prior to the Restoration, more than five hundred students enrolled in the Scots colleges in Douai, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, notable among whom was Robert Barclay, namesake and nephew of the college principal (McInally 2008: 76). During his time at college his uncle attempted to convert him to Catholicism to no avail as young Robert later distinguished himself as a Quaker apologist. From its inception Paris was different from the other Scots colleges in one important respect: it was not controlled by the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits had been banned from the city by the Parliament de Paris in 1595 for supposed involvement in the attempted assassination of Henri IV. Free from Jesuit interference, Archbishop Beaton nominated the superior of the Carthusians of Vauvert in Paris as college guardian with secular priests as principals. His choice of this reclusive order to oversee the Scots ensured that no others, particularly the Jesuits, could interfere in college affairs while the principals would be left to run the college undisturbed by the abbot. Nevertheless, in the 1660s the Jesuits made several determined attempts to take over but were seen off by the college’s strongwilled secular principal, Robert Barclay (c.1612–82), helped by a laissez-faire attitude of the Carthusians which was occasionally criticized by outsiders—‘the priours of the Carthusians att present are right negligent in overseeing the Colledge affairs’ (SCA/BILett 2/44/7). Free from Jesuit interference the Scots aligned the college more closely with the interests of the Gallican Church which, under the influence of Louis XIV, maintained its independence from the politics of the papacy. This placed the staff and students of the Parisian college at odds with their countrymen in Rome. Further differences between the two colleges arose as Gaelic speaking students from the Highlands and Islands (Montana Scotia) began to prefer the college in Rome to that in Paris. Few Gaelic speakers had enrolled at any of the Scots colleges before the beginning of the eighteenth century, due in large part to the difficulty of the Missionary Church in maintaining schools in Montana Scotia which could give the basic education necessary for college entrance. The Kirk and State in Scotland

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were active in closing those schools which did open, arresting the priests and schoolmasters. When a small junior seminary was opened at Scalan in remote upper Glenlivet in 1716 the situation began to improve. Boys from the Highlands and Lowlands were educated together, but they did not mix well and a separate school for Gaelic speakers was set up in Morar. The two language groupings to a large extent retained their own cultural identity when they transferred to the Scots colleges on the continent. The consequence of this was that the college in Paris grew to have the character of Lowland Secularism, while Rome became more Highland and Jesuit. In themselves these differences need not have created any difficulties; however, Barclay’s actions in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently led to major problems for the cohesiveness of the Scots colleges. Driven by the need to provide more missionaries for Scotland, Barclay built a new college to accommodate increased numbers of students. The site he chose was near the Sorbonne and the convent of Porte Royale, both centres of Jansenism. In 1640 Augustinus, the work of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen, was published. In it Jansen advocated that divine grace was all that was needed for salvation and that individual free will was almost irrelevant, a view so dangerously close to that of Jean Calvin that the Jesuit Père Bigné warned the principal of the Scots College in Paris, Charles Whyteford, that a Jansenist was ‘un Calviniste qui dit la Messe’ (Halloran 2003: 105). The Society of Jesus argued strongly against Jansenism and, although it was never declared a heresy, Jansen’s ideas were condemned by the Inquisition and the pope. Neither of these authorities was able to stem its popularity in France, however, where adherence to Jansenism grew. In 1713 its strongest condemnation came from Pope Clement XI in his bull Unigenitus. In Paris the papal bull was largely ignored. Although the Scots college authorities attempted to stay aloof from the controversy, the staff and students whose studies took them to other colleges were exposed to Jansenist beliefs and practices. Jansen had advocated more rigorous personal behaviour and a less ornate form of worship than the Baroque displays of the Jesuits and for reasons of familiarity appealed to many Scots, some of whom had converted from Calvinism. This need not have caused difficulties for the Scots College, but two further events conspired to turn it into a major problem. Barclay had obtained the agreement of Propaganda Fide, the Church’s authority governing the Missions, that all candidates could spend their final year at the Paris College receiving training on how to survive as missionaries. This was an eminently sensible plan since the Scottish Mission was recognized as one of the most hostile that Catholic priests could face; however, it brought the Roman and Parisian seminarians together where they recognized differences in their experiences, contrasting the High Baroque worship of Rome with the simplicity of Jansenism. The second deleterious occurrence for the Scots concerned the Mission itself. In 1731 the vicar apostolic of Scotland, Bishop James Gordon, petitioned Rome to set up a second

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vicariate for the Highlands and Islands. The elderly Gordon and his coadjutor were physically incapable of supervising the whole Mission. Hugh Macdonald was made vicar apostolic of the new district where the greatest number of Catholics lived. From the start Macdonald was faced with an unequal division of the financial resources available. Propaganda Fide provided fifty Roman crowns per annum for each priest, a sum which was inadequate for the expenses involved. The bishops relied on donations from the laity, mainly in the form of legacies to support their missionaries. Due to the relative poverty of Highlanders, most legacies were gifted by Lowland families. Bishop Gordon decided to keep this money despite the Highland district having the greater need. This was resented by the Highland missionaries, who appealed to Rome for redress. In their petition, among other failings, they accused the Lowland missionaries of Jansenism. The attacks became personal. A Highland priest, John Tyrie, wrote to Rome ‘To reform the college in accordance with the wishes of the Vicars and the Missionaries of Scotland, there is no other wish than to put in place of that young priest, the said Alexander Gordon, as Prefect of Studies, a missionary of sound doctrine . . . one can reform the said college solely by changing the Prefect of Studies’ (SCA/SM/4/2/13). Rome was reluctant to become involved but the Highlanders persisted and in 1736 Propaganda Fide instructed the papal nuncio, Niccolo Lercari, to investigate the accusations of Jansenism in the Paris College. The following year his report resulted in the dismissal of many of the staff and students on the grounds of Jansenism (Bellesheim 1890: 408–13). Those who remained were required to ascribe to Unigenitus. The purge affected the college’s ability to work as a seminary and the division of finances was never resolved; the degree of bad feeling between the missionaries of the two districts took years to dissipate. Only following the crisis of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, in which a number of the major protagonists were killed, was reconciliation possible and an effective mission rebuilt. It is difficult to view the first half of the eighteenth century as other than a challenging period for Scots Catholics. The colleges in Rome and Paris were factionalized, while Madrid was lost to Spanish Jesuits for all but twenty years. Douai found its numbers reduced due to the colleges of Scalan and Morar attracting students who previously would have attended. Nevertheless, it was during this period that a new seminary was established which not only contributed energetic missionaries but raised significantly the level of academic attainment among Scots. From the late sixteenth century there was a Scottish congregation of the Benedictine Order in Southern Germany, consisting of three monasteries: Regensburg, Würzburg, and Erfurt. From the beginning they had run their own schools, but in 1713 the college at the mother house in Regensburg was formally recognized as a seminary by Pope Clement XI and Emperor Charles VI. The Benedictines had initially followed Thomist Scholasticism yet through their involvement in the Benedictine University of Salzburg at the beginning of the eighteenth century they began to embrace the wider German Enlightenment

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movement. The professors at Salzburg had been strongly influenced by the philosophy of Christian Wolff, whose enlightened ideas developed from those of his friend, Gottfried Leibniz, and, through the work of the Belgian missionary priest François Noël, the teachings of Confucius. The Scots Benedictines who studied at Salzburg absorbed their progressive ideas with a number making major contributions to science. Bernard Stuart had been a professor of mathematics at Salzburg before engaging in major architectural and civil and military engineering works in Austria and Bavaria. On being ordained abbot of Regensburg he helped form an extended network of fellow mathematicians and scientists, Disputier kollegium, whose members corresponded on Enlightenment ideas and the new sciences. A prominent contributor was Andreas Gordon, the pioneer in the study of electricity whose genius was recognized internationally in 1748 when he was appointed a member of the French Academy, a rare honour for a non-Frenchman. Each of the three Scots monasteries was involved in the kollegium and in 1759 in collaboration with another learned society, Parnassus Boica, they formed the Bavarian Electoral Academy of Sciences. Ildephonse Kennedy, a Benedictine monk and student of Andreas Gordon, became its first secretary and helped it to develop the scientific life and industry of Munich and Bavaria. The Elector also made Kennedy responsible for reforming the schooling system throughout Bavaria. The success he achieved in this endeavour was later replicated in Austria when his system was adopted for its schools. Throughout Germany the Scots Benedictines were recognized and valued for their contributions to the Enlightenment as scientists and educationalists. During the French Revolutionary Wars they were able to make use of their enhanced status to help the British government in its dealings with Bavaria and the imperial court in Vienna. By doing so they also influenced the British attitude towards Scots Catholics. Until the middle of the eighteenth century the Hanoverian government had been strongly antagonistic, in part due to the support that Scots Catholics had given to Jacobite interests. Their activities had been centred initially on the Scots College in Paris, yet later involved Rome and the Benedictine monasteries. The threat to the British government posed by Jacobites had been removed in 1746 and its attitude to Catholics gradually began to change, driven by the need to ensure the loyalty of Catholic troops—Irish and Highland Scottish. Although popular antagonism to Catholicism remained in Britain, as demonstrated by the Gordon rioters, the government needed political and military alliances with continental Catholic powers. In their dealings with the Viennese court, British diplomats turned for help to Benedict Arbuthnott, the abbot-general of the Scots Benedictines. As a mitred abbot of the Holy Roman Empire and a gold medal winning member of the Bavarian Academy, Arbuthnott was held in high spiritual and intellectual regard by German nobility. Over two decades he used his political connections to help British ambassadors in their dealings with the

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emperor (McInally 2016: 194–5). The British government showed its gratitude for this and other supportive actions of Scots Catholics by providing the Scottish vicars apostolic with funds to replace the confiscated colleges of Paris, Douai, and Rome. The bishops opened new seminaries at Acquhorties in the north-east of Scotland in 1799 and on Lismore in Argyll for Gaelic speakers in 1803. Although Catholic emancipation was thirty years in the future, it was no longer illegal for Catholics to be educated in Scotland and the colleges began to restrict their entrants to those training for the priesthood. Valladolid continued as a seminary and the pontifical college in Rome reopened in 1820 after hostilities ended. The Regensburg College survived the secularization of religious institutions enforced by Napoleon, although the monasteries in Erfurt and Würzburg did not, but it too closed in 1862. In 1826, through the generosity of Thomas Menzies, a large new seminary was opened in Scotland at Blairs in Aberdeenshire, replacing those at Acquhorties and Lismore which had been unable to cope with the great expansion in the Catholic population due to Irish immigration in the nineteenth century. Other colleges opened in Scotland and gradually the dominance of the continental colleges lessened. During the period of their pre-eminence the continental colleges played a vital role in the defence of Catholicism. Initially their aim was to see Catholicism return to Scotland as the dominant faith; later the objective was simply to achieve tolerance for their beliefs. Part of their efforts in this regard was the publication of apologia on politics and theology. Bishop John Leslie’s history of Scotland (De Origine, moribus, ac rebus gestis Scotiae) was written to counter Buchanan and Knox’s accusations against Mary, Queen of Scots and Andreas Gordon’s The origin of the Present War in Great Britain supported the Jacobite cause. Although essentially political, works of this nature had underlying doctrinal themes. Leslie and Gordon stressed ‘the divine right of kings’. Other publications were entirely theological in substance, attacking Calvinism and the reformers. The earliest apologist to distinguish himself was Ninian Winzet. He had engaged in personal debates with John Knox and in early publications he argued against Calvinist beliefs regarding the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist (Certane Tractates). As the abbot of Regensburg in 1582 he attacked George Buchanan’s work on constitutional monarchy (De juri regni, 1579) in Flagellum sectariorum and Velitatio, again stressing ‘the divine right of kings’. However, theological works were not restricted to inter-faith controversies. Thomas Duff, a monk in Würzburg, produced devotional poetry (Liber Spiritualium Exercitiorum, AUW, M.ch.q.54), which served his brethren in a manner similar to the Jesuits’ Spiritual Exercises. He also published pamphlets which circulated to great acclaim in early sixteenthcentury Counter-Reformation Germany. Later another Scot achieved wider international recognition as a polemicist. Andrew Youngson had studied at the University of Aberdeen before converting from Calvinism in 1647 and joining the Scots College in Madrid. While a professor at a number of Spanish universities

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including the Complutensian, he wrote several books under the pen-name Junius again attacking Calvinist sacramental theology. His most influential work, De providentia et de praedestinatione meditationes scholasticae, published in 1678, developed the Thomist theory of predestination ante prævisa merita. The book was recognized in Catholic Europe as a scholarly rebuttal of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination. Youngson’s work can be considered the last serious public effort to counter Scotland’s dominant faith in theological terms. Before the end of the seventeenth century, Scottish Catholic efforts were being directed to achieving toleration at home and theological arguments became more introspective. This led some college alumni to come into conflict with Church authorities. The Jansenist controversy wracked the mission for more than a quarter of a century, but other theological ideas also caused concern. In 1733, a Würzburg monk, Marianus Gordon, was arraigned before the Inquisition and imprisoned for questioning the power of exorcism and the existence of miracles (Römmelt 1992). A decade later another Scots Benedictine, Andreas Gordon, the pioneer in the study of electricity, was accused of heresy when, at the University of Erfurt, he devised a series of experiments which overturned Aristotelian teaching on the inherent nature of objects (Elementa Physica Experimentalis). A German Jesuit, Lucas Opfermann, claimed that Gordon’s arguments denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, which argued for the inherent divine nature of the bread and wine in the Eucharist. This was similar to the accusation that Galileo had faced a century before. Gordon was not making any direct theological argument; like other Enlightenment philosophers he was following his practical experimentation to its logical conclusions, but conservative elements within the Society of Jesus were determined to defend Scholasticism. In 1745 Gordon made his situation more difficult by publishing a refutation of Scholasticism and espousal of Enlightenment thought (Oratio de philosophia nova veteri praeferenda). Fortunately for him, in 1747 Pope Benedict XIV, who was an enlightened thinker, wrote a defence of Enlightenment scholarship following which resistance to the new thinking subsided and attacks on Gordon ended. By mid-century the prospect of toleration of Catholicism in Britain was growing and open theological debate was muted. It was almost half a century later that an alumnus of the Scots College in Paris, Alexander Geddes, found himself at the centre of controversy when he published new translations of the Old Testament. However, he had antagonized both Catholics and Protestants. His attempt to defend his work in Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures corresponding with a New Translation of the Bible failed and he was excommunicated (Fuller 1984: 103). When he died in 1802 the tradition of theological controversy emanating from the Scots colleges largely ended; their future efforts were channelled primarily into educating priests for the mission and the re-establishment of a hierarchy in Scotland.

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For over two centuries the Scots colleges abroad had exercised important influences in Scotland and beyond through their alumni. However, it is impossible to determine accurately the numbers of students involved. The registers of the Paris and Rome colleges were lost during the French Revolution and subsequent wars. Reconstructions from surviving records have been made but inevitably there are omissions. Only the registers of Douai, Madrid/Valladolid, and Regensburg have survived intact. The remaining evidence shows that at least two thousand students attended the colleges from their foundation to the end of the eighteenth century. The students named show that many families in Scotland had an enduring loyalty to the colleges, giving their support over the centuries. The benefactor of Blairs College, Thomas Menzies, came from an Aberdeenshire family, Menzies of Pitfodels, who sent five generations of their sons to be educated at the Scots colleges abroad. Like them, most of the men educated by the colleges returned to their families in Scotland, but many remained abroad. As might be expected, some achieved distinguished careers in the Church; others made their mark in the military, academe, science, and commerce (McInally 2008: 185–227). Of the nearly six hundred students known to have entered the Church, the most distinguished was Charles Cardinal Erskine of Kellie (‘Charles Erskine’, Catholic Encyclopedia 1909). More than one hundred alumni served as military officers in the armies of France, Germany, Russia, Spain, and Britain. Seventy others are known to have held senior posts at major universities throughout Europe. Individual alumni shone in a number of disparate fields notable amongst whom were George Strachan, the early orientalist, James Gibbs, and James Smith, major architects in Georgian Britain, as well as Andreas Gordon. Together with Scots Catholics who had been educated at other continental universities the colleges’ alumni formed strong and influential networks that, significantly, retained their Scottish identity. Internationally their presence in major cities throughout Europe upheld the idea of a separate Scottish nation in the eyes of their hosts during a period when the creation of the British state had obliterated it politically. This was no mean feat as their Scottish identity was also under threat within the Catholic Church itself. On at least three occasions the Scots colleges actively resisted pressure from Rome to amalgamate into a single British identity. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Roman and Spanish colleges were restored with their identity intact only after persistence by the Scots. This determination ensured that when the hierarchy was restored in 1878 it was as a separate Scottish presence within the Church. This was not the only possible outcome. Scottish Catholics could have suffered the fate of being a collection of North British dioceses, or may have succumbed to incorporation in an Irish hierarchy due to the numerical dominance of Irish Catholics in Scotland at the time. The existence of the Scots colleges abroad, together with the efforts of their alumni, were crucial in the maintenance of Scotland’s status within the Church and as such deserve to be recognized as part of the heritage of all Scots.

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Bibliography Archives Archives of the Royal Scots College Madrid (ARSC) Archives of the University of Würzburg (AUW) Scottish Catholic Archives (SCA) Scottish College Archives Rome (SCAR)

Primary Literature Anon. (1598). Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu. Naples. Anderson, Peter J. (ed.) (1906). Records of the Scots Colleges, vol. 1. Aberdeen. Aquinas, Thomas (2000). Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press. Bellesheim, Alphons (1890). History of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Vol. 4. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Buchanan, George (1579). De iuri regni apud Scotos. Edinburgh. Dictionnaire Historique de la Ville de Paris et ses Environs, Tome III (1779). Paris. Farrell, Allan P., S.J. (trans.) (1970). Ratio Studiorum. Washington: Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits. Geddes, Alexander (1800). Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures corresponding with a new translation of the Bible. London. Gordon, Andreas (1745). Oratio de philosophia nova veteri praeferenda. Erfurt. Gordon, Andreas (1746). The Origin of the Present War in Great Britain being prosecuted by Charles Edward Stuart: in a brief presented and promoted to the parlement at Strasbourg. Strasbourg. Gordon, Andreas (1753). Elementa Physica Experimentalis. Erfurt. Herbermann, Charles G. et al. (eds.) (1909). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton. Junius (Andrew Youngson) (1678). De providentia et de praedestinatione meditationes scholasticae. Lyon. Leslie, John (1675). De Origine, moribus, ac rebus gestis Scotiae libri decem. Rome. Loyola, Ignatius (1548). Exercitia Spiritualia. Rome. Luther, Martin (1517). Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. N.p. Schroeder, Henry J. (ed. and trans.) (1941). The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: English Translation. St. Louis, MO: Herder. Winzet, Ninian (1582). Flagellum sectariorum: qui religionis praetextu seditions aim in Caesarem, aut in alios orthodoxos principes excitare student, quaerentes ineptissimè quidem Deóne magis, an principibus sit obediendum?. Accessit Velitatio in Georgium Buchananum circa dialogum, quem scripsit de iure regni apud Scotos. Ingolstadt. Winzet, Ninian (STS, 1888–90). Certane tractates, together with the book of fourscore and three questions and a translation of Vincentius Lirinensis, ed. J. K. Hewison, 2 vols. Edinburgh.

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Secondary Literature Baxter, J. H. (1927). ‘The Scots College at Douai’, Scottish Historical Review 24: 251–7. Chadwick, Hubert, S.J. (1941). ‘The Scots College Douai 1580–1613’, English Historical Review 56: 571–85. Dilworth, Mark (1974). The Scots in Franconia. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Fischer, Ernst Ludwig (1974). The Scots in Germany. Edinburgh: John Donald. Forbes, Eric (1981). ‘Ildephonse Kennedy, OSB (1722–1804) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences’, Innes Review 32: 93–9. Fuller, Reginald C. (1984). Alexander Geddes 1737–1802: A Pioneer of Biblical Criticism. Sheffield: Almond Press. Goldie, Mark (1991). ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies 30: 20–62. Halloran, Brian M. (2003). The Scots College Paris 1603–1792. Edinburgh: John Donald. Lehner, Ulrich L. (2011). Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740–1803. New York: Oxford University Press. McCluskey, Raymond (ed.) (2000). The Scots College Rome 1600–2000. Edinburgh: John Donald. McInally, Tom (2008). ‘The Alumni of the Scots Colleges Abroad 1575–1799’. Unpublished thesis, University of Aberdeen. McInally, Tom (2012). The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799. Leiden: Brill. McInally, Tom (2016). A Saltire in the German Lands: Scottish Benedictine Monasteries in Germany 1575–1862. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. O’Malley, John W. (1993). The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Römmelt, Stefan (1992). ‘Der Häresieprozess gegen Pater Marianus Gordon (1704–1734): Schottenmönch im Kloster St. Jakob zu Würzburg’, Mainfränkisches Jahrbuch 44: 103–27. Sanderson, Margaret (1970). ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, Innes Review 21: 87–107. Taylor, Maurice (1959). ‘The Conflicting Doctrines of the Scottish Reformation’, Innes Review 10: 97–125. Taylor, Maurice (1971). The Scots College in Spain. Valladolid: n.p. Watts, John (1999). Scalan: The Forbidden College 1716–1799. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.

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12 Catholic Thought in the Late Eighteenth Century George Hay and John Geddes Raymond McCluskey

Catholic thought in eighteenth-century Scotland has certainly not been ignored by modern scholarship. This chapter focuses on two individuals in particular— Bishops George Hay (1729–1811) and John Geddes (1735–99)—as worthy representatives of the period. The idea generally of a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ has become more accepted in scholarly circles (Robertson 2016). Such acknowledgement is a natural development in conceptual thinking once identification of ‘enlightenment’ with a particular French incarnation—male, agnostic, allied with radical thought—has been ‘downgraded’ as typical of the more universal experience (Outram 2013: 1–9). Ulrich L. Lehner summarizes the mission of Catholic ‘enlighteners’ as two-fold: to explain the dogmas of Catholicism in a new language in the face of scientific and philosophical developments and the reconciliation of Catholicism with modern culture (2016: 7). With reference to Scotland specifically, building on the seminal work of Mark Goldie (1991, 1992, 1994), Christopher M. S. Johns has observed that a group of Catholic writers shared a ‘religious view of social progress’ with other intellectuals in enlightened Europe (2015: 2–3). Certainly, Bishop George Hay, in the aftermath of assaults on Catholics in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1779, expressed incredulity that such events could take place ‘in this enlightened age when all Europe is adopting the most liberal and humane ideas’ (Hay 1779: 38–9; Goldie 1991: 43–4). This was ‘enlightenment’ which was self-conscious and self-aware with, moreover, a shared theological lexicon which crossed denominational lines and made for mutually comprehensible discourse between parties, even where disagreement otherwise might be profound.

George Hay (1729–1811) George Hay was not born a Catholic. Raised as an Episcopalian, his aspirations to become a surgeon (for which reason he commenced study at the University

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of Edinburgh) were effectively blocked on his conversion to Catholicism in December 1748, at the age of 19. After a short period as the proprietor of a chemist’s shop, he entered the Scots College in Rome in September 1751, being ordained priest on 2 April 1758 and returning to Scotland in August 1759. He was nominated a coadjutor bishop in the Lowland District of Scotland in 1768 and Vicar Apostolic in December 1778, aged 49. After long years of service, he died at Aquhorties (Aberdeenshire) in October 1811 (Gordon 1867; Kerr 1927; Halloran 2004). Such is the basic outline of the key stages of the eventful life of Bishop George Hay. It was a life taken up by a great many pastoral concerns (Anson 1970). Yet, in the midst of his episcopal responsibilities, Hay found time to pick up his quill and dedicate himself to a series of works of varying lengths, touching on theology, spirituality, apologetics, and, indeed, economics. The whole of his corpus, though not of the front-rank in terms of originality or rhetorical expression, is nevertheless impressive in terms of the sheer number of words produced and the evident tenacity and dedication which their redaction must inevitably have demanded. The first major work by Hay is The Scripture Doctrine of Miracles Displayed, published in 1775 (Strain 1873a, 1873b). Hay makes clear the central argument of his treatise at its outset: miracles require argument from Scripture, no matter should such argument evoke the ridicule of the likes of David Hume and others (Strain 1873a: viii–ix). Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, with its subversive section on miracles, had been published almost three decades before. Hay sarcastically refers to Hume’s ‘vaunted precision’, attesting that both John Locke and Hume defined the miraculous inadequately. In his own quest for a satisfactory definition, Hay displays familiarity with the treatise on miracles written by the Huguenot exile Abraham le Moine, in 1747 (1). Alert to the ‘poverty of language’ in dealing with supernatural realities, he refers to words as ‘arbitrary signs’, subject to an imposition of meaning at the pleasure of the interpreter or reader. His final definition projects a drive towards clarity: ‘an extraordinary effect produced in the material creation, either contrary to the known laws of nature, or besides the usual course of nature, above the abilities of natural agents, and performed either by God Himself, or by His holy angels’ (14). The latter part of the definition underlines a principal theme of Hay’s argument throughout the work, i.e. that ‘miracles are not reserved to God Himself ’ (16–17). Indeed, he differentiates between relative miracles performed by created agents (e.g. angels) and absolute miracles performed by God himself. What is certainly noteworthy is Hay’s categorization of certain historical periods according to their treatment of the miraculous. For Hay, despite the fissures created by the Reformation, there was still a shared acceptance of the concept of what constituted a ‘miracle’ though the Reformers were inclined to explain the miraculous in terms of the ‘agency of Satan’, in contrast to the age of ‘Deism and Freethinking’ when miracles have become ‘juggling tricks and human imposture’ (21–2). Hay had little patience with the rejection of the miraculous,

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appealing to the testimony of reliable authorities, such as Justin Martyr, Sulpicius Severus, and St Augustine (Strain 1873b: 187). He was also insistent in demonstrating that the Church does not take a facile, credulous approach to the miraculous, referring to the strict examination of the veracity of miracles as part of the protracted canonization process (221). As an appendix to the Miracles volume, the reader finds a treatment of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (231–87). This work, presented in the style of a Platonic dialogue between ‘Orthodoxus’ and ‘Philaretes’, was a product of Hay’s combative private and public exchanges with William Abernethy Drummond (1719–1809), latterly Episcopal Bishop of Aberdeen. Once again, Hay makes the appeal to Scripture, arguing for the need to use the Word of God in the defence of the doctrine (232). At the same time, arguments for transubstantiation have to be reconciled with ‘sound philosophy’ and Hay states (in the person of ‘Orthodoxus’) that his aim is to explain Catholic teaching on the grounds of philosophy of mind and common sense, referring specifically in so doing to the work of Thomas Reid (1710–96) and James Beattie (1735–1803) (242–3). Central to Hay’s thinking is the argument that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is ‘plain and intelligible’—or, rather, the reasoning behind the doctrine is (252). Once again, as the dialogue progresses, there is evidence of Hay’s breadth of reading. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), Honoré Tournély (1658–1729), and FrançoisXavier de Feller (1735–1802) are summoned as witnesses for the defence of the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation (257–62); Dr John Tillotson (1630–94), onetime Archbishop of Canterbury, is presented as an originator of contemporary anti-transubstantiation arguments (271). The main body of Hay’s writing forms something of a trilogy: The Sincere Christian (1781), The Devout Christian (1783), and The Pious Christian (1789). The first and second of these works form a very extended treatise on the living of a Christian life in the face of challenging times; the third volume is essentially a compendium of scriptural extracts, prayers, and meditations. The full title of the 1781 volume is The Sincere Christian instructed in the Faith of Christ from the Written Word. The purpose of the volume is to aid the reader in the securement of eternal life, with Hay urging assiduity in instructing oneself in ‘divine knowledge’. He seeks, at the outset, to place the importance of his subject matter in context, asking what it profits a person to understand the motions of the stars, measure of the earth, whole circle of human sciences, if one remains ignorant of the ‘science of the saints’ (Strain 1871a: 2). The work seems to have been intended as an aid for preachers and ecclesiastical students for Hay gives his stated aim of presenting the great truths of Christianity ‘in a regular orderly method’ as a help ‘to those who are to instruct others and to those who are learners’. Too many theological works, Hay asserts, are written for the learned ‘rather than the ignorant’, assuming readers to be ‘better instructed’ than they actually are. His intent in the present work is to assist ‘the most

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unlearned’, allowing God himself to speak through his Scriptures. Hay interprets such an approach as a means to presenting the original, authentic charism which gives life to Christian belief and practice. Recourse to the Scriptures themselves ‘cuts off all occasion for human sophistry’ (3). Such comments by Hay allow one to surmise his basic theological instinct, which is to allow God himself to take centre stage. To do other than this is to be seduced by the acuity of the human intellect. Theology—divine knowledge—is about God, not about the human author who writes the commentary or treatise, no matter how clever or knowledgeable. Throughout The Sincere Christian, the presentation of each chapter remains the same: a catechetical dialogue (question-and-answer) on the chapter’s theme, followed immediately by a collection of scriptural quotations to provide ballast for the arguments. Certain key themes can serve to illustrate further Hay’s approach. His discussion concerning the possibility that the pope might, in certain circumstances, be infallible is reflective of the state of the question in the eighteenth century and a reminder of the range of views before the conciliar definition on the issue in the second half of the next century. Is the Head of the Church infallible? Hay points out (188–9) that such a proposition is not an article of ‘divine faith’, nor has the Church ever made a decisive declaration on the matter. Nevertheless, Hay evidences an ability to reflect critically on what he has read, noting apparent contradictions or misunderstood implications. Honoré Tournély, he notes, had written against the infallibility of the Holy See (193) yet Hay records that the same author had argued that, should bishops be divided on a point, the Christian community should adhere to the position which is supported by its Head. Hay implies that Tournély has failed to draw the obvious conclusion from his own argument, stating that ‘from all of which, the infallibility of the Head of the Church naturally flows’ (194). An example of an even more extended treatment of a topic is the question of whether a person can be saved outside the Church, specifically outside the Catholic Church. This was a hotly contested issue with high stakes in terms of claims of exclusive soteriological and ecclesiological boundaries. Hay grounds his own argument in making it clear that the subject under discussion was not only a Catholic issue. He points to the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) with its reference to the fact that ‘out of the Church of Christ there is no ordinary possibility of salvation’ (Strain 1871b: 264) and reiterates later the fact that both the Church of Scotland and the Church of England teach the same doctrine (281–2). Indeed, the former Church had been consistent in its insistence that ‘out of which Kirk there is neither life nor eternal felicity’, as stated in the 1560 Confession of Faith (338). There is considerable discussion of the concept of ‘invincible ignorance’ and whether it is possible for someone who has lived a good life outside of the Catholic Church to be saved. There is certainly a sense, between the lines, that Hay is not

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entirely comfortable with what he is having to write. It is a sense suggested by the laborious development of arguments which he produces. Particularly significant, for example, is his ‘common sense’ depiction of current attitudes in the face of the question of the possibility of salvation for those who live and die in a ‘false religion’. Hay finds himself having to conjure up arguments which might serve within contexts where persons do not wish to think of their own friends (and, in some cases, families) as ‘unsaveable’ (328). Hay is clearly aware of the very real human implications of his ‘extra ecclesiam’ arguments. It is in reading such a passage that one can best see made plain the authorship of a pastoral bishop rather than a university professor. Ultimately, however, it also illustrates something of the unbending, rigorist streak which was part of Hay’s nature and defined many of his personal relationships, particularly in the latter part of his life (Anderson 1963). For Hay it was an act of charity to inform contemporaries that salvation required ‘being members of His Church and having the true faith of Jesus Christ’ (Strain 1871b: 281). Insistence on the fact that this true faith resided in his own Catholic community was an act of love—the truth must be spoken—and to present it as otherwise was to be guilty of misrepresentation and slander (283). The next book in the trilogy, The Devout Christian instructed in the law of Christ etc. (1783), opens with a rationale for its composition. Its predecessor, The Sincere Christian, writes Hay, ‘endeavoured to facilitate . . . progress towards the true faith by pointing out the only sure way which can conduct them to it, explaining in an easy and familiar manner the necessary articles of Christian faith, the knowledge and belief of which are required to constitute a wellinstructed Christian’ (Strain 1871c: 5). The new work, The Devout Christian, takes its inception from a desire to remind the reader that ‘he must not flatter himself that his work is done and his salvation secure’. In short, The Sincere Christian was a survey of what must be believed; The Devout Christian is conceived as a discourse on the practical ramifications of what is believed, i.e. a response to the question ‘how must I live my life?’ The core of the structure of the volume is the Ten Commandments: it is an ambitious work in terms of range and intent. Nothing, writes Hay at the outset, is more detestable to God than a ‘doubleminded man’ (1). Here is another key insight into Hay’s priorities—a detestation of the hypocritical in matters religious. But the devout Christian requires proper guidance in seeking to grow in authenticity of life, both private and public, particularly in terms of religion. Hay aims to be brutally frank in stating that there were, in his contemporary world, ‘numberless conflicting Christian sects’ and it was a matter of common sense that not all of these sects could be right. Where is the ‘one true Church’ to be found? In responding, Hay touches once again on a recurring leitmotiv of his theological writing: true sincerity and authenticity of heart before God is an absolute necessity if one is to make the journey towards a totally satisfactory answer to such a fundamentally important

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question. The answer, Hay suggests, is not just an intellectual one but emerges out of a practical response to the gift of God, which is faith (5). It is in this context that he characterizes belief in salvation by faith alone as a ‘fatal error’ (6). Rather, faith is a first step towards salvation and is insufficient alone to merit heavenly reward (14). Faith has to be full of life and seen to be so through action: ‘the practice of good works, the works of virtue and piety, by obedience to the commands of God, is so necessary for securing our salvation’ (15). The final volume of the three, The Pious Christian instructed in the Nature and Practice of the Principal Exercises of Piety (1789), is conceived along different lines to its two predecessors. While there is still a catechetical element, the book is predominantly a manual of prayers and invocations for use in church and in the home (Strain 1871e). As such, it takes its place amongst the lineage of such influential works as The Garden of the Soul (1740) by Bishop Richard Challoner (1691–1781), Vicar Apostolic of the London District, whom Hay knew and profoundly respected. Indeed, Hay makes particular recommendation to his readers of the writings of both Bishop Challoner (Think Well On’t of 1728 and Meditations for the Whole Year of 1753) and Francis de Sales (1567–1622) (19). Inspired by such authors, Hay structures The Pious Christian around a series of chapters which touch on a broad range of devotional life, including Morning Prayers, Assisting at Mass, Litanies and Prayers for the Sick and Dying. The Pious Christian commences with the drawing of a distinction between ‘devotion’ and ‘piety’. For Hay, these are not synonymous terms. Devotion is a readiness of will to do what is agreeable to God; piety is actual service rendered to God (1). An example of such active piety is the discipline of reciting the Rosary, as commended by Francis de Sales (153, 157). Here one finds Hay aligning himself with the more psychological approach to prayer of Ignatius of Loyola (as well as Francis de Sales) in seeking to instil a willingness in the praying individual to use their imaginative faculties to place themselves mentally at Golgotha when meditating on the crucifixion and death of Christ. Empathy with the sorrow of Mary, Christ’s mother, is urged. Such appeal to the imagination and the emotions may strike one as rather odd in a man who can come across as exceptionally austere. But such writing is a corrective to such a one-dimensional portrait of Hay. He was also a fiddle-player, with a love too of a good song (Noden 2012: 248–9). Moreover, anyone who had lived in Rome for as long a period as Hay had done could not but have been marked by the vivid and colourful statuary of Christ’s passion and Mary’s consequent suffering as displayed in the churches and processed in the streets of the city (Johns 2015). One further passage from The Pious Christian is deserving of particular note here as it is unusual in making reference to a present and recent popes. This is untypical of Hay; not that there is a deliberate avoidance of such references to contemporary and near-contemporary pontiffs but, rather, it underlines that Hay is no prototypical ultramontane. He addresses the question ‘why are these virtues

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so necessary?’ in relation to faith, hope, and charity as well as, more specifically, meekness, patience, purity of intention, conformity to the will of God, and humble contrition for sins (Strain 1871e, 131–2). His response to the question occasions mention of a plenary indulgence granted by Pope Benedict XIV (1740–58) to anyone who might perform virtuous acts every day for a month (i.e. internal acts of mind and will prompted by the recitation of certain prayers), confessing their sins and receiving communion at least once during the course of that month, and praying for the good of the Church and the peace of Christendom. The indulgence had been confirmed by his successors, Clement XIV (1769–74) and ‘his present Holiness’, Pius VI (1775–99). What is so obvious here is that Hay refers to the popes, not as the authors of theological or teaching texts, but in terms of their spiritual power. Popes simply do not feature very often in his works. Mark Goldie has referred to Hay and John Geddes as ‘tame Erastians’ (Goldie 1991: 59–60), inhabiting a quite different world from the self-consciously triumphalist and ultramontane Victorian Church of Cardinals Nicholas Wiseman (1802–65) and Paul Cullen (1803–78). Hay’s world simply disappeared as a new era was catapulted into being with the onset of the French Revolution in the same year as the first publication of The Pious Christian. Hay produced other works, such as on usury (1774), as well as a number of pamphlets on current events and a voluminous quantity of letters. Yet it is his work on miracles and his trilogy on the Christian life which were most influential in terms of their contemporary impact. Cormac Begadon has demonstrated that Hay was, of all the Vicars Apostolic of the period in England and Scotland, the most popular author amongst a Dublin readership (Begadon 2011: 334). Recollection of such popularity of Hay’s works beyond Scotland has been largely lost but renewed awareness of such a reception allows modern scholars to point towards Hay’s ability to address aspects of Catholic theology with a clarity and logic which was appreciated by literate and educated persons. He was not a popularist in his theological writing—not for him a ‘dumbing down’ of content— but, grounded in his own philosophical and theological education in Rome and elsewhere, he was an elucidator.

John Geddes (1735–99) Though some six years younger, the student years of John Geddes coincided with those of George Hay at the Scots College in Rome (McMillan 2000: 50). This was the basis of a respectful friendship between the two. Geddes, a native of the Enzie in Banffshire, had been brought up as a Catholic, educated at Rathven, Cairnfield, Litchiestown, and Preshome before commencing his Roman sojourn in 1750. Ordained priest in 1759, he served the Shenval mission until 1762 when he was removed to take charge of the small seminary at Scalan, from whence he was again

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transferred to the charge of the mission in Preshome in 1767. He was appointed rector of the Scots College in Spain some three years later and was responsible for the oversight of the formal transfer of the College from Madrid to Valladolid in 1771. This period in his career is particularly revealing of Geddes’ diplomatic and social talents—steely determination married to cultured charm, a winning combination. In 1780, Geddes was consecrated bishop and returned to Scotland the following year as Bishop Hay’s coadjutor in the Lowland District. He died in 1799 after several years of ill-health, never having achieved what should have been his destiny, i.e. succeeding Bishop Hay as Vicar Apostolic (Anderson 1967; Watts 1999; Briody 2015). Geddes has not left behind a body of published work which can be compared in quantity to the writings of Hay. In terms of originality and quality of critical scholarship, he is clearly overshadowed by his cantankerous and iconoclastic cousin (also a priest), Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). It is once again a measure of the man that John Geddes maintained good familial relations with his cousin throughout his life despite Alexander’s accruing reputation for heterodoxy, particularly in the field of biblical exegesis (Fuller 1984; Johnstone 2004; Goldie 2014). Nevertheless, there are glimpses of Geddes’ theological positions in several of his somewhat disparate writings. When studying these, it is important to be mindful of the positive impression which Geddes made on the literati circles of Enlightenment Edinburgh and elsewhere, including representatives of the judiciary and civil life, as well as members of the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland such as William Robertson, Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Most famously, Geddes’ encounter with Robert Burns, at the outset of the Ayrshire poet’s career, led to a mutual admiration which is testified to in correspondence (Turnbull 2016). Moreover, Geddes was elected corresponding member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1781 and, indeed, contributed to its activities in aiding in its administration (Goldie 1991; Kafker and Loveland 2007). The first text which might be considered is Geddes’ treatise on duelling by which he presents a case for the abolition of the custom (Geddes 1790). This was a text with its finger-on-the-pulse of a serious contemporary issue and, indeed, it appeared posthumously in a French edition (Geddes 1801). It is not predominantly a theological text though its structure is, to some extent, modelled on scholastic textbooks such as Geddes would have encountered in his studies, with definition of an issue, objection and then response. Geddes would seem to be implicitly building on the condemnations both of the Council of Trent and of Pope Benedict XIV relating to the matter (Chadwick 1980: 137) but it is the likes of John Mair (1467–1550) that he explicitly quotes in discussing duels in Scotland in medieval times. There is a clue here that Geddes wanted his treatise to have the most general audience possible, not confined by denominational boundaries. For Geddes, the duel is ‘downright murder’ (5), deaths as a result of which it is difficult to justify if the fatal outcome of, for example, a drunken dispute (15).

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Geddes appeals to his readers’ fear of divine judgement as surely reason enough to shun the duel but he has a dedicated section for those who identified themselves as atheists. ‘I hope the number of atheists is still but small’, he writes before continuing: ‘But be that as it will, whoever unfortunately doubts of there being a Ruler of the world . . . ought nevertheless to reflect that there can scarcely be a more serious matter for him, even according to his own principles, or rather fancies, than the putting of himself into the greatest danger of being at once plunged out of existence back into nothing’ (15–16). However, Geddes’ next passage provides a salutary corrective for modern scholars who might overemphasize the increasing demise of religion in the Enlightenment period. At the outset of what is, effectively, the most theologically dense section of the treatise, duelling is presented as ‘contrary to the first principles of natural religion’: ‘let us address ourselves to the generality of mankind, who not only believe that God has made them and all other things, but has also prescribed to us a law, and will call the violators of this law to an account for their transgressions’ (16). Again, it is the absence of references to ecclesiastical sources which is striking in these pages. The appeal is to all right thinking Christians. Geddes continues: ‘Does not true philosophy – does not ordinary prudence, and even common sense, dictate, that we should put an infinitely greater value on the approbation of the Ruler of the universe, which is of eternal consequence to us, than on the capricious opinion of a few, and those the least to be regarded’ (17)? Ultimately, for Geddes the duel is incompatible both with Christian morality and Christian humility: ‘The Christian religion enjoins universal, sincere benevolence to our fellow-creatures, as one of our most essential and indispensable duties, and requires of us, not only that we carefully avoid the doing of any harm to others, but also that we strive to do them good, and that even to our most inveterate enemies, in obedience to our God’ (18–19). Christians are beholden to such duties as implied here by Geddes because of the salvific actions of Christ (19). In lines which have deep roots in Catholic ethical teaching across the centuries, Geddes makes the case for seeking ‘true knowledge of one’s self ’ and the removal of ‘the unsafe rubbish of self-conceit’ (19). In appealing to the use of common sense and philosophy in achieving such knowledge, one notes a hint of the latitudinarian in Geddes, an openness to seeking common ground in appealing to the even-handed, educated person of his day, an intellectual (indeed, theological) sociability which did not always endear him to his superior, George Hay. Such sensitivity to a broader audience for his writing is clearly seen in the Preface of Geddes’ pamphlet on the life of St Margaret of Scotland (1045–93) (Geddes 1794). As has already been noted by Matthew Kilburn (2004), Geddes is almost apologetic in tone in seeking the forbearance of any Protestant reader who might alight upon the pamphlet, given that the religious context of Margaret’s lifetime was different from ‘what has prevailed in Britain for some time past’ (5). The pamphlet can be described in terms of genre as hagiography but not in a

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pejorative sense and the text certainly cannot be considered ‘credulous’. Taking his cue from the Bollandists’ rigorous approach to the sources of saints’ lives— particularly the ground-breaking work of Daniel Papebroch SJ (1628–1714)— Geddes’ text is littered with references to medieval authors (including William of Malmesbury, Matthew Paris, and Hector Boece) and near-contemporary works (for example, Richard Challoner and Alban Butler). For Geddes, the life of Margaret is essentially an exemplar for anyone seeking a path towards Christian perfection (19). She is filled with faith, ‘the foundation of all supernatural virtues’ and ‘hearkened with an entire submission to the catholic church, which assisted by the divine Spirit, always holds and faithfully delivers down all those truths, without any possibility of falling into error’ (35). In stating that Margaret was even glad when her good actions were sometimes misunderstood, Geddes emphasizes that the persecuted state makes one ‘more like to our Saviour’ (36). He referenced the criticism of Margaret, with some ‘modern authors’ accusing her of spending too long in prayer. Here Geddes touches implicitly on the age-old discourse on the respective merits of the contemplative and the active in responding to the will of God (a choice of roles represented by the two sisters, Martha and Mary, in the Gospel of Luke). Geddes proposes a nuanced solution: it is possible to be both contemplative and active: ‘It is indeed observable, that very often they who give most of their time to devotion, are those who likewise perform the greatest things for the real good of mankind’ (38). Geddes was clearly influenced by the increasingly more sophisticated approaches to historical interpretations that characterized the Enlightenment period. There is a need to judge people and events by the standards of their own age, not one’s own (58). He is keen not to be seen as simplistic in his acceptance of the apparently inexplicable, commenting that claims made for a vial of miraculous oil had yet to be tested by scientific method (40). To charges that Margaret’s regime of fasting was worthy of condemnation, potentially having hastened her own premature death, Geddes responds with the psychological insight that ‘she may have had many other reasons for acting as she did that are unknown to us’ (41–2). It is a reminder of developing appreciation of psychological states long before the development of a distinctive academic discipline in the late nineteenth century (Hatfield 1994: 383–4). Part of what Geddes aimed to do in the life of Margaret was to underscore the demanding procedure applied by the Church before a deceased person could properly be declared a saint and venerated at the altars of churches throughout the world. It took the passage of more than 150 years before Margaret was finally declared a saint by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 (49). The message here to his contemporary world was that canonization is a matter of due process and considered study—the implication being that one would have to be truly prejudiced not to appreciate the rigour and merits of the slow-moving procedure over generations.

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This appeal to ‘reasonableness’ is evident also in Geddes’ contributions to the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Kafker and Loveland 2007). At the request of the Editor, George Gleig (1753–1840), future Episcopalian Bishop of Brechin and Primus, Geddes prepared an article on the ‘Pope’ (Geddes 1797a). This is Geddes as both Catholic bishop and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland as he seeks, primarily, to outline in some detail the machinations of papal elections. His treatment of more controversial aspects is a model of moderation and awareness of others’ sensibilities. One is reminded of Hay’s own treatment of the question of infallibility on reading Geddes’ observation that ‘some Catholic divines are of the opinion that the pope cannot err, when he thus addresses himself to all the faithful in matters of doctrine’ (377). However, ‘this infallibility of the pope, even when he pronounces in the most solemn manner, is only an opinion, and not an article of Roman Catholic faith’. He embraces head-on the thorny issue of popes whose actions have ‘given scandal and done harm to religion’ (378). Such faults have often been ‘exaggerated’ and their conduct ‘misrepresented’ but, in any case, no Roman Catholic is ‘obliged to approve what they have done; nay, without acting contrary to his religion, he may judge of them freely, and blame them if he think they deserve; only he will do it with respect and regret’. Within a matter of decades, advocacy of such a position would be difficult to maintain in Scottish Catholic circles. He ended the entry with a bracing appeal to ‘Christians of all denominations’ to ‘endeavour to understand one another better than they have often done’ (378). Geddes also contributed respectively shorter entries on ‘Saint’ (1797b) and ‘Holy Water’ (1797c). In writing about saints, Geddes is once again intent on presenting the canonization process as much more than routine official approval of popular superstition. Of particular importance to him is to emphasize the need for authenticity of Christian witness in the life of the person whose cause for sainthood is being forwarded. The principal question is ‘whether or not the person proposed for canonisation can be proved to have been in an eminent degree endued with the moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance; and with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity’. He is careful to evoke the name of Pope Benedict XIV, the author of a scholarly work on canonization, acclaimed by many contemporary scholars. Canonization, Geddes seems to be arguing, belongs in the modern world of science and enlightened thought. Indeed, this same portrait of ritual as something to be appreciated as deeply symbolic in spiritual terms as opposed to redolent of ancient pagan superstition is to be found in Geddes’ treatment of ‘Holy Water’. He emphasizes its customary use is to be found amongst the Orthodox as well as Catholics and references ancient writers, including Jerome and Bede. More particularly, the witness to authentic sacramental Christianity is underlined by making a connection between the sprinkled holy water and the water of baptism. This is typical of Geddes’ sensitive understanding of the purpose of such an encyclopaedia entry. It is iconic

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of late eighteenth-century Catholic thought in Scotland as determined to find its place as a contributor to cultural knowledge and the good of society. Towards the end of his life, Geddes produced a short reflection on death and the ‘last things’: death, judgement, heaven and hell (Geddes 1797d). More than half of the sixteen-page pamphlet is taken up with ‘A prayer for obtaining a happy death’. While short, and more rhetorical than speculative, Geddes’ text provides an intriguing Scottish contribution to the well-established Catholic tradition of ars moriendi, exemplified best in the early modern period perhaps by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s more extended treatise, The Art of Dying Well (1619). Geddes shares Bellarmine’s Augustinian relegation of the things of this world to ‘secondary importance’ (Vogt 2004: 32). As a consequence, he urges his reader to take on a ‘salutary, active fear’ in the face of the impending terrible judgement of God. In this sense, Geddes is a true inheritor of a Catholic eschatological imagination: ‘some allow themselves to be dazzled by the deceitful appearance of the objects that surround them . . . and many circumstances must occur to terrify them, which will be followed by the horrors of death, judgement, and hell’. The prayer for a happy death which he offers is long and rather convoluted (yet Geddes has high expectations that it will be meditated upon three times a day for a week and then every Sunday over a twelve-month period), but it offers the only example of explicit Mariology to be found in his work as he petitions Mary’s powerful intercession with her divine son.

Conclusion In addressing Catholic thought in late eighteenth-century Scotland, this chapter has sought to do no more than present significant exemplifications in the work of two particular individuals. George Hay and John Geddes cannot—and should not—be expected to carry the burden of representing the entire spectrum of contemporary Scottish Catholic thought. Nevertheless, consideration of their outputs allow the modern scholar to note in particular the following: (1) Scottish Catholic thought was in dialogue with the ‘enlightened’ culture of the eighteenth century; (2) both Hay and Geddes were widely read (Hay particularly so) in a range of ‘modern’ authors; (3) contemporary philosophy, particularly of the Common Sense school, made a considerable impact on the style and approach of both Hay and Geddes in their writing; (4) ecclesiological understanding, particularly in relation to the role of the papacy, remained in the eighteenth century at some distance from the ultramontanism which was so to characterize the Catholic Church in Scotland during the nineteenth century. Both George Hay and John Geddes had their faults and their weaknesses but, in an age of great change and at least one truly seismic moment (the French Revolution), they demonstrated fortitude and industry in seeking to meet the challenges of the

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new age without diminution of belief in theism and, ultimately, in the universal Church which they sought so resolutely to serve amongst the scattered Catholic ‘faithful’ of eighteenth-century Scotland.

Bibliography Primary Literature Briody, Michael (ed.) (2015). The Scots College, Spain, 1767–1780: Memoirs of the Translation of the Scotch College from Madrid to Valladolid. Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. Geddes, John (1790). Reflections on Duelling and on the most effective means for preventing it. Edinburgh: W. Creech. Geddes, John (1794). The Life of Saint Margaret of Scotland, with some account of Her Husband, Malcolm III, surnamed Kean More, and of their children. Aberdeen: J. Chalmers. Geddes, John (1797a). ‘Pope’, in G. Gleig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edition, Volume XV. Edinburgh: A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar, 375–9. Geddes, John (1797b). ‘Saint’, in G. Gleig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edition, Volume XVI. Edinburgh: A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar, 606–7. Geddes, John (1797c). ‘Holy Water’, in G. Gleig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edition, Volume XVIII. Edinburgh: A. Bell and C. Macfarquhar, 815–16. Geddes, John (1797d). Watch and Pray; or, a Method of Preparing for Dying Well. Sine Loco: Sine Nomine. Geddes, John (1801). Reflexions sur le Duel, et sur les moyens les plus efficaces de le prévenir. Paris: Didot Jeune. Gordon, James F. S. (1867). Journal and Appendix to Scotichronicon and Monasticon, Volume 1. Glasgow: John Tweed. Hay, George (1774). Letters on Usury and Interest; Shewing the Advantage of Loans for the support of Trade and Commerce. London: J. P. Coghlan. Hay, George (1779). A Memorial to the Public in behalf of the Roman Catholics of Edinburgh and Glasgow containing an Account of the late Riot against them on the Second and following days of February 1779. London: J. P. Coghlan. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1871a). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 1. The Sincere Christian. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1871b). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 2. The Sincere Christian. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1871c). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 3. The Devout Christian. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1871d). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 4. The Sincere Christian. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: William Blackwood.

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Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1871e). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 5. The Pious Christian. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1873a). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 6. On Miracles. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Strain, J. M. (ed.) (1873b). Works of the Right Rev. Bishop Hay of Edinburgh. Vol. 7. On Miracles. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: William Blackwood.

Secondary Literature Anderson, William James (1963). ‘St Ninian’s, Fetternear and the Burial of Bishop Hay’, Innes Review 14: 196–204. Anderson, William James (1967). ‘The Autobiographical Notes of Bishop John Geddes’, Innes Review 18: 36–57. Anson, Peter F. (1970). Underground Catholicism in Scotland, 1622–1878. Montrose: Standard Press. Begadon, Cormac (2011). ‘Catholic Devotional Literature: Dublin’, in J. H. Murphy (ed.), The Irish Book in English 1800–1891. Oxford History of the Irish Book, vol. IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 331–41. Chadwick, Owen (1980). The Popes and European Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fuller, Reginald C. (1984). Alexander Geddes 1737–1802: A Pioneer of Biblical Criticism. Sheffield: Almond Press. Goldie, Mark (1991). ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies 30: 20–62. Goldie, Mark (1992). ‘Common Sense Philosophy and Catholic Theology in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 302: 281–320. Goldie, Mark (1994). ‘Bishop Hay, Bishop Geddes and the Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Innes Review 45: 82–6. Goldie, Mark (2014). ‘Alexander Geddes (1737–1802): Biblical Criticism, Ecclesiastical Democracy and Jacobinism’, in J. D. Burson and U. L. Lehner (eds.), Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 411–30. Halloran, Brian M. (2004). ‘Hay, George (1729–1811)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatfield, Gary (1994). ‘Psychology as a Natural Science in the Eighteenth Century’, Revue de Synthèse 115: 375–91. Johns, Christopher M. S. (2015). The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Johnstone, William (ed.) (2004). The Bible and the Enlightenment: A Case Study— Dr Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). London: T&T Clark International.

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Kafker, Frank A. and Jeff Loveland (2007). ‘Bishop John Geddes, the First Catholic Contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30: 73–88. Kerr, Cecil (1927). Bishop Hay: A Sketch of his Life and Times. London: Sheed and Ward. Kilburn, Matthew (2004). ‘Geddes, John (1735–1799)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehner, Ulrich L. (2016). The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. McMillan, James F. (2000). ‘Development 1707–1820’, in Raymond McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome 1600–2000. Edinburgh: John Donald, 43–66. Noden, Shelagh (2012). ‘The Revival of Music in the Post-Reformation Catholic Church in Scotland’, Recusant History 31: 239–60. Outram, Dorinda (2013). The Enlightenment, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robertson, Ritchie (2016). ‘The Catholic Enlightenment: Some Reflections on Recent Research’, German History 34: 630–45. Turnbull, Michael T. R. B. (2016). ‘Bishop John Geddes, Robert Burns and Dr Alexander Geddes’, Innes Review 67: 55–61. Vogt, Christopher P. (2004). Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Watts, John (1999). Scalan: The Forbidden College 1716–1799. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.

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13 Natural and Revealed Theology in Hill and Chalmers Mark W. Elliott

George Hill (1750–1819) Life and times: governance–ecclesial, academic, and political George Hill’s reputation rests on his political skills more than on his theological output. Yet in a number of ways his long and successful governorship, spanning three decades at the helm of the Church of Scotland, even while Principal of St Mary’s College, was rooted in a grasp of ecclesiology embedded within a flexible orthodoxy. His tenure at St Mary’s afforded him almost complete control of that college’s make-up, for better and for worse, as well as a considerable influence on the university as a whole. After his St Andrews MA, gained when he was only fourteen, he tutored in and around London and worked for Prynne Campbell, MP for Pembrokeshire (a job secured for him by William Robertson). During his time in England he celebrated Christmas Day and received communion (Cook 1820: 37). Then followed theological training in Edinburgh in the late 1760s for ‘two winters’, where he declared himself unimpressed on meeting David Hume (Cook 1820: 39). Hill was Professor of Greek from 1772 to 1775 and assistant to Principal Tullidelph and then Principal Watson. By the time John Lee, the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, arrived in 1812 he was the only man not related to Hill or Cook at St Mary’s, which had become, in the words of Robert Dundas Lord Chief Baron to his nephew Henry, Second Viscount Melville, ‘an asylum for their family or dependents’ (Emerson 2008: 513). Looking back on the previous century, Emerson concludes that compared with Glasgow, whose professors were men educated further afield, an inwardlooking ethos reigned in St Andrews, due in part to Jacobitism in the early century and to the fact that nepotism was rife in the second half. For those reasons, during the century of Scottish Enlightenment St Andrews produced little in theological terms of which it could be proud. It is not my intention to dispute this conclusion, but to show that Hill, a man clearly skilled in university and ecclesiastical politics, was no theological dunce and had considerable influence on the career and theology of his most famous pupil.

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One of many controversies (in 1789) concerned the requirement that Scots behave as Anglicans in order to hold office in England under the provisions of the Test Act, hence being treated as any other dissenters until they could prove otherwise. Hill’s wish to preserve the status quo, his resistance to this challenge, and his caricaturing of the Whig-backed (Foxite) Henry Erskine (the once and future Lord Advocate) as ‘the man who willed to appear the Governor of our Church’, grew out of an undisguised fear of dropping the British guard against Roman Catholicism. To admit the motion would mean that the General Assembly was setting itself up as a forum for the discussion of and ruling on Scottish interests. Yet by insisting on the competence of the General Assembly to mind the public business of Scottish religion, widely understood, Hill was himself arguably complicit in setting a course that would result in near-inevitable collision with the House of Lords almost half a century later. One might add that the resurgence of nationalism albeit in chastened Tory form in the first few decades of the nineteenth century had at least as important a part to play; nevertheless, Hill and his kind unwittingly contributed to the Disruption. Yet it is perhaps both fairer and more interesting to judge someone by their intentions, not the unforeseen consequences. Following Hooker and Stillingfleet (Irenicum), Hill argued that church government is indeed of divine appointment, and not of state jurisdiction; yet the form is not fixed—we only have Acts of the Apostles and that doesn’t tell us everything, since it focuses on only one of the apostles, St Paul. Surely each apostle would have accommodated to the cities as they found them. ‘By the Revolution settlement, Presbyterian government was established in Scotland, not as being of divine right, but as being agreeable to the inclination of the great body of the people of this country; and by far, I trust, the largest proportion of the members of the Church of Scotland hold the liberal sentiments upon which the words of this settlement proceed’ (Hill 1835: 31). ‘This constitution gives the ministers of the Church of Scotland a voice in framing those regulations which are enacted to direct their conduct; it affords them such opportunities as are unknown under Episcopal government, and it has a tendency to form that manly, enlightened, and independent mind, which becomes all who are employed in the ministrations of the sacred office’ (Hill 1835: 125). Hill’s social conservatism was such that, had he lived a decade longer, he would have been horrified. He opposed Roman Catholic emancipation, for, as a child of the Enlightenment, he saw Rome as representing only superstition, and was also lukewarm about embracing the cause of the abolition of slavery (as evidenced by a ‘J’accuse’ letter from W. Brown of Marischal College, Aberdeen in the aftermath of the 1807 General Assembly, even if Hill rejected the associations and insinuations). Something of his attitude comes across in his 1792 sermon on Deut. 32:19, wherein he observes of the French constitution, ‘our neighbours are engaged in a

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hazardous experiment’. In comparison, the inhabitants of this island are well off and should be thankful. This is not Burkean Toryism; rather, ‘We enjoy at present the best that is known continually receiving improvement . . . from the progress of society from the diffusion of enlightened and liberal views’ (Hill 1792: 16). One might compare his mentor William Robertson, or the view of J. L. Mackenzie: ‘This age is superior to the age of Reformation; our sentiments may be presumed juster and more correct than theirs’ (quoted in Clark 1970: 205). Given that the Moderate party controlled the Assembly during most of Hill’s involvement, it is perhaps no surprise that Hill accorded the Assembly such a supreme role, one with executive power. The Barrier Act (of 1697) which gave each presbytery the right to object to novel overtures in the Assembly ‘in either doctrine or worship, or discipline, or government’ was justifiable, although he expressed reservations about its use: any person who considers the momentary impressions incident to all large bodies of men in the heat of debate, or in their zeal for a particular object, will not think it advisable that a court so numerous as the General Assembly, which sits once a-year for ten days, should have the uncontrolled power of making standing laws upon the spur of the occasion. At the same time, it must be acknowledged, that the operation of the Barrier Act tends to produce great tardiness in the legislation of the church. (Hill 1835: 66)

He added that interim acts can help here.

Hill on the Bible and doctrine Hill’s lectures on the OT display an admission of the need for textual or lower criticism and that he was hardly au fait with the incipient ‘higher’ criticism of (e.g.) Eichhorn. About the Scriptures he maintains that it is necessary to read them with humility: An intimate acquaintance with ancient languages and manner has expounded the meaning of many passages which has been misunderstood or misrepresented; and sacred criticism, proceeding upon sound principles, and conducted by men of erudition and information, has, in numberless instances, rescued the Scriptures from the charge of absurdity and inconsistency, and has demonstrated the effectual care with which Providence has preserved the oracles that were at first given by the inspiration of God, from destruction or from gross corruptions. (Hill 1812: 38–41)

This is the statement not of a biblical critic, interested in the contingency and levels of truth in the successive layers of the Bible, but of an apologist who thinks

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that once lower criticism has done its work the plain sense of Scripture is then plain enough. Most of the OT has to do with ethical injunction in the light of an overarching providence. The historical books are full of warnings against transgression of the moral law. In Hill’s Theological Institutes of 1803 there is a mention of Michaelis, Lectures on the New Testament, and Lowth, de Sacra Poesi. Hill also opposes Anthony Collins and argues for intentional and direct prophecies of Christ in the OT. Concerning Scottish Enlightenment divines, Thomas Ahnert has contended that ‘Doctrine, on the other hand, hardly played its role in their concept of religion’ (2015: 78). This judgement, however, does not fit Hill squarely. William Robertson lamented that the presumption of men had added to the simple and instructive doctrines of Christianity the ‘theories of a vain philosophy that attempted to penetrate the mysteries’; instead, sanctity and virtue alone can render man acceptable to the great author of order and of excellence’ (Robertson 1769: 74; Ahnert 2015: 81). Hill would not have disagreed with Robertson’s sentiment, but seemed to come to Moderatism from a different direction. For all his restrained and clipped prose, the thought that underpinned his scholarship had more in common with someone like Thomas Halyburton (despite Emerson’s observation of a contrast with the latter’s ‘enthusiastic Calvinism’) than with that of Robertson. For Hill was a life-long theologian, and one who was to all intents and purposes loyal to the Westminster Confession, for all that he read it in a different spirit from how it was written. In his Counsels respecting the duties of the pastoral office, Hill is adamant that theology must be alive: ‘But they are destitute of true animation, if we do not feel the divine power of the doctrines which we preach’ (1803: 413). In his Lectures in Divinity, as preserved in the lecture outlines of the first part of the 1803 Institutes as well as published in a fuller form posthumously, Hill calls ‘the Catholic’ the position he favours and presents as his own. This comes only after careful consideration of the history of the diversity of views. It is the business of a student of Divinity to make himself acquainted with that diversity of opinions, and that opposition of argument, of which he may derive a general knowledge, from Calvin’s Institutes, Medullo Marckii, Burner on the 39 articles, Mossheim’s Church History translated by Maclaine and Stapfer’s Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae.¹ It is his duty to endeavour, by a patient exercise of Reason and sacred Criticism, to learn the truth as it is in Jesus; remembering, in the words of our Confession of Faith, that Holy Scripture is the supreme judge. (Hill 1803: Book III, Chapter 6)

¹ Stapferi Institutio Theologiae Polemicae: Joh. Frid. Stapferi (Stapfer, Johann Friedrich) . . . Institutiones theologiae polemicae universae, ordine scientifico dispositae. Apud Heideggerum et Socios, 1752.

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In Chapter VII, Hill commends some ‘further reading’, writing ‘You will find another excellent abridgement of the ordinary course in Marckii Medulla Theologiae, a duodecimo of 300 pages, which used to be the text book in St Mary’s College and which in my opinion ought to be read by every student of divinity, not early, but before he finishes his studies’. This work, published in Amsterdam in 1721, was already more than half a century old. Perhaps still more surprising is what follows, as Hill states with regard to Calvin’s Institutes: ‘I do not know a more useful book for clergymen in the country’. His main trouble with it was that its structure makes for repetitions and inefficient practice. Turretin [the elder] abridged by Rusenius (Riisenius) is recommended as a very useful book for giving a short view of all the controverted.² Yet the guiding animus is Anglican, and from a few generations prior, e.g. Bishop Bull, described by Hill as ‘the ablest defender of the Catholic system’. Against Hume he argues: ‘The falsehood of the testimony of the apostles would be more miraculous—i.e., it is more improbable than any fact which they attest’ (Hill 1861: 13). It is worth noting that the doctrine of the Atonement is afforded 55 pages. Hill insists that the Atonement is not a cancellation of a debt, as the Socinians think, but rather a carrying out of a punishment. That is the ‘Catholic’ view (1861: 69). Atonement might be thought of as ‘limited’ in that ‘faith is required in all who partake of the remedy; thus, the extent of the remedy is limited by this requisition’ (78). When it comes to the outworking and application of that atonement, he opines: ‘we must admit that the original intention of the Creator and Ruler of the universe always coincides with the event which takes place under his administration . . . he foresaw the use which they would make of his blessings, and all the consequences of their conduct entered into the plan of his government’ (87). For, according to the wisdom of Divine Providence, not all have been saved—especially those in overseas places.

Reassertion of Westminster Calvinism An Arminian system is not fundamentally about grace, even if that is prevenient (77–9), for it encourages boasting, since ‘the minds of some men are disposed to comply with it [grace], and the mind of others to reject it’ (82). Moreover, ‘it proceeds upon the supposition of a failure of the purpose of the Almighty, which it is not easy to reconcile with our notions of his sovereignty’ (83–4). Dr Clarke insists that God respects moral rights—but should we say that the creaturely realm is free if it be immune from divine sovereignty? Dr Reid thinks so. Hill was

² Francisci Turretini . . . Compendium theologiae didacto-elenchticae, ex theologorum nostrorum institutionibus theologicis auctum & illustratum . . . Memoriae juvandae causa conscriptum à Leonardo Riissenio [Utrecht trained, pastor at Deventer; First edition 1695]. Apud S. Luchtmans et al., 1731.

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not so sure. His vision was Augustinian, his anthropology severely realist. His vision of humanity and churches was one of low expectations and of mutual correction, working with rather than against natural order, but seeking also to tame it. His theological writing was concise, intended to clarify rather than elaborate, and to set doctrine as an ascesis that would connect with a certain revelation of a mystery, which came immediately from the Apostles and their teaching, as Calvin would have agreed, i.e. as teaching of a heavenly sort. Although doctrine is not itself grace, it graciously reminds and points towards grace in all its fullness. In the Arminian system God seems to predestine in creation by giving some the right disposition and others not. The Arminians ascribe the faith and good works of some, to a predisposition in their own minds for receiving the means which God has provided for all, and to the favourable circumstances which cherish this disposition; and the impenitence and unbelief of others, to the obstinacy of their hearers, and to a concurrence of circumstance by which that obstinacy is prevented from yielding to the means of improvements. For the Calvinist, grace is what enables human morality. Whereas Arminians call God’s operation lenis suasio, moral suasion, Calvinists believe that those whom God has chosen . . . [receive] a supernatural influence exerted by the Creator on the faculties of the human mind, which deriving its efficacy from the power of God fulfilling his purpose, never can fail of its effect; and which produces, in a manner that they do not pretend to explain, John iii.8, but ordinarily with the use of means, and always with a consistency with the reasonable nature of man, that change which is the work of the Spirit. This Grace does not preserve any man in this state from every kind of sin; however, those to whom it is given, cannot fall from it either finally or totally. (99)

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) Chalmers is famous for his attempt to join gospel proclamation to social care, as well as for his journey from Moderatism and Natural Philosophy (including Economics) through Evangelicalism by conversion and mission (home and overseas), to leading the fight against Patronage in the corridors of power, and eventually departing the established Kirk. His leadership of the Disruption in 1843 marked his church’s retreat from societal influence in Scotland as the price of ecclesial independence. ‘It created a [Free] Church, enjoying the allegiance of a large section of the people, which denied the assertion by the British state that religion, along with everything else, was subject to its absolute parliamentary sovereignty’ (Fry 1993: 31). One can see Chalmers’ theological animus as an attempt to hold together the natural-social and the salvific-ecclesial. The story of Chalmers’ res gestae is best told by Stewart J. Brown (1982).

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Master of natural theology In terms of his writing career, Chalmers’ ‘breakthrough’ into the limelight was his ‘Christianity’ in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1813), republished as The Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation in 1814 and 1817. His Astronomical Discourses based on his London lectures of 1815–16 was also a tremendously successful publication, which went through nine editions, resulting in 20,000 copies, in less than a year (Hanna 1852: 97–9). As these titles suggest, he was first and foremost a ‘fundamental theologian’, shuttling between Natural Theology and Revealed Theology. After graduating in 1799 from St Mary’s College under the tutelage of Hill, he had gone to Edinburgh and learned from Dugald Stewart and his development of the ‘common sense’ tradition. Chalmers would later express gratitude to James Beattie’s Essay on Truth (1770) for its counterweight to D’Holbach’s scepticism, whereby human minds are unable to transcend their status as objects subject to causal effect. A course of lectures on Butler’s Analogy of Religion delivered in the University of Edinburgh (first published 1839) is indicative of Chalmers’ starting point. Moreover, the other two ‘textbooks’ he recommended were Paley’s Evidences and Hill’s Theology. Butler had emphasized ‘an analogy or likeness between that system of things and dispensation of Providence which revelation informs us of, and that system of things and dispensation of Providence which experience, together with reason, informs us of ’(Butler 1817: 6). These ideas were very influential in evangelical circles in the first half of the nineteenth century (Jenkins 2015: 195). Although Brown (1982) is doubtless right to consider Chalmers’ active ministry and ecclesio-political life, ‘tragic’ in many respects; nevertheless, G. D. Henderson might have it the wrong way round when he spotlights Chalmers as no real thinker, but as ‘a man familiar with the homes and hearts of common people’. Principal John Cairns thought ‘the West Port [Edinburgh] evangelism of Dr Chalmers far more effective than his Astronomical Discourses’ (Henderson 1947: 353). Yet the latter was republished in 1850—not to mention nine volumes of posthumous works—by which time the West Port mission was already consigned to history. In these works, Chalmers frequently pressed into service passages from the Bible such as ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions’ to defend the plurality of worlds (Jenkins 2015: 194). Chalmers was not troubled that his favourite thinkers belonged mostly to the previous century: ‘We see in the theology of Newton, the very spirit and principle which gave all stability, and all its sureness, to the philosophy of Newton’ (Chalmers 1817b: 84) For Newton had regarded the life of Jesus well supported by evidence. He knew the boundaries and did not speculate. ‘Without the testimony of an authentic messenger from Heaven, I know nothing of heaven’s counsels’ (Chalmers 1817b: 52). The laws of nature could not account for the very existence of the universe; however, a divine order and plan could best be

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seen in Natural History, i.e. how the pieces are providentially made to work together (Smith and Wise 1989: 94). When it came to moral philosophy and theology, Chalmers regarded human selfishness as securing basic virtues such as honesty and so trust between people (Dixon and Wilson 2010: 729). ‘A true self-interest, one indeed compatible with liberal order, was one that does feel “the well-spring of action in itself ” one which is freely disposed toward its aims. For this self the need to act has been taken within through choice, and thus its conduct has become a matter of “principle”.’ In this way the self becomes properly moralized, for, after all, ‘nothing [can be] moral or immoral which is not voluntary’ (Chalmers 1833a: vol. 2, 222; Dixon and Wilson 2010: 742). Chalmers saw disciplined, ascetical commerce as different from the ‘execrescent trade’, the ‘blotch and distemper of our nation’ (Hilton 1985: 147). Again the focus is on the moral self, not systems or structures. (Analogously, Catholics should not be deprived of freedom to be religious, hence open to the gospel.) Reminiscent of Hutcheson, Chalmers made much of the self, not as an ego-self but as a social and responsible one. Provided the self was not condemned to withering solitude, the selfish and social affections need not be in opposition (Chalmers 1833a: vol. 1, 261). Princeton’s Archibald Alexander criticized Chalmers’ view that only voluntary acts could be sinful, as being a ‘New School’ idea (Noll 1997: 770). In a Lockean vein, Chalmers thought that a universal Christian education provided ‘a guarantee for the progressive conquests, and at length the ultimate triumph, of good over evil in society’ (Chalmers 1833b: vol. 2, 51). Yet this did not imply salvation for the many. The New School view, based on what Sydney Ahlstrom has termed a ‘benign and optimistic anthropology’, ‘struck at the very heart of the Christian faith’ (Rice 1971: 33). It was just that one could not work one’s way to the knowledge of God in the light of reason enhanced by some gracious illumination. There must be a reformation of the heart from above, not just of conduct that has been improved simply by being placed in better society. Righteousness must go beyond that of outer behaviour, although one should start with one’s conduct and work inwards. ‘He should do diligently every one right thing that is within his reach, and that he finds himself to have strength for’ (Chalmers 1815: 7).

The move to revealed theology and the gospel of moral order for all As for the issue of philosophical necessity, Jonathan Edwards’ views gave Chalmers an overpowering sense of the providential magnitude of God’s activity in the world (Rice 1971: 26). Yet his resistance to speculation or at least an awareness of the need to give biblical flesh to philosophical bones is clear as early as 1821, when he harked back to his experience of gaining a rapturous idea:

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‘the magnificence of the Godhead, and the universal subordination of all things to the one great purpose for which he evolved and was supporting creation. I should like to be so inspired over again, but with such a view of the Deity as coalesced and was in harmony with the doctrine of the NT. To be told that Nature never recedes from her constancy, is to be told that the God of Nature never recedes from his faithfulness’ (Hanna 1852: 17; originally 1821).

After 1809 he would never again consider that spiritual virtue of a Christian sort could be built on top of natural virtue as an intensification of it. Radical conversion was required. Reading the Penseés in 1812 formed Chalmers’ strong identification with Pascal (see Hanna 1852: 152), as well as with Wilberforce and Richard Baxter, followed by or sealed by the Marrow of Modern Divinity, wherein he found ‘much light and satisfaction on the subject of faith. It is a masterly performance, and I feel a greater nearness to God, convincing me that Christ is the way to him, and an unconditional surrender of ourselves to Christ is the first and most essential step of our recovery . . . I feel a growing delight in the fulness and sufficiency of Christ’ (Entries in the Journal for 23 and 24 August 1812, Hanna 1852: 298). Remarkably he was able to use Hill’s lectures in his own teaching at Edinburgh University; assuming the students had read them, he comments on certain aspects, suggesting that they were comprehensive and with lucidus ordo, but mostly ‘frigid’. Paradoxically, Hill’s argument for the plausibility of Lazarus’ raising relies too much on emotion. The two religions of Judaism and Christianity differ ‘only in degree, not kind, as a full-grown man differs from a babe’ (swimming against a current of despising the OT). One must make sure to combine doctrinal exposition with scriptural narrative, more than Hill does. God is always active and Hill is mistaken to think a culture needs to be pre-evangelized before conversions are possible. Chalmers here has Gibbon’s Deism in his sights. It is all quite simple: ‘The faith is the procuring cause of our salvation’ (Chalmers 1849a: 158). Accordingly in Chalmers’ 1837 lectures on Romans, the phrase ‘from faith to faith’ (Rom. 1:17) signifies that as it is made known and discerned at first in the act of our believing, so the revelation of it becomes more distinct and manifest, just as the faith becomes stronger . . . not, say they, from faith unto works, but from faith to faith—marking what is very true, that our righteousness before God, regarded as the giver of a perfect and incommutable law, is wholly by faith. (Chalmers 1840: 52)

The power of God serves to work holiness as well as belief. However, wrath ‘has its origin in the breast of the Divinity; And it goeth forth from an upper storehouse’ (87). ‘The Heathen sinner will be tried by the light which he had’, yet justly the Christian sinner will be tried by the light which he fled from . . . For though justified by faith, we shall be judged by works . . . Faith is the high road to

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repentance . . . Our acceptance of the righteousness of Christ as our title for an entrance into heaven, is an essential stepping-stone to our own personal righteousness as our preparation for the joys and exercises of heaven. (125)

The message of Christ’s blood has power and draws attention to Christ: hence on Rom. 2:13: ‘ . . . and while we bid you look unto Jesus and be saved, it is such a look as will cause you to mourn . . . a look as will liken you to His image, and import into your own character the graces and the affections which adorn His’. On propitiation in Rom. 3:25: ‘It rather, however, signifies the offering itself, than the place in which the blood of the offering was sprinkled’. At the moment of personal faith in his blood, Christ then becomes one’s propitiation. ‘It is through faith in God’s promise of the Holy Spirit that we shall upon asking Him receive the Holy Spirit . . . As is the faith, so is the fulfilment’ (190–2). Chalmers’ posthumously published Institutes—perhaps his theological testament—bear witness to more than just a rearrangement of traditional topics. They employ an inductive method. ‘The doctrine of man’s moral character ought to have first place . . . and the doctrine of God’s mysterious constitution the last place in the argumentations of our science’—these are the urgent necessities of the human spirit (Chalmers 1849a: xx). The disinterested love of God was the key to metaphysics and hence ethics: the mind is not looking for pleasures, but to the relief of another [appetite]’s hunger (hence anti-utilitarian). With ‘common sense’ conviction, the mind likewise, is seeking God, not pleasure. Butler rightly described special affections as different from general affection, which is love of self. There is need for deep psychological change. The design argument doesn’t merely prove God’s existence but tells us about divine properties. Creation out of nothing is a revealed doctrine: God’s voice comes through his creating order, more likely out of chaos than nonentity (Voges 1984: 245). The theme of apologetics is rarely far away. To meet Hume’s infidel objection: how can we say there is a cause we have not seen? Well, Reid and Stewart propose a separate and original principle of evidence. One only needs an intuition of a watchmaker not an experience of him. ‘The natural precedes the Christian theology, just as the cry of distress precedes the relief which is offered to I, or rather, as the sensation of distress precedes the grateful and willing acceptation of the remedy which is suited to it’ (Chalmers 1849a: 93). ‘With fresh vigor and enthusiasm Chalmers sets his systematic theology within the polarity of the disease and the remedy, echoing Pascal’s contention that “the Christian faith goes mainly to establish these two facts, the corruption of nature, and the redemption by Jesus Christ” ’ (Rice 1979: 186). Rice thinks the Atonement is central to the Institutes, but in fact the focus in the Institutes is on the move from the Cross as objective satisfaction to the imputation of Christ’s whole righteousness to all of the believer’s life. Atonement is inherently ‘extrospective’. Margaret Oliphant summed it up: ‘He would not have any limitation of the

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Atonement. He thought that when Scripture said that Christ died for the world, it was most likely he meant that and nothing else. He did not like the explanation that what it meant was Gentiles as well as Jews. “God commandeth all men everywhere to repent” ’ (Oliphant 1893: 253). Nor does soteriology always trump theology (Rice 1979). Chalmers was also concerned with ‘penetrating into the recondite truths’ of theological science and ‘drawing from their obscurity those deep and hidden things which lie beneath the surface of observation’ (Rice 1979: 188), through grappling with verbal obscurities. In a way reminiscent of Pusey, there was no place for ‘historical criticism’, since the literal sense meant that there was high factual content to the biblical narratives whose writers sought mostly to describe. It is the theologian’s task to interpret these. What did the authors really write and what is the sense of meaning of it? Corrective and interpretive criticism of the scriptural text is welcome, hence, not John Owen against Brian Walton but both together. Despite its holding a contempt for the idea of any spiritual influence in Scripture, the younger Michaelis’ Introduction to the NT (English translation, London: Rivington, 1802), was useful (as it had been for Hill), just as the Gibeonites had been to the children of Israel. ‘Who is this God of history?’ he seemed to ask. Chalmers’ conversion to Evangelicalism did not alter his doctrine of God, even as it introduced Christology as a remedy for sin. God was powerful enough to simply forgive, but there is more to God than ‘power’ (Voges 1984: 277). Atonement ‘relates not to the government of heaven but to the needs of man’ (Chalmers 1849a: vol. 2, 6): it was ‘necessary’ in that existential sense. One should study the disease in the light of the remedy as revealed (vol. 2, 12). This means that only lower or textual criticism is admissible for hearing the Bible’s message (cf. Hill). There was no place for long discussions about ancient pagan sacrifices. At best, criticism is a means of defence from error. Yet one should not miss the realities for the words. Even the word atonement, if taken in the original form: at-one-ment, is expressive only of the reconciliatory effect—not of that which purchased the reconciliation (vol. 2, 37). Yet lutron (ransom) does tell us something; with help from William Outram (Two dissertations on Sacrifice, London: John Allen, 1817), one sees that what is involved is not just the acquittal from a charge but the transfer into a state of approval, in other words, the imputation of active righteousness, ‘a propitiated forgiveness’. As for ‘faith’, a penitent desire for salvation should issue in penitent Christian obedience before the Exalted Prince. Augustine offers an example: it was in the act of quitting his sin that he felt the radiance of Christianity gather upon his soul (Chalmers 1849a: vol. 2, 217), just as heaven begins in the heart with regeneration. Following Edwards, those who strive more are most aware of their failure and need for grace. Yet the latter covenant shares its moral content with the former covenant (of works). ‘If a man keep my sayings, to him will I manifest myself ’—‘To him that ordereth his conversation aright, will I show the salvation of God’ (vol. 2, 281). The works of the saints ascend together

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with prayers. ‘He who has his hope in him purifies himself even as Christ is pure’ (1 John 3:3). One should remember: ‘They are right in saying that it [holiness] gives no title to God’s favour, but they are wrong in saying that its chief use is to . . . make that title clear to him who possesses it. It is in fact valuable on its own account. It forms part, and an effective part, of salvation . . . ’ (vol. 2, 184) There should be no divide between evangelical and moral preaching, for the gospel is for society; in that sense he was both moderate and evangelical (Voges 1984: 266). Dugald Stewart had admitted it was hard to reconcile metaphysical necessity and moral blame, yet added that those who believe in necessity still think of themselves as moral agents. Chalmers acknowledges his debt to Stewart and Jonathan Edwards. No account of the universe, including a moral one, can make human choices totally free from constraining powers, but there is liberty, even though God is never a spectator but is sovereign in his (fore)knowledge and influence. In Lecture III on Predestination, Chalmers adds: ‘We cannot disjoin God from one particle of the universe, without, in fact, despoiling the universe of its God’ (Chalmers 1837: 13). Small things can have big consequences, such as with the bird outside the cave where ‘Mahomet’ was hiding. ‘It saved the life of the false prophet . . . and this perpetuated a superstition, which overspreads our globe to this day’ (Chalmers 1837: 13). As for Predestination itself, well how could God not know? Rom. 8:29–30 and Eph. 1:5 join witness: in knowing he loves them as redeemed on their way to heaven. In Lecture II on Predestination, he hints at the Spirit’s means of operating: ‘Instead of mechanical force from without an influence may be addressed to principles within. Conscience may be touched; the will may be influenced; the faculty of attention may be turned within; and suitable actions may be the result’ (Chalmers 1837: 9). There is the analogy of making a clock go faster by shortening the pendulum rather than pressing on the hand. Meanwhile humans are to concern themselves more with the call. The question is not whether, by election, I am one of the saved, but, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Now this includes pursuing holiness. Most orthodox theologians, many of whom were influenced by Leibniz, think that God leaves the unsaved to their own devices. Yet Leibniz was overly concerned with the goodness of this world; for human sin is needing to be judged. Everyone in the world needs the promises of the NT to deal with that unholiness (Chalmers 1849a: 406). As for the Trinity, in itself, the doctrine itself is not so clear, even when it is clear that each three (Father, Christ, Spirit) are God. ‘The Bible tells us of the Trinity in separate portions only; for out of the single propositions it has not even formed any general and conjunct proposition that is comprehensive of them all’ (422–4). One should not even try to harmonize the Threeness and the Oneness. The Church should keep reciting the creed, for the sake of reverence for Christ and his deity, and the despising of sin. This sense of the divinity of Christ enhances the sacredness of all his religious contemplations. As early as in the Introduction to the Institutes, Chalmers states that it would be wrong to give the Trinity an early

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place (cf. Schleiermacher) when it is clearly a thing we have no experience of, since we work with an analytic approach ‘where you have the principles to seek’, employing a modus indagandi, feeling our way upwards. Chalmers shows himself to be a Reformed theologian with a preference for the biblical over the dogmatic and systematic, not least because the former lent itself more immediately to application to hearers of this theology. The natural order and its theology provided some but not sufficient knowledge for salvation: revealed theology emphasized the means for the transformation of the self in the light of God’s generous grace in Christ.

Bibliography Primary Literature Butler, Joseph (1817). The Analogy of Religion. London: Rivington. Chalmers, Thomas (1813). ‘Christianity’, in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia = The Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1814. Chalmers, Thomas (1815). Address to the inhabitants of Kilmany. Edinburgh: White; London: Longman. Chalmers, Thomas (1817a). A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation. Glasgow and London: Gale and Fenner. Chalmers, Thomas (1817b). Astronomical Discourses. Glasgow: James Hedderwick; Edinburgh: William White; London: Longman. Chalmers, Thomas (1833a). On The Adaptation of External Nature to The Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, 2 vols. [Bridgewater Treatise 1]. Edinburgh. Chalmers, Thomas (1833b). On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the adaptation of external nature, to the moral and intellectual constitution of man. London: W. Pickering. Chalmers, Thomas (1835). On Natural Theology, vol. 1. Glasgow: William Collins; Hamilton: Adams and Co.; London, originally 1821. Chalmers, Thomas (1837). Five Lectures on Predestination . . . Selected from “The Pulpit”, 2nd edition. London. Chalmers, Thomas (1840). Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans. Glasgow: William Collins, S. Frederick St.; London and Hamilton: Adams, 1840. Chalmers, Thomas (1849a). Institutes of theology, ed. William Hanna. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. Volume 8 of Posthumous Works. Chalmers, Thomas (1849b). ‘Prelections on Butler’s Analogy, Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, and Hill’s Lectures in Divinity’, in Posthumous works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D. Vol. 9. Edinburgh: Constable. Cook, George (1820). The life of the late George Hill, Principal of St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews. Edinburgh: Constable.

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Hanna, William (1852). Memoirs of the life and writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D. Edinburgh and London: Constable. Hill, George (1792). The Present Happiness of Great Britain. A Sermon. Edinburgh: Balfour & Dickson. Hill, George (1803). Counsels respecting the duties of the pastoral office. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute and P. Hill; London: Longman and Rees. Hill, George (1812). Lectures upon portions of the Old Testament: tended to illustrate Jewish history and Scripture characters. Edinburgh: Constable and Co.; London: Longman. Hill, George (1821). Lectures in divinity, by the late George Hill, D.D., edited from his manuscript, by his son, the Rev. Alexander Hill. Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes [also Philadelphia, 1842]. Hill, George (1835). Theological Institutes. Including View of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland = Third part of Theological Institutes. Edinburgh: J. Waugh. Hill, George (1861). Theological Institutes: short selections = Extracts from lectures in divinity by the late Principal Hill; on important subjects which are now engrossing the public attention (1803). Reprinted Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood. Paley, William (1802). Natural Theology. London: Faulder & Morgan. Robertson, William (1769). The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, Vol. I. London.

Secondary Literature Ahnert, Thomas (2015). The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment 1690–1805. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ahnert, Thomas and Susan Manning (eds.) (2011). Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baxter, Paul (1993). ‘Deism and Development’, in Stewart J. Brown and Michael Fry (eds.), Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 98–112. Brown, Stewart J. (1982). Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cairns, David (1956). ‘Thomas Chalmers’ Astronomical Discourses: A Study in Natural Theology?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 9: 410–21. Cameron, James K. (1982). ‘Theological Controversy: A Factor in the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (eds.), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 116–30. Cheyne, Alec (1998). Studies in Scottish Church History. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Clark, Ian D. L. (1970). ‘From Protest to Reaction: The Moderate Regime in the Church of Scotland, 1752–1805’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200–24.

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Dixon, William and David Wilson (2010). ‘Thomas Chalmers: The Market, Moral Conduct, and Social Order’, History of Political Economy 42/4: 723–46. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1975). The Church in Victorian Scotland, 1843–1874. Edinburgh: St Andrews Press. Emerson, Roger L. (2008). Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fry, Michael (1993). ‘The Disruption and the Union’, in Stewart J. Brown and Michael Fry (eds.), Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 31–43. Henderson, G. D. (1947). ‘Thomas Chalmers as Preacher’, Theology Today 4: 346–56. Hilton, Boyd (1985). ‘Thomas Chalmers as Political Economist’, in Alec Cheyne (ed.), The Practical and the Pious. Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, 141–56. Hilton, Boyd (1988). The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jenkins, Bill (2015). ‘Evangelicals and the Plurality of Worlds Debate in Scotland, 1810–51’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 35/2: 189–210. Livingstone, David N., Darryl G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (eds.) (1999). Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. McCallum, Donald P. (1989). ‘George Hill, D.D.: Moderate or Erastian Evangelical?’ MA thesis, University of Western Ontario. Noll, Mark A. (1997). ‘Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) in North America (ca. 1830–1917)’, Church History 66: 762–78. Oliphant, Margaret (1893). Thomas Chalmers: Preacher, Philosopher, and Statesmen. London: Methuen. Rice, Daniel F. (1971). ‘Natural Theology and the Scottish Philosophy in the Thought of Thomas Chalmers’, Scottish Journal of Theology 24: 23–46. Rice, Daniel F. (1979). ‘An Attempt at Systematic Reconstruction in the Theology of Thomas Chalmers’, Church History 48: 174–88. Ross, Ian S. (2000). ‘The Natural Theology of Lord Kames’, in Paul Wood (ed.), The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 335–51. Sher, Richard B. (1985). Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Skoczylas, Anne (2004). ‘The Regulation of Academic Society in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland: The Tribulations of Two Divinity Professors’, Scottish Historical Review 83: 171–95. Smith, Crosbie and M. Norton Wise (1989). Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, M. A. (2003). ‘Religion and Rational Theology’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–59.

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Suderman, Jeffrey (2001). Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Voges, F. (1984). Das Denken von Thomas Chalmers im kirchen- und sozialgeschichtlichen Kontext. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. Yeager, Jonathan M. (2011). Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine. New York: Oxford University Press.

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14 Theology, Slavery, and Abolition 1756–1848 Iain Whyte

‘It is not the authority of any single detached precept in the gospel, but the spirit and genius of Christian religion, more powerful than any particular command, which hath abolished the practice of slavery thro’ the world’ (Robertson 1759: 31). This excerpt from a sermon by William Robertson, leading churchman, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, and renowned figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, may have seemed unduly optimistic at that time. By the mid-eighteenth century Britain had not even begun to consider outlawing its slave trade, let alone plantation slavery in the Empire. Hardly a voice had been raised on slavery amongst Scottish churchmen, despite the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment was at the height of its power, providing for many an intellectual atmosphere that encouraged new ideas and challenged many traditional attitudes. Duncan Rice claimed that eighteenth-century Scotland was ‘an extraordinary case of a small society that developed a heavy economic commitment to slavery at the very time when its intelligentsia were vehemently criticising it’ (Rice 1981: 19). Scots immigrants to the Americas and the Caribbean had some of the worst reputations for cruelty, and many Scots fortunes were made on the backs of enslaved people (Whyte 2006: 44–50). Recent research on the compensation claims after abolition in the British Empire indicates how many Scots benefited, directly or indirectly, from slavery (Devine 2015). This chapter will explore the theological arguments made to counter slavery in four episodes of Scottish history—the mid eighteenth century, when black slaves from the Americas and the Caribbean were resident with their masters in Scotland, the campaigning years against the slave trade at the end of that century and plantation slavery in the early nineteenth century, a key move to demand immediate abolition in 1830, and the question of fellowship with American churches that admitted slave-owners to membership in the ante-bellum years.

Slaves in Scotland and Baptism There were three slave cases discussed in the Court of Session in the eighteenth century. In 1756 Robert Sheddan planned to return Jamie Montgomery from

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Ayrshire to his native Virginia. Montgomery escaped from the dockside, and made his way to Edinburgh. Shortly after court proceedings began, the slave died in the Tollbooth Jail (Court of Session, 1756). A slave, so-called ‘Black Tom’, had been brought to Fife from Grenada by his master, Dr David Dalrymple, around the year 1776. As he was about to be sent back to the West Indies in 1779, he sought baptism in Wemyss Parish Church, was named David Spens and accompanied by a friendly local elder, John Henderson, declared his freedom and left Dalrymple’s service. Spens too was imprisoned, but before the Court could decide on the case Dalrymple died, and the self-liberated slave was freed (Court of Session, 1770). It would be another eight years before the judges of the Court of Session, by a majority of eight to four, decided that the law of Scotland did not support slavery, and that Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean, near Perth, had no further claim on his slave, Joseph Knight, whom he had brought from Jamaica (Brown 1826: 777). The lawyers for the masters in these cases frequently quoted Scripture in support of their clients. Sheddan’s counsel in 1756 cited verses from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, arguing that God’s permission for slavery was given to his chosen people. Advocate James Ferguson for Sir John Wedderburn claimed that it was ‘evident that our Saviour gave no authority for change’ and ‘that neither the Apostles nor the first Christians ever thought of making any alteration’ on this matter. The return of the slave Onesimus by St Paul and the exhortation in Ephesians for slaves to obey their masters were used in two of the memorials. Those acting for the slaves were less free in their use of Scripture, but 1 Corinthians, Galatians, and even John’s Gospel (The truth shall make you free) were all cited. A key issue in these early cases was undoubtedly that of baptism. It was the contention by its defenders that the slave trade was justified because Africa was reputedly ‘barbarous’ and ‘heathen’. Archibald Dalzel of Kirkliston in his History of Dahomey, written for the Liverpool merchants in 1789, made great emphasis on this. It had some persuasive power, as a spirited exchange on the slave trade in the Glasgow Courier in February and March 1792 demonstrated. One correspondent claimed that it saved countless African lives from human sacrifice and other practices. In the early eighteenth century English lawyers had anticipated the question of baptism and freedom, already raised by evangelicals and Quakers alike. In the 1729 opinion of the Attorney General and Solicitor General, the need was emphasized to ‘correct the vulgar error that slaves become free by being baptised’ (Walvin 1971: 94–5). By contrast the lawyers for the slaves in the three Scottish cases argued that Christian baptism inevitably led to practical emancipation. Lord Bankton, presiding judge in the Montgomery case, raised it himself, and undertook to examine whether the slave was freed by baptism. This was never decided in the Sheddan/Montgomery case due to the slave’s death, but it was a significant factor in the courts in a land where Christianity was so much more

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invoked in law than it was further south. Although Sheddan, Montgomery’s master, claimed that John Witherspoon, minister of Beith, had warned the slave that his baptism changed nothing, this is belied by the certificate of Christian Conduct given to him by Witherspoon as a kind of ecclesiastical ‘laissez passer’ (Court of Session, 1756). Lord Auchinleck, father of James Boswell and judge of the Court of Session, stated his opinion in the 1788 Knight case thus: Although in the plantations they have laid hold of poor blacks and made slaves of them, yet I do not think that is agreeable to humanity, not to say to the Christian religion. Is a man a slave because he is black? No, he is our brother; and he is a man, though not of our colour; he is in the land of liberty, with his wife and child, let him remain there. (Brown 1826: 777)

Auchinleck not only encapsulated Enlightenment thinking in this way, but that statement would find an echo both in the cultured circles of Moderate churchmen and also in the ranks of the evangelical Popular party in Scotland at that time. When the campaign against the slave trade started a decade later, theological arguments dovetailed with those of humanity and civilization in the wording of petitions sent to Parliament in 1788 and 1792, calling for the abolition of the slave trade. Scotland forwarded 156 out of 561 from Britain and Ireland in 1792. At first they were almost exclusively from Church of Scotland synods, presbyteries and congregations, and universities, but later increasingly reflected the results of community meetings and trades councils.

Theology in the Petitioning Years The Reformers’ legacy of familiarity with the Bible and theology within large sections of Scottish society was reflected in the arguments presented in these petitions. Emphasis was placed on the contrast between the barbarities of the slave trade, and proclaimed British values of freedom, fairness, and humanity. So far this conformed to the pragmatic approach of the abolitionists in limiting the campaign to that of the trade, and making it clear that there was no intention, at least for the present, to interfere with plantation slavery itself. That distinction, however, was to become more blurred when theological arguments were presented. Considerable discussion took place over national guilt incurred by the trade, and a fear of resulting divine retribution. Edinburgh Presbytery in 1792 expressed itself ‘anxious to avert the vengeance of a God who exercised judgement for the oppressed’. Cupar Presbytery spoke of the whole nation ‘exposed to the judgement of heaven’. The strongest word on this theme came from a secular body, the Incorporated Trades of Paisley with Twenty One other Bodies. They made ‘an awful consideration of the daily accumulation of guilt from a disgraceful trade’, but also ‘from West Indian barbarity’, and continued that ‘if a timely stop is

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not put to their oppression there is reason to conclude that such a system of iniquity cannot long escape the righteous judgement of God’ (Caledonian Mercury, 1792). A second theme was reflected in Auchinleck’s statement to the Court of Session, and was the recognition of the common bonds of humanity expressed in the gospel. The Relief Congregation of Hamilton declared the trade as a ‘violation of Jehovah’s righteous laws’, which ‘positively require every man to love his neighbour as himself ’. Paisley Presbytery spoke of the ‘reproach that the trade brought upon the Christian name’, and the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr complained that ‘these barbarities were displeasing to that God who has made himself the friend and avenger of the oppressed’. The Journeymen Shoemakers testified to their abhorrence of these ‘unjust, inhuman, and barbarous measures’, which they judged to be ‘contrary to the law of God and every well regulated country’. The Popular party in the Church of Scotland had long been pressing for evangelism beyond the shores of Scotland. It became easily apparent that this was in conflict with the slave trade. A leading light in the party, Dr John Erskine of Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh, argued in the General Assembly that evangelism of Africans would be impossible if Christian nations supported their enslavement. Rev. Thomas Balfour, founder of the Glasgow Missionary Society, in a motion to Glasgow Presbytery argued that the trade was a ‘hinderance to the propagation of the gospel, whose happy and universal influence we desire to promote’ (Glasgow Presbytery, 1792). The Gaelic Congregation of Edinburgh accused the slave trade of being unchristian because it retarded the gospel, by producing in the minds of Africans an inveterate aversion to Christianity ‘on account of the injustice, cruelty, and abominable wickedness of those who are called by that honourable name’ (Caledonian Mercury, 1792). There were of course dissident voices, but their opposition to the petitions to Parliament was more reflective of ecclesiastical pragmatism and conservative politics than theology. Rev. James Lapsley of Campsie recorded a lengthy dissent after the Presbytery of Glasgow agreed to petition Parliament. He argued that the Presbytery had overstepped its proper area of concern, that the abuses involved in the slave trade were far outweighed by the instances of immorality at home, and that the dependence of many ministers on public funds for their stipend might be compromised by this attack on the economic fuel provided by the trade (Glasgow Presbytery, 1792). The Principals of St Mary’s and St Leonard’s colleges in St Andrews took the Presbytery to task for its supposed ignorance of the facts, and interference in matters in which they had no ‘patrimonial interest’, adding that such action would encourage ‘amongst the people a spirit of turbulence and a desire to dictate to the legislature’, and this in the wake of the threats from revolutionary France (St Andrews Presbytery, 1792). A significant contribution to abolition came from the North of Scotland. James Beattie, poet and Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College,

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Aberdeen, not only organized petitions from the University and City, but was well known for his lectures on slavery. These contrasted with the rather half-hearted utilitarian ideas discussed by many of the Scottish intelligentsia at the time. Beattie concentrated on the moral objections of treating men as ‘a beast or a piece of wood’ (Beattie 1817: 24). Amongst others, these lectures made a strong impression on James Stephen, subsequently a lawyer in Barbados, who was to draft the bill to abolish the slave trade, and to devote the rest of his life in the anti-slavery cause, inside and outside Parliament. One of Beattie’s contemporaries was James Ramsay, an Episcopal priest and physician from Fraserburgh who, as a naval chaplain, had witnessed the trade at first hand. After being invalided out of the navy in 1759, Ramsay went to St Kitts, but his care for enslaved people led him to be forced out of the island in 1769. His biographer claimed that Ramsay was the first to ‘lift the veil of plantation slavery’, and for this he was constantly hounded to an early death by the powerful West Indian group in the British Parliament (Shyllon 1977: 7–12, 37, 110–12). In 1788 Bishop Bielby Porteous of London asked Beattie to produce a theological response to a pamphlet by Raymond Harris, a former Jesuit priest, written for the Liverpool merchants. It strongly defended the slave trade. Beattie made some initial comments on this, but it was Ramsay who provided a detailed and careful reply. He did not attempt to deny the biblical injunctions that permitted slavery, but argued that ‘we can as little draw the doctrine of perpetual slavery from its permission to the Jews as we can the keeping of concubines from the thousand wives and concubines of Solomon’. It was clear that there was a huge gap between Paul’s care for Philemon and West Indian slavery, ‘where neither the feelings nor the happiness of the slave is taken into account’ (Ramsay 1788: 29). After the naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805, the government felt it was safe to abolish the trade; abolitionists hoped that with the supply of fresh labour from Africa cut off, conditions on the West Indian plantations would improve, and slavery would wither on the vine. Attempts to regulate slavery by registration of slaves in the second decade of the nineteenth century failed, and government guidelines to the colonies in 1823 on the improvement of conditions for the slaves were either studiously ignored, or indignantly opposed. That same year, the abolitionists’ campaign calling for the ‘Mitigation and Eventual Abolition of Slavery’ reflected the cautious nature of the change sought. Towards the end of the 1820s more urgent petitions were calling for abolition ‘as soon as possible’. Almost all assumed that slavery was in direct conflict with Christianity. In January 1826 The Scotsman commended the Aberdeen Abolition Society for setting an example to the nation. Their petition to Parliament two years later declared slavery to be ‘altogether incompatible with the indisputable rights of men, with the precepts of the Bible, and the principles of the British Constitution’ (The Scotsman, 1826).

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Andrew Thomson and Immediatism Such sentiments were continually expressed at this time in the Christian Instructor, founded in 1810 and edited by the leading Scottish evangelical, Dr Andrew Thomson, Minister of St George’s Church in Edinburgh. Thomson had been a founding member since 1824 of the Edinburgh Anti-Slavery Society. It therefore shocked his colleagues when, in October 1830, at a gathering of over two thousand in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh’s George Street, Thomson declared that he would oppose the resolution to press for abolition ‘at the earliest possible opportunity’. ‘I oppose it’, he explained, ‘because it does not go far enough’. In two major speeches that month, and in a sermon the previous year, Andrew Thomson carefully and uncompromisingly laid out his reasons for demanding immediate emancipation. He assumed that his audience would be united in regarding slavery as a sin. He then asked whether any Christian was entitled to delay the ending of any sinful practice. To come out of sin ‘by degrees’ and to postpone the duty of ‘doing justly and loving mercy’, he maintained, ‘is to trample on the demands of moral obligation and to disregard the voice of heaven’. Anticipating the nervousness of his audience over the social order and economic effect of immediate abolition, he stated ‘I have no hesitation in saying let moral rectitude triumph, let God’s will be done, let men be free, even though all our colonies be the price of such a consummation’. In the tradition of James Beattie, Thomson claimed that slavery invariably treated those in bondage in the West Indies at the level of beasts, and against that he asserted that any who were enslaved had ‘a soul which, as for ours, the Saviour died, and which, like ours, is destined for immortality’. If that were so, then whatever biblical arguments might be made for slavery, he maintained that this could never be equated with the spirit of Jesus. Thomson drew on Enlightenment thought when he underscored the rejection of the right of property in human beings. He then affirmed the inevitability of human frailty. He admitted that there were slave-owners in the colonies who treated their slaves with humanity, and that some slaves might be better fed and clothed than many workers in Britain’s industrial factories. However, he claimed that any treatment on the plantations depended on the personal whim of the owners and overseers who held power over life or death. That, for him, was far too dangerous for flawed human beings—absolute power resided only in the divine. Thomson compared slavery to a sepulchre ‘full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness’. For him it remained like that even when it was ‘whitewashed’. During a two-hour speech in the Assembly Rooms on October 1830 he declared: Slavery is the very Upas tree of the moral world, beneath whose pestiferous shade all intellect languishes and all virtue dies. And if you would get rid of the evil, you

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must go more thoroughly and effectively to work than you can ever do by these palliatives, which are included under the term “mitigation”. The foul sepulchre must be taken away. The cup of oppression must be dashed to the ground. The pestiferous tree must be cut down and eradicated; it must be, root and branch of it, cast into the consuming fire and its ashes scattered to the four winds of heaven. It is thus that you must deal with slavery. You must annihilate it, – annihilate it now, – and annihilate it for ever. (Thomson 1829: 23; 1830: 5–6, 14)

Thomson died suddenly in 1831 of a heart attack. Duncan Rice and David Brion Davis estimate that Andrew Thomson’s public stand moved the British abolition movement from the cautious position of ‘gradualism’ to what was then termed ‘immediatism’. Certainly his influence was seen in nearly five hundred petitions sent from Scotland to both Houses of Parliament, the majority of which called for immediate action (Rice 1981: 23; Davis 1962: 221). Andrew Thomson’s ideas did not go unchallenged. Dr Henry Duncan, minister of Ruthwell, the founder and editor of The Dumfries and Galloway Courier, published a series of letters in 1830 addressed to Sir George Murray, the Colonial Secretary. In these he rejected the idea of slavery always being sinful, claimed that many colonies had reformed its practice, and affirmed that the British government should not interfere in the affairs of the West Indies. Thomson responded vigorously in the Christian Instructor in January 1831, a few weeks before his death from a heart attack (Duncan 1830). When Andrew Thomson asked the Synod of Lothian in November 1830 to support a petition for immediate abolition, the motion carried by twenty-three votes to seven. Those who dissented were unwilling to declare slavery as an offence to God, and believed that it would be wrong to abolish it without guaranteeing the interests of planters as well as slaves (Synod of Lothian, 1830). Two Scots were members of the Anglican ‘Clapham Sect’, committed to evangelical Christianity, reform of morality, and the abolition of slavery. Both made a significant contribution to the British abolition movement throughout several decades of their lives. One was the Aberdeen educated lawyer and politician, James Stephen. William Wilberforce was the best-known member of that little community on the edge of London, but the man who provided the background research for the parliamentary campaigns was the son of a Scottish highland manse, Zachary Macaulay. Macaulay in his early years, in company with many young Scots, had fled Glasgow to escape scandal, and became a bookkeeper on a Jamaican plantation in the 1790s. Through a family connection with Wilberforce’s friend Thomas Babington, he later became Governor of the experimental colony of former slaves on the Sierra Leone coast and saw the slave trade at first hand. These experiences gave him invaluable insights, and moved him to dedicate the rest of his life to research and writing in the abolitionist cause. His numerous pamphlets used sources mainly culled from government reports and West Indian newspapers.

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As editor of the Clapham Sect’s Christian Observer from 1802 Macaulay saw to it that slavery was a topic constantly before its readers, and he combined the cold logic of factual accounts with the heat of a theological attack on the treatment of God’s children in this way. From 1825 until his death in 1838 he ran the monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter, which provided ammunition for the parliamentary campaign and information for the numerous anti-slavery committees throughout Britain. Macaulay was hated and reviled by the West Indian party in Parliament, who could not disprove his facts. He was described, when abolition came, by the one who succeeded Wilberforce, Thomas Fowell Buxton, as ‘the anti-slavery tutor of us all’ (Whyte 2011). By 1833 it was obvious to all but the most blinkered observer that emancipation was inevitable, although the compromises made to get the bill through both houses included the enormous sum of £20 million and the transfer of all the slaves to an apprenticeship that was simply slavery by another name. A further petitioning campaign was necessary until the final legislative victory came in 1838.

The Free Church and American Slavery After 1838 the abolitionists’ attention turned to world slavery, but particularly to the United States. There theological positions on slavery had been developed, and attitudes were hardening, not just in the Southern states where slavery was legal and heavily protected by law, but in the North as well (Ford 2009). Leading Presbyterian ministers in Charleston such as James Henley Thornwell and Thomas Smyth, combined a passion for the religious education of slaves and hopes of eventual manumission, with a robust defence of the institution (Clark 1996: 188–95). Thornwell drew extensively on biblical texts for his religious manuals on the duties of masters and slaves, and Smyth was commended in 1861 by the Clerk of Charleston Presbytery for his theological response to critics of slavery in the South. Smyth was a friend of Thomas Chalmers, who in turn admired his zeal for education and the ordered conservatism of southern Presbyterians. When the Free Church was constituted in 1843 with Chalmers as its Moderator, a delegation was sent to America to seek moral and financial assistance from sympathetic friends there. They travelled extensively, north and south, and Smyth’s efforts in Charleston raised a large proportion of the modest funds collected (Whyte 2012: 15–27). American and Scottish abolitionists learned of this before the delegation returned, and there followed a three-year campaign calling for the return of funds collected ‘from the blood of slaves’, and for the breaking of fellowship with any American denominations that allowed slave-owners to become, or remain, communicant members of their congregations. The renowned self-liberated slave and abolitionist lecturer, Frederick Douglass, toured Scotland as a guest of the Glasgow Emancipation Committee, speaking

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before large audiences (Shepperson 1953). On one occasion he took a spade up the Crags in Edinburgh, accompanied by those he termed ‘two fair Quakeresses’— Eliza Wigham and Jane Smeal of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society— and carved out in large letters on the turf ‘Send Back the Money’ (Shepperson 1951: 128). A series of ballads and broadsheets appeared in the streets. One of them reflected the familiar warning of divine wrath in the lines ‘there’s no’ a mite in ‘a the sum but what is stained in blood, there’s no’ a might in ‘a the sun but what is cursed by God’ and ‘Send Back the money, send it back, tempt not the negro’s God, to blast and wither Scotland’s church, wi his avenging rod’ (Anti-Slavery Songs, 1846). The Free Church response to this ranged from muted to intemperate. Dr Robert Candlish of St George’s Free Church in Edinburgh was charged with convening a Commission that attempted to put pressure on American Presbyterians to take more action on slavery. Professor William Cunningham, who led the delegation in America, continually expressed opposition to slavery, but publicly castigated the abolitionists as ‘agents of the devil’ who were trying to destroy the Free Church (Whyte 2012: 39, 83, 135). On both sides of the Atlantic there were appeals to Dr Thomas Chalmers to give clear moral guidance, hopefully in favour of making fellowship with American Presbyterians conditional on disavowing slavery (Chalmers Papers, 1844). He ignored these, but when Thomas Smyth wrote a pained letter to him complaining of the ingratitude and lack of charity from some churchmen in Scotland, Chalmers set out his position in May 1844 in The Witness, effectively the paper of the Free Church, edited by the stonemason-theologian Hugh Millar. Chalmers began by agreeing that slavery was ‘a great evil’, and affirmed that ‘we rightly recoil from the system of slavery, and charge it with atrocities and evils, often the most hideous and appalling which have either effected or deformed our species’. At this point he seemed to be following Andrew Thomson’s total condemnation of the system. But he quickly parted company, with his contention that although slavery had a corrupting effect, and the vices of cruelty, licentiousness, and brutality might affect people in slave-holding states, he could not agree that the holding of slaves automatically led to these things that should rightly, as he saw it, debar a person from the Lord’s Table. Christianity, he agreed, was inimical to all violence and all vice. War, too was a great evil, yet, in his view ‘it follows not that there may not be a Christian soldier, neither does it follow that there may not be a Christian slave-holder’. Chalmers then made a distinction between what he called ‘the character of the system and the character of the person whom circumstances have implicated therein’ (The Witness, 1844). This was to be parodied by Douglass who declared at a later meeting that ‘the eloquent Scotch divine, has by long study and deep research, found that whilst slavery may be a heinous sin, the slave-holder may be a good

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Christian, a representative of the blessed Saviour on earth, an heir of heaven and eternal glory’ (Blessinghame 1979: 163). Backed into a corner, and desperate to do anything to defend the vulnerable Free Church from its opponents, Chalmers argued that the church ‘deals not with civil or political institutions’, but with ‘persons and with ecclesiastical institutions’. To demand the excommunication of slave-holders from churches, especially those who have inherited their slaves and given that station by God in life, would be, in his view, be totally inadmissible. There were a number in the Free Church who were unhappy about this position, notably the Professor of Old Testament at the church’s New College in Edinburgh, Dr John Duncan. At a Presbytery meeting in 1845 he asked whether every new Free Church building would have ‘a slave stone in it?’ and declared his incredulity that there were ministers ‘who would sit down and eat the Lord’s Supper with traders in human blood’ (Free Presbytery Edinburgh, 1845). At the 1846 General Assembly he was brought into line, and by this time the issue in the Free Church was beginning to fade. The controversy continued for a while on a more international stage. When the Evangelical Alliance was formed in 1846, with Robert Candlish as a founder member, it resolved that invitations to membership ‘ought not to be sent to individuals who, whether by their own fault or otherwise, may be in the unhappy position of holding their fellow-men as slaves’. This was slightly modified before the first Conference in London the following year, and an American delegation, including Thomas Smyth, was seated. Twenty-five Free Church representatives attended, but few spoke at the lengthy debate over several days. The most prominent Scot to do so was the veteran Glasgow Congregationalist, Dr Ralph Wardlaw. Wardlaw’s anti-slavery sermons and lectures were famed, and even drew the young David Livingstone from Blantyre to hear them. The final resolution was agreed on 1 September 1846 with the reluctant support of what were termed ‘The Scottish Dissenters’. It made it clear that no branch of the Alliance should admit any member who had willingly become a slave-holder, a slight watering down, but marking a fundamental breach with most of the American delegation (Evangelical Alliance 1847). Of the Church petitions against the slave trade in 1788 and 1792, only one originated outside the Church of Scotland. Those against slavery between 1823 and 1829 saw none from other churches but this was soon to change dramatically. Between 1831 and 1833, 25 petitions came from the Church of Scotland, 367 from dissenting Presbyterian churches, and 126 from other religious bodies (JHC/JHL (1788–1833)). By 1833 Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers became much more active in the Scottish abolitionist movement. The Glasgow and Edinburgh Emancipation Societies and the separate Ladies Committees were all led by Quakers, the merchant families of Smeal in the west and Wigham in the east (Rice 1981: 31–49).

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Up to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond women were excluded from abolitionist platforms in Scotland; even the reports at the annual meetings of the Ladies societies were given by men. However, this masks the considerable part played by women in the campaigns. The boycott of sugar from West Indian islands in the late eighteenth century depended on domestic arrangements (Oldfield 1998: 57–8). In 1837 twenty thousand Scottish women petitioned Queen Victoria to bring the notorious Apprenticeship Scheme in the West Indies to an end. By the 1840s Scottish women were in correspondence with American abolitionists and were raising funds for their work. Many made the connection with their own liberation. Eliza Wigham, who circulated an appeal to all Free Church congregations in May 1847 urging them to send remonstrances to the Church’s forthcoming General Assembly, went on to publish a short history of the anti-slavery movement in the United States (Wigham 1863). David Brion Davis has argued that the confluence between American enlightenment and evangelical Protestantism dealt slavery a telling blow (Davis 2003: 55). That was certainly true of Scottish theological assaults on slavery. There was a strong strain of enlightened and ‘common sense’ philosophy, which was not limited to the middle classes and to which the Reformers’ zeal for widespread religious education provided a powerful legacy. It needed the fervour of evangelical theology to set this alight. It was of course assisted by the lack of theological justification for slavery amongst Scottish churchmen (or women). Such opposition to the abolitionist movement was confined to arguments based on supposed economic disadvantage or public safety. Well-meaning or deceitful Scottish figures often argued that colonial slavery was misrepresented, and emancipation would be harmful to the slaves, but even if they cited scriptural texts, they provided no theological justification for slavery. In the century from William Robertson’s preaching to Eliza Wigham’s activism, the elemental strands of Scottish public opinion remained remarkably similar— that something ought to be done about a system of inhumanity which violated the very basis of the accepted Christian faith, and of the image that Scotland wished to present to the world. The theory was embedded in the culture—the practice took a great deal longer.

Bibliography Archival Sources Anti-Slavery Reporter. Anti-Slavery Songs (1846). Bodleian Library, Oxford G.Pamph 2586(3). Caledonian Mercury (1792) 11 February; 12 March. Chalmers Papers (1844). New College Library, Edinburgh, 306.74, 4.314.26, 4,317.66. Christian Observer. Court of Session (1756). National Archives of Scotland 234/53/12.

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Court of Session (1770). National Archives of Scotland 236/D/4/3. Free Church Presbytery Edinburgh Minutes (1845). National Archives of Scotland CH111/25. Glasgow Courier (1792) February, March. Glasgow Presbytery Minutes (1792). Mitchell Library, Glasgow, CH2/171/14. Journals of the House of Commons (JHC) 1792–1833. Journals of the House of Lords (JHL) 1792–1833. St Andrews Presbytery Minutes (1792). National Archives of Scotland, CH2/1132/8. Synod of Lothian (1830). The Scotsman (1826) 22 April. The Witness (1844) May.

Primary Literature Beattie, James (1788). ‘On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery particularly that of Negroes’. Aberdeen University Library, Safe 3, Box B49. Beattie, James (1817). Elements of Moral Science, Book III. Edinburgh. Blessinghame, J. W. (ed.) (1979). The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, vol. 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brown, M. P. (ed.) (1826). Decisions of the Lords of Council and Session from 1766 to 1791, collected by Lord Hailes, vol. 11. Edinburgh. Dalzel, Archibald (1789). The History of Dahomey: An Inland Kingdom of Africa, ed. J. D Fage. London: Cass, 1967. Duncan, Henry (1830). Letters on the West Indian Question addressed to Rt. Hon George Murray. London. Evangelical Alliance (1847). Report of the Proceedings of the Conference held at Freemasons Hall, London. London: Partridge and Oakley. Ramsay, James (1788). An Examination of the Rev. Mr Harris’s Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade. London. Robertson, William (1759). The Situation of the World at the time of Christ’s Appearance and its Connection with the Success of His Religion Considered. Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour. Thomson, Andrew (1829). Slavery not Sanctioned, but Condemned by Christianity in Sermons on Various Subjects, Appendix. Edinburgh. Thomson, Andrew (1830). Substance of the speech delivered at the Edinburgh Society for the Abolition of Slavery on October 19th 1830. Edinburgh. Thornwell, John Henley (1850). Rights and Duties of Masters. Charleston, SC. Wigham, Eliza (1863). The Anti-Slavery Cause in America and its Martyrs. London: A. W. Bennett.

Secondary Literature Clark, Erskine (1996). Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country 1690–1990. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Davis, David Brion (1962). ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-Slavery Thought’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49: 209–30.

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Davis, David Brion (2003). Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Devine, T. M. (ed.) (2015). Recovering Scotland’s Past: The Caribbean Connection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ford, Lacy K. (2009). Deliver us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oldfield, J. R. (1998). Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery. London: Frank Cass. Rice, C. Duncan (1981). The Scots Abolitionists 1833–1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Shepperson, G. A. (1951). ‘The Free Church and American Slavery’, Scottish Historical Review 30: 126–43. Shepperson, G. A. (1953). ‘Frederick Douglass and Scotland’, Journal of Negro History 38: 307–21. Shyllon, Folarin (1977). James Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist. Edinburgh: Canongate. Walvin, James (1971). The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England 1555–1850. London: Orbach & Chambers. Whyte, Iain (2006). Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whyte, Iain (2011). Zachary Macaulay: The Steadfast Scot in the British Anti-Slavery Movement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Whyte, Iain (2012). Send Back the Money: The Free Church and American Slavery. Cambridge: James Clark.

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15 Scottish Literature in a Time of Change Ian Campbell

When Walter Scott shows Davie Deans imposing his stern and unbending Christian practice on his family in The Heart of Midlothian, he is making a complex point. A survivor of brutal religious wars, Davie is unbendingly attached to his own particular Presbyterian interpretations of Scripture and conduct, even to the extent of standing by and seeing his own daughter condemned by a temporal court whose legitimacy he refuses to acknowledge, declining to attend or testify. The conflict of personal and religious faith with the realities of a changing Scotland is one he and his generation are not prepared for: the next generation as represented by Jeanie Deans and her minister husband, Reuben Butler, are one step nearer a position with which the modern reader can sympathize. With the utmost respect for Davie Deans’ intransigence and unbending adherence to his received form of Scottish worship, they are allowed by Scott to make the transition to a Scotland more humane, one where forms of worship become less overpoweringly rigid, where the modern world allows (in the novel’s closing pages) a slow transformation to something more recognizable to the reader. That slow transformation is the theme of this chapter. It is too easy to read literature’s depiction of older religious positions in Scotland as black-and-white confrontations between religious systems, forms of worship, absolute prohibitions, instead of acknowledging writers’ ability to penetrate the psychological complexity of people trying to come to terms with their own religious beliefs and value-systems in a rapidly changing world.

The Decline of the Church as Central Parish Institution John Galt’s neglected Annals of the Parish (1821) is an imitation of a ‘statistical account’ of fifty years in a fictitious country parish (Dalmailing), kept by a retired minister whose long years in a remote corner of Scotland seem at first sight a celebration of an unchanging Christian nation. From his first year’s account (1760) to his retirement (1810) Balwhidder keeps a seemingly unthreatening annual diary of parochial events, while Galt ironically gives the reader ample opportunity to see through his myopic narrator’s focus on the trivial to the larger events of these years.

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Some of these belong to social history—factory weaving and new population, improved communications, change in power structures in local politics—while others impinge on the account of weekly worship and parish affairs. Balwhidder’s intensely conservative preaching is, as he admits, stuck in the traditions of the Glasgow Divinity Hall where he studied in the 1750s, and it is small surprise that among the weavers of the new suburbs of his parish an alternative congregation is formed with a livelier style of worship. When he invites a favoured young parishioner to preach (1789), ‘his sermon was assuredly well put together, and there was nothing to object to in his doctrine; but the elderly people thought his language rather too Englified’ while ‘the younger part of the congregation were loud in his praise’ (Galt 2015: 68). The point is picked up in The Ayrshire Legatees (1820) where the very traditional Dr Pringle, after a lengthy visit to London to collect a large inheritance and a chance to see the wider world, loses no time on his return in resigning his country parish to a younger man (one who reads the Waverley Novels, a habit which would have scandalized many of his more rigid hearers). In a revealing scene, Galt describes the Pringles’ return from London to the parish, as ‘the old men on the dike stood up and reverently took off their hats and bonnets’ while ‘the weaver lads gazed with a melancholy smile’ (2015: 180). Times have changed, and it takes a wider vision to see that: the younger generation lack the elders’ instinctive reverence, and the work of the parish passes to younger hands better able to communicate to a new generation. Just as Scott in the closing part of Heart of Midlothian depicts a Scotland adjusting religious forms and imperatives to a changing world, Galt uses his fiction to suggest, obliquely, the need for worship to change, and parish organization to change with it. Lockhart’s Adam Blair (1822) is partly based on a real-life incident in which the principal character, a country minister recently widowed with one surviving daughter, meets with a friend of his late wife and in due course they fall in love, to the extent that the minister leaves his parish for a clandestine meeting which (though clothed in decent asterisks) is obviously one of passionate sexual encounter. The reaction to all this is the novel’s chief interest. The minister, paralysed by self-loathing guilt, insists on resigning his parish (though colleagues and parishioners alike are happy for him to return to his previous charge) and debase himself back to the peasant origins of his father, who had laboured there for many years. After years of this, both parish and presbytery come to him and persuade him to return to the pulpit of Cross-Meikle (a none too subtle naming) for a further twenty years ‘in the midst of an affectionate and confiding people’ (Lockhart 2007: 169). Here Lockhart evokes a strong desire for continuity in the Scottish parish, not only in forms of worship but in the personality of the minister—one Balwhidder encountered in Galt’s Annals even as the old man’s preaching wandered into repetition, and in The Ayrshire Legatees—certainly among the older generation. It was a theme to be picked up and amplified in the ‘kailyard’ fiction of ‘Ian

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Maclaren’ (John Watson) whose very successful pictures of country religious life partly reflect the realities of rural Perthshire where he ministered in Logiealmond, and partly project to a wider readership (which was enormous, far beyond Scotland) an image of a country where religious life was still central, and the consequences of the Disruption of 1843 still very much real. Established and Free Kirk congregations coexist in The Days of Auld Langsyne (1895), in friendly rivalry but in powerful self-identification, their members resisting fiercely both change and any possibility of union. This exaggerated and often roseate picture was one which was to provide for many overseas readers an image of a late nineteenth-century Scotland where the Church was still central: like most of the other kailyarders, Maclaren achieved this by writing of country parishes far from the cities and their problems, his Scotland real enough to his experience, but drastically unrepresentative of the experience of millions.

A New Tone in Literature’s Depiction of Church and Minister With the twentieth century there comes a marked change. The reaction to kailyard, when it came, was severe and never more so than in George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901). When the young hero’s mother expresses the ultimate kailyard mother’s hope, ‘ “Eh, but it’s a grand thing, a gude education! You may rise to be a minister”. Her ambition could no further go’—his father’s reply catches the new tone. ‘ “It’s a’ he’s fit for”, he growled’ (2005: 153). If Scott in Old Mortality (1816) and Heart of Midlothian (1818) caught the sense of a Scotland holding on to forms of worship as a link to the past, the realist writers of the twentieth century were to catch a very different tone. There is no shortage of modern writing in Scotland that depicts austere Christians in an unflattering light; Fionn MacColla’s And the Cock Crew (1945), George Macdougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914), the conflict between minister and lay Christians in John Buchan’s Witch Wood (to say nothing of the kirk session Gideon Mack encounters in James Robertson), Neil Gunn’s and Iain Crichton Smith’s depiction of more unbending Christians all reflect—or refract—a negativity missing in the earlier fiction discussed, something closer to the less articulated hostility implicit in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, which Burns was nervous to publish in his own lifetime. William McIlvanney in The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) provides an incisive rendering of a modern Glasgow view of proselytizing believers: But why did found-again Christians all have to claim they’d been Genghis Khan? Macey looked at the three people who were with Ricky, a woman and two men. They were scanning the faces of the bystanders with a fierce attentiveness, like showmen gauging the effect of the performance. For Macey they had a look he

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recognised among do-gooders, an intensity that never quite connected, an openness like an iron grille. They were reaching out to shake hands with life, but they kept their gloves on. (166)

An intense conservatism is visible in Scottish fiction’s portrayal of worship even while the novel’s wider vision may encompass a country in the throes of change. Scottish literature is rich in depictions of characters, both ministers and lay people, who both provide exposition of Scripture within due bounds, and who force it further. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) has a powerful picture of a dour Christian who in the privacy of his family satisfies his unnatural sexual appetites on his wife, and would on his daughter if he could. When his wife says ‘Four of a family’s fine; there’ll be no more’ his answer is ‘Fine? We’ll have what God in His mercy may send to us, woman. See you to that’ (2006b: 38). Knowing that another pregnancy might kill his wife does not stop him. Nor does he hesitate to thrash his son unmercifully for rolling the word ‘Jehovah’ appreciatively round his tongue: ‘And mind, my mannie, if I ever hear you again take your Maker’s name in vain, if I ever hear you use that word again, I’ll libb you. Mind that. Libb you like a lamb’ (2006b: 39, 40). A man who can threaten his own son with castration is one of Scottish literature’s villains, doubly so one who does it claiming religious motives. Some of Scottish literature’s villains are openly secular, like John Gourlay in The House with the Green Shutters. Some, like John Balfour in Scott’s Old Mortality, are doggedly loyal to religious motives with which the author seems to disagree: some, like Gideon Mack, inhabit a time and a place when dogged loyalty has become almost impossible in circumstances where absolutes have become irretrievable.

Grassic Gibbon and the Dilemma of the Minister In his unfinished The Speak of the Mearns, Grassic Gibbon’s satiric sketch of a Free Kirk minister, Gibbon illustrates the shift of focus from doctrine to satire: The Reverend Adam Smith was surely the queerest billy that ever had graced a pulpit, in faith. He wasn’t much of a preacher, dreich, with a long slow voice that sent you to sleep, hardly a mention of heaven or hell or the burning that waited on all your neighbours, and he wasn’t strong on infant damnation and hardly ever mentioned Elijah . . . (2007: 3)

Yet the same author produced in Cloud Howe (1933) one of the most sensitive and often sympathetic fictional accounts of a man preaching in the face of change, of scepticism, of the Depression years. In his book of essays Scottish Scene he admitted that while the Kirk was in decline all over Scotland, ‘there is still a kirkward trickle of folk on a Sabbath morning in summer, when the peewits hold

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their unending plaint over the greening fields’, but he went on to say that ‘ . . . it is little more now than a thin and tattered veil upon the face of the Scottish scene’ (Gibbon 2007: 188). Despite this conviction, Grassic Gibbon wrote an insightful and often sympathetic account of Robert Colquohoun, struggling with a dying country parish, trying to accommodate his own Socialist beliefs with Christianity, and finding himself up against what seems irrevocable social change, voiced by the thoughts of his hearers (see Campbell 2017). The War had finished your fondness for kirks, you knew as much as any minister. Why the hell should you waste your time in a kirk when you were young, you were young only once, there was the cinema down in Dundon, or a dance or so, or this racket and that . . . To hell with ministers and toffs of his kind, they were aye the friends of the farmers, you know . . . No, no, you were hardly so daft as take that, you would take the mistress a jaunt instead, next Sunday or maybe the next, up the Howe to her cousin in Brechin that hadn’t yet seen the new car you had brought . . . You wouldn’t bother your head on the kirk, to hell with ministers of the kind of Colquohoun . . . (Gibbon 2006a: 280)

The struggle ends only with Robert’s death in the pulpit from the delayed effect of poison gas from the First World War, but Robert refuses to give up his fight for the kind of Church he wants to forge, telling his wife that ‘It’s you or the kirk, Chris, and I’m the Kirk’s man’ (2006a: 466). The Kirk he wants is one ‘filled with the anger and pity of the Christ who drove the money-changers from the temple courts, looked into their hearts and found there fear’, and can offer instead ‘a stark, sure creed that will cut like a knife, a surgeon’s knife through the doubt and disease’ and one day even perhaps mankind will find ‘the christ come back’ (2006a: 471). It’s a curiously sympathetic portrait throughout by a professed atheist of a minister caught in a historic change he is powerless to resist, and strongly contrasts with the portrait of the parodic Rev. MacShilluck in Grey Granite (1934), another generation of Scotland’s twentieth-century history having obviously convinced Gibbon that the Church had retreated into irrelevance in the face of the social problems of the Depression, and the looming threats of totalitarian war. The success of Sunset Song and the unrelenting bleakness of Grey Granite have diverted attention from Cloud Howe, an extraordinary novel about Scotland and religious change in the 1930s.

The Persistence of the Old While Scottish fiction foregrounds a post-Reformation Protestant society, Scottish writers have consistently referenced the earlier world Burns deftly uses in ‘Tam o Shanter’ for the satanic dancing in Alloway Kirk. In the late nineteenth century Stevenson made frequent use of residual belief in a world of witchcraft and

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devilry—for instance in the narrative voice of ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881), the voice of an old parishioner who might ‘warm into courage over his third tumbler’ and tell the story of the Devil and Rev. Mr Soulis, a young man who, in the oldster’s view, had been ‘ower lang at the college’ and ‘would sit half the day, an’ half the nicht forbye, which was scant decent’ over his books, when the serious were of opinion ‘there was little service for sae mony, when the hale o’ God’s Word would gang in the neuk o’ a plaid’ (Stevenson 2012: 20). Soulis, in Stevenson’s splendid tale, rejects the older generation’s superstitious belief that his housekeeper (Thrawn Janet herself ) is a diabolical presence, till he meets the Black Man of Scottish tradition in the kirkyard, and suffers a horrifying encounter with the other world in the dark till he manages to utter the name of God—and the Devil (in the disguise of Thrawn Janet) is overcome, ‘an’ sinsyne the de’il has never fashed us in Ba’weary’. Stevenson here picks up some of the same tone as Scott does towards the end of ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ from Redgauntlet (1824), for there too mastering Satan by uttering the name of God is not enough: Stevenson’s Soulis is ‘the man ye ken the day’, permanently affected, just like Steenie at the end of Scott’s tale (Stevenson 2012: 27). There is an odd resonance with Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown (1835), who manages to utter the holy name and free himself from Satan’s power—but spends the rest of his life mentally scarred by the experience. Stevenson plays with the same idea in The Merry Men (1882), where the narrator’s uncle has had some otherworldly contact, never sharply described, with ultimate evil resulting in his living terror of the black man and the death that takes them both in the same water that had drowned the Espirito Santo and all its living crew. Stevenson enjoys playing with half-belief and belief in the Devil, which plainly he thought of as a living tradition when he wrote The Tale of Tod Lapraik (1893) with its bizarre sighting of the Devil cavorting on the Bass Rock— ‘it was joy in the creature’s heart, the joy o’ hell, I daursay: joy whatever’ (Stevenson 2012: 74). That same presence, moving obscurely in the bottle of The Bottle Imp (1891), suavely offering Markheim his assistance, crops up in many disguises in Stevenson’s work (Stevenson 2012: 208, 196). Scottish literature enjoys keeping alive that half-belief in the Devil in Burns’ time—his address to the deil is a classic—in Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927), and more recently in James Robertson’s splendid The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), which takes Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and rewrites it into the Scotland of the present day.

James Hogg and the Confessions Hogg’s tale captures both themes simultaneously, the responses of Scotland to a century and more of change in its worship experience, and the ambiguities which drive human decision making—particularly in relation to the supernatural world

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which may be the world of God and Christ worshipped in the Sunday weekly meetings, or some half-vanished alternative world which makes room for the Devil. Both worlds are central to Hogg’s magnificently convoluted narrative, though the Christian God is largely an invisible figure, while the alternative is very much part of the Scotland Hogg depicts, one set a century and more before publication. Presbyterian worship in Scottish fiction has always offered a central role to the reading and the preaching of the King James Bible, and Hogg in the Confessions makes striking and original use of this in structuring the novel round the thoughts and experiences of a rigid Antinomian who convinces himself (with the assistance of his father, an equally extreme exponent of the idea of election to Heaven) that he is ‘justified’ to the extent that nothing he does on this earth will prevent his entry to Heaven. The plot is a masterly early metafiction, and the ‘narrator’ (presumably an enlightened voice of the 1820s) distances himself from the theological extremes of these characters, while presenting a plot of supernatural occurrences which the narrator himself claims not to understand. Yet such is Hogg’s narrative power that the reader comes to see in the mysterious Gil-Martin, who counsels and finally overwhelms the central character, an earthly manifestation of the Devil, recognized as such by a few of the more balanced Christian characters, but not by those extreme Antinomians who believe themselves the elect. Hogg simultaneously feeds into both the main themes of this essay: by presenting the events of the plot as belonging to a darker and more extreme Christian period, he suggests that for ‘the present’—1824—‘with the present generation, it will not go down’ (Hogg 2004: 175). Yet he casts doubt on the rational rejection of the Devil’s presence in the plot, a presence witnessed by reliable human beings, and partly corroborated by such details as the unnatural preservation of the central character’s body a century after burial. Is there a Devil? The narrative voice certainly is no help: ‘with regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it’ (Hogg 2004: 174). Scottish fiction, as presented here, certainly allows for the presence of the supernatural in a credulous past, but presents it in a manner which has the power to convince some in a less credulous present. Hogg’s Confessions still entertains a generation which may have lost belief in a literal Heaven and Hell, a satanic presence of any recognizable kind, a generation less familiar with the King James Bible than Hogg’s generation—he grew up memorizing the book of Psalms at his mother’s instruction. The text of the Confessions is densely allusive to both Old and New Testaments in the King James Version. One of the best devices of the Satan-figure Gil-Martin is his frequent allusion to Scripture which he performs effortlessly—often grossly misleadingly, but convincing even a generation which knew its Bible. The moment when Robert, the central character, accepts his justification and free passage to Heaven is a disgraceful misreading of Genesis 32 by his own father, a minister of the Church (Hogg 2004: 79). One of the most telling speeches in the novel is given to another minister who warns Robert that ‘religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the

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bond of society on earth and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds’ (2004: 90).

Modern Times James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack illustrates how different currents of belief and unbelief, of a half-preserved past and a new sceptical present, can coexist in contemporary Scottish writing. The novel knowingly borrows plot elements from, and refers to, Hogg’s Confessions but transfers the action to the ‘now’ of twenty-first century Fife. The central character here, too, is a minister of the Church with conflicted views of both his ministry and his core beliefs, living in tension with the more orthodox Christians of his time. Robertson also invokes the troubling presence of a not-quite defined character easy to identify with the Christian Devil, adding an original twist to the relationship of troubled human minister and supposed infernal by an accident which takes the central character— Gideon—into a subterranean experience not explainable by normal earthly circumstance, where he is tended by this dark mysterious stranger in a dark mysterious cavern—and cured of a broken leg, though left with a lifelong limp (an echo of Genesis 32?), and eventually returned to his parish after an unexplained absence and a supernatural interlude he cannot account for, to the scepticism of— and eventual rejection by—his former flock. Contact with this other-worldly force has a profound and unexplained effect on Gideon: basically someone who has lost his original Christian faith, who has gone through the motions of parish ministry with good intentions but little personal religious motivation, Gideon returns to the world he previously inhabited restless, visited from time to time by the unearthly presence he met in the underworld, and eventually writes his experiences (like the hapless Wringhim in Hogg’s Confessions) before (again like Wringhim) disappearing from this world in unexplained circumstances. The world he leaves behind is one where the Scottish rural parish is torn between the conservative forces who simply cannot understand Gideon’s position, and those members (including some who are pointedly not churchgoers) who are more open minded. What sets Robertson’s strikingly successful novel in our own century apart from Hogg’s 1824 masterpiece is the transfer of eminently recognizable doubt and half-belief in a supernatural world to a modern setting, colliding with residual Christian belief in the twentieth-century parish, colliding with a conservative and untrusting kirk session, colliding too with an educated knowledge of Scripture and religious history by an ordained minister of the Church half-refusing to acknowledge the existence of a biblical Devil and Hell, yet finding himself to all appearances there and meeting its tenant, and unable to return to the life he led before that meeting. Like Goodman Brown, like Scott’s Steenie, like Rev. Soulis in

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‘Thrawn Janet’, Gideon Mack is destabilized by an experience he cannot explain, and the writing is of such power as to display openly its borrowing from Hogg’s earlier novel, yet to attack the present-day reader with a realistic vision of a possible Hell, and a realistic psychological study of collapse in a mind touched by an evil—or at least an other-worldly—intelligence. Like Grassic Gibbon’s Robert Colquohoun, Gideon Mack does not depend on the reader’s acceptance of Christian belief or acceptance of a Christian Satan or Hell: well-crafted realistic fiction like this relies rather on a credible handling of plot, and intensely interesting psychological development, to sustain interest. The Testament of Gideon Mack succeeds on both counts: it updates Hogg’s Satanic encounter, and at the same time provides (in a manner reminiscent of Cloud Howe) a sympathetic picture of a parish minister whose personal faith proves insufficient to cope with a parish— Scotland—a world—in spectacular change.

A World after the Church More recent writing has brought a revolution in the portrayal of minister and Church, replacing the largely deferential attitude in earlier centuries. Take Robertson’s character Iain Macinnes in The Testament of Gideon Mack, describing his Christian childhood between the wars. I grew up in Wester Ross . . . A beautiful, bleak bog of a place. My parents were members of the Church of Scotland. Believe me, we were on the liberal wing of Christianity in those parts. Other folk thought we were worshippers of Baal. Not that you’d have noticed in our house – religion oozed out of the walls. We all had to go to church, of course, every week, me and my brother and sister. Sundays that went on for days. No escaping them . . . Our minister’s name was Mackenzie. He was a miserable bastard. There were only two more miserable bastards than him in the whole district. Do you know who they were? The Free Church minister and the Free Presbyterian one. (2006: 148)

This touches on a recurrent theme in Scottish writing, the dehumanizing effect of unbending adherence to what a character conceives of as the true faith—Davie Deans preferring to let his own daughter die to accepting the validity of the secular court trying her, John Guthrie in Sunset Song maltreating his wife in the name of God, while (with more than a hint of sexual irregularity) threatening his son with castration for enjoying the sound of the name ‘Jehovah’ (Gibbon 2006b: 40).

Dehumanized? Iain Crichton Smith in particular highlights the negative in his depiction of the loneliness and desolation of a poor widow, a human character cut off from love

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and companionship after a lifetime of misguided severity accepted in the name of misunderstood religious belief. In ‘Old Woman’ from The Law and the Grace (1965) he emphasizes her rigidity—‘you steadily stamped the rising daffodil’, while ‘Your set mouth / forgives no-one, not even God’s justice / perpetually drowning law with grace’. Your grained hands dandled full and sinful cradles You built for your children stone walls . . .

(Crichton Smith 2011: 51).

In ‘John Knox’ (from Thistles and Roses, 1961) Crichton Smith lays the blame squarely on a preaching tradition he personally found constricting, typified by John Knox and Mary: ‘That scything wind has cut the rich corn down – / the satin shades of France spin idly by – / the bells are jangled in St Andrew’s town – / a thunderous God tolls from a northern sky’. The villain is John Knox and his brand of reforming theology—‘The shearing naked absolute blade has torn / Though false French roses to her foreign cry’ (Crichton Smith 2011: 25). That ‘naked absolute blade’ is a recurrent concern in many Scottish writers’ attempt to come to terms with their religious past and present. And it represents for many today a view of a Church which has always been vulnerable to human misinterpretation of doctrine and Scripture, and has come to seem for many to have lost its relevance to a modern Scotland, a modern world. Scotland is changing: that absolute Church seems to have lost touch with a new country emerging with the urban novel, with experiments in literary form, with a Scotland where Church attendance is precipitously declining and traditional moral signposts seem increasingly irrelevant. A new Scotland is producing a different literature, and a different language.

Changing Times A crucial feature of the evolution of literature in Scotland has been (as was evident in any discussion of Hogg) the coexistence of several language levels available to the writer including the varieties of Scots still available in many regional forms, and the familiarity with English, one of the results of Protestant worship based on the King James Bible. Like Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle had grown up in a world where attendance at public preaching, and the observance of family worship, were normal and, in his Ecclefechan community, close to universal. In adult life, when his own personal faith was at best wavering, Carlyle recalls arriving late at night at his parents’ home: it was ten p.m. of a most still and fine night when I arrived at my Father’s door; heard him making worship, and stood meditative, gratefully, lovingly, till he had

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ended; thinking to myself, how good and innocently beautiful and manful on the earth, is all this: – and it was the last time I was ever to hear it. I must have been there twice or oftener in my Father’s time; but the sound of his pious Coleshill (that was always his tune), pious Psalm and Prayer, I never heard again. (Carlyle 2009: 71)

This is an outsider’s view, retrospective, of a country where worship and the religious idiolect still were normal and unquestioned, where spoken Scots and spoken biblical English were everyday occurrences. Much of the innovative brilliance of Hogg’s Confessions comes from Hogg’s ability to manipulate language levels between Scots and English, assuming a detailed knowledge of Scripture in the King James Version, and satirically pointing out the mismatch between language levels of characters too easily labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In more recent decades Scottish writing has not had this opportunity, as evidenced by the need for detailed annotation in editions of Scott and Hogg to explain biblical allusion. Scottish writers, whether inside or outside a strongly-defined tradition like Carlyle’s family, were aware that religious life was changing as much as language was. In his Autobiography Edwin Muir recalls: During the time when as a boy I had attended the United Presbyterian Church in Orkney, I was aware of religion chiefly as the sacred Word, and the church itself, severe and decent, with its touching bareness and austerity, seemed to cut off religion from the rest of life and from all the week-day world, as if it were a quite specific thing shut within itself, almost jealously, by its white-washed walls, furnished with its bare brown varnished benches . . . and filled with the odour of ancient Bibles. (1954: 277)

The Autobiography charts Muir’s expulsion from this apparent Eden of an Orkney childhood, full of the smell of ancient bibles, to the mainland of Scotland and a fearful succession of personal problems, misfortunes, and crises of health, before he found some kind of religious balance in Rome, where he had gone to work for the British Council. Seeing the religious life of Catholic Italy put his Scottish early years into a new perspective. He writes of seeing in the Via degli Artisti a picture of the Annunciation, the angel bending over the Virgin with tender love, which affected him powerfully, giving rise to one of his most successful poems. ‘See, they have come together, see, / While the destroying minutes flow, / Each reflects in the other’s face / Till heaven in hers and earth in his / Shine steady there’. That representation of a human love so intense that it could not reach farther seemed to me a perfect earthly symbol of the love that passes understanding. A religion that dared to show forth such a mystery for everyone to see would have shocked the congregations of the north, would have seemed a sort of blasphemy, perhaps even an indecency. But here it was publicly shown, as Christ showed himself on the earth. (Muir 1954: 278)

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Muir’s positive faith in his later poems (One Foot in Eden, 1956) points to a possible Christian world even after the horrors of the Second World War, where ‘famished field and blackened tree / Bear flowers in Eden never known’—where ‘Strange blessings never in Paradise / Fall from these beclouded skies’ (Muir 1984: 227). Losing touch with one Christian life (in Orkney), learning new languages of image as well as word, passing through various versions of Hell (personal, psychological, professional) Muir emerged not rejecting Christianity, not reverting to the severely literal biblical faith of his Scottish roots, not accepting the Roman Catholic church, but finding a new possibility which he memorably describes in ‘The Labyrinth’, a world of tolerance and grace, ‘all permissible, all acceptable, / Clear and secure as in a limpid dream’. ‘That’, he can say with finality, ‘was the real world; I have touched it once, / And now shall know it always’ (Muir 1984: 165).

A Real World Today A ‘real world’ beyond over-literal versions of the Christian faith characterizes another great modern interpreter, George Mackay Brown who also used his position on the edge of modern Scotland to work for some kind of vision. A Time to Keep (1969) is a tour de force of short stories which suggest that other world which coexists with today’s Christian and post-Christian societies, a world apprehended in the history of the northern isles, its traces still just visible. In ‘A Treading of Grapes’, Brown imagines three sermons preached at different times in St Peter’s Church whose ruins survive to our times. One is a sermon before the reformation (deeply spiritual in its interpretation of the marriage in Cana of Galilee); one (in a rebuilt more modern St Peter’s) in the tone of the most rigid Church of Scotland tradition of preaching to the sins of those in the congregation by name; one finds a more chatty modern style unsuccessfully trying to reach a sceptical modern hearer with the idea of a miracle. All the time ‘the wind from the sea soughed under the eaves of the Kirk, and among tombstones with texts and names newly chiselled on them, and those with withered half-obliterate lettering, and those that have lost their meanings and secrets to very ancient rain’ (Brown 1969: 75–6). Brown’s work is continuously aware of the sound of that ancient rain when he imagines the Scotland of his own time, the islands with their society retaining much that the modern world seems to have obliterated, never more so than in ‘The Wireless Set’, which interrogates the modern world’s understanding of things it can barely comprehend. An island community, its life patterned by centuries of practice, loses one of its young men to the torpedoes of the Second World War, a war it has heard of only on the deceptive wireless—promising unreliable weather forecasts, dubious news, even the flagrant lies of Lord Haw Haw and wartime propaganda. In a brilliant climax, Brown shows the reaction of the community to

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the telegram with the news of the death of young Howie, who had bought the radio for his mother. She, on hearing the news, has no time for the missionary’s consolation: ‘ “He made the great sacrifice. So that we could all live in peace, you understand”. Betsy shook her head. “That isn’t it at all,” she said “Howie’s sunk with torpedoes. That’s all I know.” ’ Howie’s fisherman father Hugh, whose immediate reaction to the radio had been to brand it a box of lies (its weather forecasts proverbially fallible) reacts to his son’s death by smashing it with an axe. ‘Hugh knows the truth of a thing generally before a word is uttered’, says Betsy. And the community—‘Through the window she could see people moving towards the croft from all over the valley. The news had got around. The mourners were gathering’ (1969: 105–6). Brown evokes an extraordinary world of appearances and deeper awareness which seems to survive in the island remoteness even in our own time. The challenge in this story, as in so much of the literature touched on here, has been the inclusion of an experience from which the reader is excluded in whole or in part. Scottish writing today thrives with energy derived from sources far removed from the village fastnesses of the kailyard—from the cities, James Kelman’s or Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow, Irvine Welsh’s or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, from Scotland’s modern preoccupations with a shifting industrial and commercial base, with the possibilities of political independence, with the survival of Gaelic and Scots, with persistent questioning of the meaning of a Scottish identity in a world where communication provides a kaleidoscope of possibility. Some of the themes in this survey remain very apposite. The Church in Scotland, surviving the Unions of 1603 and 1707, provides a multitude of possible identities, and writers have not been slow to show the dangers of over-simplified adherence to any one. The Presbyterian form of the Church has ensured the continuance of the King James Bible as a read text preached from till recent times, an inseparable part of writers’ education and vocabulary base as well as a common basis of communication with readership, even operating in the Gaelic speaking areas through Gaelic translations of Scripture. The inheritance of the Reformation’s provision of schooling at parish level ensured the verbal skills and the reading ability assumed by Burns, Hogg, and Carlyle, deftly woven into satiric writing where even the Devil can converse in the Bible’s terms, and splendidly evoked by Mackay Brown in those ancient sermons in St Peter’s Church where the centuries bring change but the preaching remains intelligible even as the stones are worn away. This is a world away, as it should be, from the over-simplified if attractive picture of the kailyard of a strong and unthreatened Kirk. When Davie Deans threatened his daughters with a dose of preaching on the sins of dancing, ‘It’s a dissolute profane pastime, practised by the Israelites only at their base and brutal worship of the Golden Calf at Bethel, and by the unhappy lass wha danced aff the head of John the Baptist, upon whilk chapter I will exercise this night’ he did so in the knowledge that they would pick up his reference (Scott

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2008: 100). Even as the country moved away from his rigidity to the centuries of progress this chapter has touched on, that ability to assume in Scottish society a familiarity with a system perhaps not wholly accepted, certainly not now universally understood let alone believed in, gave to Scottish writers an opportunity to depict the psychological pressures of belief in a changing world, and the persistence of half-forgotten beliefs from an earlier Scotland, from which much successful writing has come even as Davie Deans’ Scotland fades into history.

Bibliography Brown, George Douglas (2005 [1901]). The House with the Green Shutters. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005. Brown, George Mackay (1969). A Time to Keep. London: Hogarth. Campbell, Ian (2017). ‘ “A Thin and Tattered Veil”: Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Church of Scotland’, Studies in Scottish Literature 43/1: 115–23. Carlyle, Thomas (2009). Reminiscences. Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd. Crichton Smith, Iain (2011). New Collected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet. Galt, John (2015). Four Galt Novels. Edinburgh: Kennedy & Boyd. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (2006a). A Scots Quair. Edinburgh: Polygon. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (2006b). Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Polygon. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic (2007). The Speak of the Mearns. Edinburgh: Polygon. Hogg, James (2004 [1824]). The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lockhart, John Gibson (2007 [1822]). Adam Blair. Edinburgh: Mercat. McIlvanney, William (1983). The Papers of Tony Veitch. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Maclaren, Ian (2008 [1895]). The Days of Auld Langsyne. Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd. Muir, Edwin (1954). Autobiography. London: Hogarth. Muir, Edwin (1984). Collected Poems, London: Faber and Faber. Robertson, James (2006). The Testament of Gideon Mack. London: Penguin. Scott, Walter (2008 [1818]). The Heart of Midlothian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis (2012). Selected Short Stories. Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd.

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16 The Calvinist Paradox in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison M. Jack

Scottish literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a wide and deep field, and careful selection of texts and themes is necessary to make sense of even a small area within the constraints of this chapter. What is offered here is a different but complementary perspective to that of Ian Campbell,¹ and should be read alongside his chapter for a more complete view of the interaction between theology and literature in Scotland from the eighteenth century to the present day. This chapter will focus on texts which have undergone a process of re-appraisal in recent years in terms of their literary status or of the significance of the theological context of their authors. The work of Robert Burns (1759–96) will be the starting point, followed by the novels of some of the less well-known Scottish female writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While this selection may seem arbitrary, in fact all share a deep engagement with theological ideas which has been misrepresented or ignored in the past, but which is of new interest and significance. All are from a Reformed background, although there are variations in denominational allegiance. All demonstrate in their work, to varying degrees, an anti-clericalism which might be considered to be in tune with a Knoxian version of Calvinism, and which at times shades into antiCatholic rhetoric. Many are critical of privilege, and assert both the worth of the individual and the theological benefit and imperative of a well-functioning human society in which all have rights and responsibilities. This may transfer into an apocalyptic hope in a divine or heavenly resolution, often, in the novels, expressed in deathbed scenes, but found too in Burns’ poetry. All may be described as at least aware of, and in many cases fully ascribing to what Liam McIlvanney calls ‘the Calvinist paradox: you most fully possess the tradition by going outside it; you accede to its power in the act of renouncing it’ (McIlvanney 2002: 162). This counter-intuitive relationship with a distinctively Scottish theological position will be a guiding theme in the texts discussed here.

¹ See Chapter 15 in this volume.

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Robert Burns and Theology Burns’ reputation as a poet of his time has undergone a shift in recent years, as the literary and cultural focus has moved from an appreciation of the apparent nostalgia of poems such as ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (K, 72)² to affirmation of the more cutting social critique of ‘Is there for honest poverty’, now better known as ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’ (K, 181).³ This has been associated with a clearer appreciation of the force of the biting satire embedded in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ (K, 53). The influence of theological currents on Burns has been re-evaluated, so that he is read as much more of a man of his time, an educated and involved layman with a commitment to a particular strand of Calvinism, rather than as an iconoclastic although at times sympathetic maverick. The three poems mentioned above form a potent triad of popular evidence for Burns’ attitude towards the theological debates of his time. Read together, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ share a similar distrust of religion based on rigid rules rather than the prompting of the heart. The vesting of power in figures of authority is also treated with suspicion in both poems, and the resulting fellowship of equal ‘brothers’ is celebrated in ‘A Man’s a Man’. ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is a response to a long-running dispute between the Kirk Session at Mauchline Church in Ayrshire and Burns’ friend, Gavin Hamilton, begun in 1784. Hamilton stood accused of failing to attend public worship and neglecting his role as leader of worship at home: the sort of responsibility captured with such careful and positive attention to detail in ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. The subject of Burns’ dramatic monologue is the Mauchline elder William Fisher, a vociferous critic of Hamilton’s but suspected of less than perfect morals himself. The theological assumption on which Fisher’s selfrevealing prayer is based is that of double predestination. A distant God, ‘that in the heavens does dwell’, apparently randomly chooses one in ten for salvation, the rest for damnation, to reveal his ‘glory’ rather than for ‘onie guid or ill / They’ve done afore [Him]’. Fisher is convinced he is a ‘chosen sample’, one of the elect and an ‘example’ to others, ready to zealously condemn those who fall into the public sins of drinking, dancing, and swearing. However, he reveals that his sexual morality is startling in its waywardness, he is ‘fashed wi’ fleshly lust’ which he justifies as comparable to Paul’s ‘fleshly thorn’, sent by God himself to prevent him from becoming overly proud. That being so, in ² Burns’ poems are to be found in Kinsley’s three-volume edition of The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (1968). The number following a K in parenthesis refers to Kinsley’s numbering system rather than to a page number. ³ The shift is charted by Richard J. Finlay, who comments that ‘for many in the Scottish establishment . . . for most of the twentieth century . . . the Bard [has been rendered] a safe apolitical emblem ripe for sentimental and nostalgic abuse’ (Finlay 1997: 76).

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the logic of this theological economy, he must simply bear it until God chooses to lift it from him. His salvation is not in jeopardy, however he chooses to act: and, as he reveals, he chooses to indulge his God-given burden with various women. The condemnation Holy Willie calls upon God to visit upon Hamilton, and the Presbytery of Ayr which supported him, follows on from this revelation of his theological self-understanding. His demand that God ‘for [His] people’s sake destroy them, / An’ dinna spare’ is undermined by his hypocrisy, of which he is exuberantly unaware. The ‘glory’ described as being behind God’s operation of double predestination in verse 1 is repeated in the climactic closing verse. Now, however, it is focused on the rising success of Holy Willie, who longs to be ‘excell’d by nane’. The speaker comes close to claiming parity with the God whose glory he will reflect back, almost as an equal. As Robert Crawford comments, in this poem, ‘Burns fuses Calvinist theology with boastful sexual energy as his speaker, bragging of being a “shining light”, goes on to reveal himself as a less than perfect sexual example . . . [T]iming and slyness give it a performative gusto, a phallic stand-up comedy.’ The result is ‘an excoriating, brilliantly modulated satire on hypocrisy’ (Crawford 2010: 173–4). ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ is so effective because it is written from a position of theological literacy and there is a conviction lying behind the satire that an alternative is possible. Holy Willie’s self-justifying position is an obvious theological parody. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was written in 1785/6, a matter of a year or two after the events which inspired the earlier poem, and offers a nostalgic vision of what that alternative might have looked like. Drawing on the pastoral tradition of Thomas Gray and Robert Fergusson, Burns presents religious devotion which is theologically informed yet focused on the home rather than on the Church with its structures and levels of rule-bound authority. In a cottage ‘far apart’, the ‘inmates poor’ please ‘The Power’ in their worship with their ‘language of the soul’ more than ‘all the pomp of method, and of art’ of ‘poor Religion’s pride’. The difference is that the ‘pageant’ of formal religion does not involve the ‘heart’, while members of the cotter’s family ‘tune their hearts’ in order to come to God in worship. In places, this antipathy towards clericalism is directed towards Roman Catholicism, alluded to in the ‘Italian trills’ and ‘sacerdotal stole’ which contrast with the rough simplicity of the domestic scene. However, the critique of authority implied in the poem goes beyond this, and includes a more general affirmation of the authentic, God-given rights and responsibilities of the cotter and those like him: A virtuous Populace may rise the while, And stand a wall of fire, around their much lov’d ISLE.

(ll. 179–80)

Education and virtue are closely linked in the poem, with the act of the ‘priest-like father’ reading sacred Scripture to the gathered family offered as a pivotal moment

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of moral authority. A commitment to understanding and applying the Word of God means that all the family, and those like them, hold dear may need to be defended from those who do not have the best interests of a morally righteous society at heart. ‘A Cotter’s Saturday Night’ has been reassessed by critics such as McIlvanney in ways which highlight its continuity with the more recently popular political satires and affirmations of the brotherhood of humanity such as ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ that’, rather than focusing on its nostalgic myth-making. In later poems such as ‘A Man’s a Man’, the reforming zeal of earlier poems is tempered by a more eschatological hope in a coming time of egalitarian harmony: ‘Radicalism has become a profession of faith, the millenarian belief in a brotherhood of peace and equality that, in spite of everything—“for a’ that” – will come to pass’ (McIlvanney 2002: 219). However, a closer examination of ‘A Cotter’s Saturday Night’ reveals that this apocalyptic vision is present here too, in the emphasis placed on the Book of Revelation in the list of the readings the father might choose to incorporate into evening worship, including: . . . he, who lone on Patmos banished, Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand, And heard great Bab’lon’s doom pronounc’d by Heaven’s command. (ll. 133–5)

The poem’s closing line also refers to Revelation, in its assertion that those such as the cotters will be enrolled into God’s ‘Book of Life’.⁴ The integration of zeal for religious and economic reformation in this life with a hope of eschatological fulfilment is not restricted to the later poems. A belief in the reversal of fortunes for the poor in the life to come is at least implied in earlier poems such as ‘A Cotter’s Saturday Night’. Underlying much of Burns’ poetry, for many modern commentators, is a commitment to a particular stream of Presbyterian thought, inspired by the civil and religious zeal of the Covenanters of the seventeenth century, if not by every aspect of their theology. Burns opposed some of the harsh theologies of Calvinism, such as the theory of salvation espoused so rigorously by Holy Willie, and he found himself under the discipline of his local Kirk Session for some of his moral and sexual choices. However, his views of authority legitimized by the trust of all, contingent on the maintenance of the contract established between rulers, God, and the people for the good of all society, sit squarely within contemporary ‘New Light’ Moderatism. The division in the Kirk between ‘Old Lights’ and ‘New Lights’ stemmed from the response of various parties to the Patronage Act of 1712 concerning who had the right to place ministers in charges. The Moderate Party arose in 1752, with purpose of asserting the ⁴ Reference to the ‘Book of Life’ is found seven times in the Book of Revelation (3:5, 13:8, 17:8, 20:12, 20:15, 21:27, 22:19).

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authority of the General Assembly who followed the law of the land and supported the thrust of the Patronage Act against the Evangelical Party, who demanded greater freedom of choice for congregations. While this issue remained important in the urban centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow, provincial ‘New Light’ followers were a looser group of independent thinkers. Anti-authority and closer to the Irish Presbyterianism of, Francis Hutcheson Glasgow University’s Professor of Moral Philosophy (1730–46) the Moderatism which was so attractive to Burns stressed the rights of the individual and the importance of an egalitarian society.⁵ As McIlvanney concludes: The principles of New Lightism – private judgement, practical benevolence, universal tolerance, defiance of tyranny – were intellectually attractive to Burns, and informed many of the books he most admired. Equally, Burns enjoyed the sense of being part of a progressive, avant-garde group of independent thinkers, taking a defiant stand against entrenched authority. (McIlvanney 2002: 123)

Allied to this was his commitment to Freemasonry, whose tolerance of religious freedom and egalitarian sense of brotherhood sat easily with New Light radicalism and in sharp contrast to what for him was the Old Light closed-mindedness of which he had had personal experience. Burns could satirize the ridiculous nature of religious disagreements in the Church of Scotland, as he does in ‘The Holy Tulzie’ (‘Dispute’) (K, 52). However, his support for the Moderate position is clear in this poem in his mocking portrayal of Old Light supporters who label each other ‘Hypocrite’ and ‘Villain’ and who denounce Common Sense philosophy as preached from the pulpit, while they refer to their own congregations as ‘maingie sheep’. This is satire from a position of inside awareness of and commitment to one position over another, light-hearted but serious in intent because the issues at stake matter. There is evidence to substantiate this commitment and the influences behind it. A recent biographer of Burns, Robert Crawford, notes the influence of the Moderate, Rev. Patrick Wodrow, minister of Tarbolton Parish Church, on Burns as a young man (Crawford 2010: 93). At this time, Burns’ friend David Sillar remembers Burns’ interest in the theology and writing of Dr John Taylor of Norwich, including Taylor’s approach to reading the Bible that ‘we ought not to admit anything contradictory to the common sense and understanding of mankind’ (Crawford 2010: 93). Independent thought and the right, even duty, of the

⁵ The close connection between New Light theology, Ulster and Scotland in a literary context is explored further by Andrew R. Holmes (Holmes 2009). J. Walter McGinty’s study of the influence of religion on Burns is less detailed about the influence of the New Light/Old Light controversy on Burns’ poetry, but notes his use of ‘symbol-like words that lie innocently on the surface, but under which lie huge depths of understanding’ (McGinty 2003:194).

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individual to interpret Scripture according to conscience led Burns in a direction which was critical of fixed theological movements in the Church which he viewed as leading to hypocrisy. In renouncing these aspects, it could be argued, paradoxically, he more fully possessed a Calvinist tradition with a long heritage in challenging and independent engagement with the truths of the faith. Burns’ popularity has not waned over the years, although the scholarly and popular focus on his poetry has shifted in recent times. Three of his best-known poems have been explored here to chart this shift in theological terms and offer a current perspective. In the remaining pages of this chapter we will consider writers who are much less well-known, and texts which have fallen out of popular favour but which are undergoing scholarly reassessment. From the firmly canonical Burns and his critical reading of the theological trends of his day, driven paradoxically by the powerful Calvinism which shaped him, we turn to the work of three female novelists, Susan Ferrier, Catherine Sinclair, and Margaret Oliphant.

Introducing Susan Ferrier, Catherine Sinclair, and Margaret Oliphant Susan Ferrier (1782–1854) is sometimes referred to as the Scottish Jane Austen and her novels are perhaps the best regarded of a group of female writers of the time whose work was very popular but has faded from critical and popular view (including Mary Brunton (1778–1818) and Elizabeth Hamilton (1756–1816)). Here, I will focus on her first two novels, Marriage (1997 [1818]) and The Inheritance (2009 [1824]), although her third, Destiny (1882 [1831]), will also be of interest. An Edinburgh society figure, Ferrier offers an array of characters in her family sagas and, through them, contrasts the theological scene in Scotland with that of England. More than later writers such as Margaret Oliphant, she writes with moral and theological instruction in mind as well as social satire, from a position firmly within the established Church at least up until the Disruption of 1843. Catherine Sinclair’s (1800–64) background is in the Scottish Episcopal tradition. She is perhaps best known as a writer of children’s fiction (particularly the novel Holiday House from 1839), if she is remembered at all. Her theological trajectory in relation to her writing takes her in a completely different direction to both Oliphant and Ferrier. Moral instruction comes to mean something very specifically sectarian in theological terms. Finally, Margaret Oliphant (1828–97) is scarcely an unknown writer, but various factors have led to her work being somewhat downgraded compared to male contemporaries such as Scott, Hogg, and Carlyle. It is often commented that her financial needs led to her producing work of varying quality—a point she

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makes herself ⁶—but it would also be true to say that the volume of her output means that underlying themes are harder to establish accurately. Her place in the canon of Scottish literature is also problematized by the lack of time she spent in Scotland, as she moved from her childhood home in Wallyford to the Scots community in Liverpool when she was seven and never really lived in Scotland permanently after that. But there is little doubt that she identified as Scottish, her accent was remarked upon by those who met her, and her interest in the Scottish Church in all its variety was acute—and based on first-hand knowledge. In fact, I will argue that her spiritual journey (from the Church of Scotland to the Free Church at the Disruption to a general acceptance of, if not regular attendance at, the Church of England) brought her insights into Scottish theology which are worth hearing. The role and function of Church structures had been an area of keen satiric interest to Burns, and he questioned the legitimacy of those in authority over the faithful Christian individual. A similar debate is entered into by the three writers under discussion here, from an equally committed but critical position. Ministers as characters feature in their work, but often in surprisingly peripheral ways. Their necessity and the nature of their calling is uniformly probed, and the lay ministry of individuals, particularly of women or a woman and particularly within the home, is explored.

The Marginalized Minister: A Theology of the Home Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) offers a set of binary oppositions for the heroine of the novel to choose between, based not on direct church involvement but family influence: these include the contrast between England and Scotland; marriage and the single life; and religious observance which leads to action and that which has little effect on life. In his Memoirs of Susan Ferrier, John Doyle writes that ‘neither the details of ecclesiastical machinery nor the differences between religious forms and creeds greatly interested her’ (Kirkpatrick 1997: xxi). This tolerance and openness, not to say disinterest, is reflected in the message of the novel. The heroine, Mary, has a strong religious life which is nurtured not through the formal structures of any church, but in the company of her aunt Mrs Douglas: To engraft into her infant soul the purest principles of religion, was therefore the chief aim of Mary’s preceptress. The fear of God was the only restraint placed upon her dawning intellect; and from the Bible alone was she taught the duties of morality – not in the form of a dry code of laws, to be read with a solemn face on ⁶ In her Autobiography, Oliphant comments that she had made a decision to write to support her family, rather than to write a fine novel, although she reflects that had the quality of her work been better she might have earned as much for half of the output (Oliphant 1990: 15–16).

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Sundays, or learned with weeping eyes as a week-day task, but adapted to her youthful capacity by judicious illustration, and familiarised to her taste by hearing stories and precepts from the lips she best loved . . . [T]he first effort of her reason was the discovery that to please her aunt, she must study to please her Maker. (Ferrier 1997: 158)

Religious commitment is mediated through loving personal relationships and the power of biblical narrative to affect the heart through engagement with the imagination and experience. This is in sharp contrast with the theological views offered by her other aunts, the ladies of Glenfern, for whom religious education ‘was to attend the parish church, and remember the text; to observe who was there, and who was not there; to wind up the evening with a sermon stuttered and stammered through by one of the girls (the worst reader always piously selected, for the purpose of improving their reading)’ (Ferrier 1997: 176). Ecclesiology of a sort is clearly contrasted here with the experiential, common sense regime offered at home by Mrs Douglas. This education stands Mary in good stead when she goes to England to spend time with her real mother, who, having fallen out with the local vicar, forbids her to go to church at all, lest she becomes a Methodist—‘I won’t suffer a Methodist in the house’ (Ferrier 1997: 248). Mary is equipped to undertake a theological debate with herself over the relative hold of the Ten Commandments over her—whether to honour her parents or to worship God—and decides to overrule her mother and attend the local church. Here, incidentally, she finds the unexpected sound of the organ, in contrast with the twang of the precentor, ‘the music of the spheres’ (Ferrier 1997: 254). Ferrier thus engages neatly and presciently in a wider contemporary debate about changing styles of worship. However, the key message of Mary’s experience is that her religious life, nurtured in the home, means she is not dependent on romantic love, or parental approval, or the comfort of a fixed theology, for her personal happiness. Moreover, while the structures of the Church in Scotland may be abused and misunderstood, as they are by Mary’s aged aunts, the novel suggests that they nevertheless offer the natural foundation for society which everyone may and should access at their own level. The contrast between the church in Scotland and England is one aspect of a wider comparative debate into which Ferrier enters with some confidence.⁷ In her final and somewhat bleak novel, Destiny (1831), Ferrier engages in the Patronage debate in her comic portrayal of the minister McDow, whose easy, undeserved situation and gluttony echoes that of Dr Redgill in Marriage, and who is ultimately dismissed from his parish. As Carol Anderson and Aileen M. Riddell comment, Ferrier also highlights a typically ‘Presbyterian radicalism’ (Anderson

⁷ For further discussion of the role of the metaphor of marriage in the novel in terms of a wider national debate, see Benjamine Toussaint’s article (Toussaint 2016).

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and Riddell 1997: 192) in this novel, of the sort shared by Robert Burns, in Edith’s rebuke of Lady Waldegrave. Lady Waldegrave refuses to pay a workman on the grounds that ‘there is nobody so poor that cannot get credit somewhere’. Edith retorts that ‘the poor as most to be pitied when their sufferings are occasioned by the thoughtlessness and extravagance of the great’ (Ferrier 1882: vol. 2, 292). Ferrier is critical of both ecclesiastical and societal structures, from a position of theological investment. In Catherine Sinclair’s first novel, Modern Accomplishments (1836), the setting is very closed and revolves almost entirely around the family unit. In place of extensive plot developments, the reader is offered a variety of contrasting moral, intellectual, and theological perspectives. The novel centres on the conversations of three society sisters about the education of their daughters. The views of their two governesses are given as two possible perspectives, particularly about the role of moral reading: the conclusion seems to be that there is a hope for a future time when ‘books of practical piety and evangelical truth would be preferred to those abounding in speculation of wild enthusiasm and daring presumptions’ (Sinclair 1836: 315). This is not presented dogmatically, however, but the development of ways to read well, differentiating between literatures, is a central theme. A third perspective is offered by the third, unmarried sister, Barbara Neville, and the widow of their brother, Lady Olivia Neville, who offer contrasting religious views. Barbara flirts with every passing religious phase of dissent (Methodism is a particularly anxiety-inducing possibility) while Lady Olivia, the moral centre of the novel, espouses the important place of the established Church of Scotland. For her, true Christianity can only be known in the local church community, gathered for worship as one body. These two ladies represent what Sinclair details in her preface to the novel as the opposition between ‘the hypochondriacal fanaticism of a disordered fancy [and] the purifying influence of an enlightened faith’ (Sinclair 1836: vi).⁸ Binary oppositions such as these are resolved not through reference to Scripture or preaching or the guidance of the minister but through open female conversation within the family sphere, informed by judicious reading. In her second novel, Modern Society (1837), Sinclair does offer the reader the presence of ministers to guide the female mind—but one of these ministers remains firmly within the literary sphere. The writing of the Rev. Dr Thomas Chalmers is offered in the novel as the work of a contemporary theologian with a solution to practical problems of social deprivation, which may be read as for entertainment as well as improvement. ‘I wish Dr Chalmers’s work on Civic Economy could be rained down in thousands on the world, to show what true philanthropy means, for no science is more difficult than that of doing real good’ asserts the parish minister, Dr Murray (Sinclair 1837: 118). Stewart J. Brown has

⁸ These oppositions are explored further in Timothy C. Baker’s article (Baker 2013).

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written about the work of Chalmers’ writing as ‘romantic epic’, suitable and exciting literature for pious Evangelicals (Brown 1982: 108); here, as Baker argues, it is also used as an ‘[i]ndicator of sound morals and as a guide to society at large’ (Baker 2013: 153), available to both men and women; lay and ordained. However, from this egalitarian position in which theological ideas are available to all who will engage with them, Sinclair’s theological journey will take her and her fiction in a very different direction. As we will discover, as her sectarian views harden, her confidence wavers in the power of any literature to promote theological orthodoxy through the appropriate application of the imagination. In the wide array of Oliphant’s work, the theological relationship between individual believers and the clergymen who represent the structures of the Church, feature strongly. Oliphant, of course, wrote a biography of Thomas Chalmers (1893), but before that she produced a biography of the charismatic minister Edward Irving (1862), which brought her to the attention of the Carlyles. At the same time, she was writing the first of her Carlingford novels, The Rector (published with The Doctor’s Family in 1863, but serialized in Blackwood’s from September 1861–January 1862). By this stage, Oliphant had had experience of an eclectic range of theologies, from the Free Church of her youth to the Roman Catholic churches she frequented on her travels abroad. Her view of ministry had also been influenced by her long-standing friendships with leading Scots ministers from the broad church tradition, Robert Story and John Tulloch. The unfortunate Rector, Mr Proctor, in the Carlingford novel, is shown to have little understanding of the needs of parishioners in distress: for him, paradise is the Fellows’ Common Room at All-Souls College, rather than the edenic garden of his prominent parishioner with the marriageable daughters; or the deathbed of an elderly woman. ‘There floated before him vain visions of that halcyon world he had left – that sacred soil at All-Souls, where there were no parishioners to break the sweet repose. How different was this decomposing real world’ (Oliphant 1986: 19). At the deathbed of the parishioner, the narrator comments that ‘how to be of any use in that dreadful agony of nature was denied to [him]’ (Oliphant 1986: 24)—while the curate, Mr Wentworth, is indeed able to hold before the woman ‘that cross, not of wood or metal, but of truth and everlasting verity, which is the only hope of man’ (Oliphant 1986: 25). No doubt drawing on her experience of the Scottish Church and its rather different, egalitarian view of education, not least for ministry, Oliphant presents a priest in the Church of England, with a particular educational background, who is wrestling with the nature of calling (Proctor), in contrast to one who seems naturally to be able to offer theological comfort in times of direst need (the curate, Wentworth). In this comparatively early novel, she will offer the possibility of change in Mr Proctor’s understanding of his calling in one of her characteristically open-ended conclusions: Mr Proctor returns to All-Souls, but the possibility of his being drawn back to parish life, a changed man, is offered as a

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tantalizing vision at the end—‘the late rector of Carlingford, self-expelled out of the uneasy Paradise, setting forth untimely, yet not too late, into the laborious world’ (Oliphant 1986: 35). In later novels, Oliphant will be less charitable and less open to the possibility of change and development in the characters of her clergymen.

The Deathbed as Eschatological Illumination It was argued above that Burns maintained a hope in a final reckoning which would resolve the theological and social issues he grappled with. In the fiction of the novelists I am considering here, the deathbed scene offers an opportunity for some of the same issues to be explored. For Oliphant, deathbed scenes will signal, typically, not moments for repentance and illumination on anyone’s part, or glimpses of eschatological resolution, but questions about the very nature of theological hope. Orthodoxy for Oliphant should not be confused with faith, a conviction which seems to grow as she ages. Wentworth the curate offers an orthodox hope in the saving power of the cross to his dying parishioner in The Rector. However, in the later novel, A Rose in June (1874), Oliphant presents a country clergyman, Mr Dameral, who is perplexed by intellectual uncertainty on his deathbed after a life of what Elisabeth Jay defines as ‘cultivated aestheticism’ rather than pastoral concern (1995: 191). Dameral reflects, ‘He was departing alone, the first of his generation; curious and solitary, not knowing where he was going. To God’s presence; ah, yes! But what did that mean?’ (Jay 1995: 191). Mr Nolan, his curate, who is full of Christian virtues, leaves the scene disgusted by Mr Dameral’s self-centredness, but ends up ‘shivering with something like cold, as he looked up at the stars. “I wonder, after all, where he is going?” he said to himself with a sympathetic ache of human curiosity in his heart’ (Jay 1995: 191). It might be argued that Oliphant’s personal experiences of the loss of her husband and children, as much as the relativism of her theological and ecclesiastic experience, leads her to contrast the certainties of orthodoxy with the unknowable mysteries of humanity’s spiritual condition, with a certain sympathy rather than judgement. For Susan Ferrier, deathbeds are far more illuminating moments, promising eschatological resolution, and this may be aligned with her faith in the power of literature to offer religious guidance, at least in the early part of her writing career. On the deathbed of the blind Mrs Lennox in Marriage, Mrs Lennox’s son ‘felt that he was seen and known. Her look was long . . . the veil seemed to drop from their hearts; one glance sufficed to tell that both were fondly, truly loved . . . she then raised her eyes to heaven, and the spirit sought its native skies!’ (Ferrier 1997: 401). In a neat, if incredible and so far unattributed reference to 1 Corinthians 13, Ferrier attributes sight to the blind at the very moment of death, a literary foretaste of the illumination and restoration to come in the heavenly realm.

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The Novel as Theological Educator and the Case against Catholicism Ferrier justifies the sort of theological conviction asserted in the deathbed scene of Mrs Lennox in her Introduction to the reissue of her second novel, The Inheritance, in the Standard Novels series. Here she writes: With regard to the introduction of religious sentiments into works of fiction, there exists a difference of opinion which, in the absence of any authoritative command, leaves each free to act according to their own feelings and opinions. Viewing this life merely as the prelude to another state of existence, it does seem strange that the future should ever be wholly excluded from any representation of it even in its motley occurrences – scarcely less motley perhaps than the human mind itself. The author can only wish it had been in her province to have raised plants of nobler growth in the wide world of Christian literature – but as such has not been her high calling, she must only hope her ‘small herbs of grace’ may (without offence) be allowed to put forth their blossoms amongst the briars, weeds and wild flowers of life’s common path.⁹

For Ferrier, the novel form may justifiably concern itself with speculation about heavenly existence as the resolution to life’s perplexities, as an imaginative exercise. She may not have had a ‘high calling’ in the sphere of Christian literature, but there is an implication that she has a calling of sorts to present theological truths in an attractive way. Such conviction is less firmly held by Catherine Sinclair in her later works, which seem to lose the confidence and interest of texts such as Modern Accomplishments in wide theological debate leading to changed moral behaviour. Sinclair’s later novels become more singularly didactic at the same time as they become more fantastic, and she justifies them on the basis of their antiRoman Catholic stance alone. Sinclair identifies her later novels as attempts to encourage readers to distinguish between truth which is based on Protestant beliefs and may be supported by the imagination, compared with the superstition of Catholic beliefs which rely on the imagination inappropriately. In the expanded preface to her novel Beatrice (1855), published under the title Modern Superstition, she explains the novel was written to demonstrate ‘the irreconcilable hostility with which the Italian school of superstition looks upon the moral principles and domestic peace of a happy English fire-side’ (Sinclair 1857: 3). As Baker notes, here the English world is presented as normative, with no distinction

⁹ The revised Introduction is included in Doyle (Doyle 1898) and the quotation is found in Baker (Baker 2013: 154).

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between England and Scotland in terms of fireside or church denomination or integrity of appearance (Baker 2013: 157). Meanwhile, the ‘Italian’ represents all that is dangerous about the imagination and its deceptive snares. In the same novel, the Protestant Lady Edith has to correct the parish minister, Mr Clinton, in his understanding of Shakespeare: ‘Mr Clinton, when Shakespeare said, All the world’s a stage, he should have added “particularly to the Jesuits”, because among them the men and women are indeed “merely players”. None were ever better actors, being willing and able to assume any part’ (Sinclair 1852: vol. 1, 292). The comment is a strange one, however, as disguise and dissembling are key features throughout the novel in the attempt to save Protestant characters from the clutches of the Jesuits themselves. The boundary between the appropriate and inappropriate use of the imagination and fiction becomes increasingly untenable in Sinclair’s novels such as Beatrice, despite the assertions in her prefaces. Baker notes that in these novels, even the writing of Thomas Chalmers on theological philanthropy no longer has a place in fiction, and Chalmers is represented in Beatrice as a marble bust in front of which a foolish young Catholic girl recites her rosary. Disillusionment with the novel as an appropriate vehicle for theological and moral teaching means that as her texts ‘slide into anti-Catholic tracts, it becomes more apparent that the link between fiction and civic or religious responsibility cannot be maintained’ (Baker 2013: 158).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that theology has a significant role in a wide range of Scottish literature, whether the texts are deeply canonical or from the marginal reaches of the literary field. An understanding of theological engagement is one aspect of the study of literature which may shift and change over time, as authors are re-evaluated and their works are re-read in light of new moves towards greater inclusion. The brief survey I have offered here of broadly theological issues in the work of authors who are undergoing this re-evaluation has identified four areas of interest. The first is the influence of denominational and intra-denominational theological allegiances on literature of the period; the second is the tension between professional ministry and the domain of the home as the setting for faith to be encountered and worked out; the third is the significance of eschatological influences on literature; and the final one is the appropriateness or otherwise of literature as a vehicle for theological debate. In all of the texts considered, something of what has been called the ‘Calvinist paradox’ has been encountered: that such a theological tradition may be most fully possessed when it is viewed from a critical position.

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Bibliography Anderson, Carol and Aileen M. Riddell (1997). ‘The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds.), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 179–95. Baker, Timothy C. (2013). ‘Catherine Sinclair, Domestic Community, and the Catholic Imagination’, Studies in the Novel 45/2: 143–60. Brown, Stewart J. (1982). Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burns, Robert (1968). The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols., ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crawford, Robert (2010). The Bard: Robert Burns—A Biography. London: Pimlico. Doyle, John A. (ed.) (1898). Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier: 1782–1854. London: John Murray. Ferrier, Susan (1882). Destiny, or The Chief ’s Daughter, 2 vols. London: R. Bentley. Ferrier, Susan (1997). Marriage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferrier, Susan (2009). The Inheritance. Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd. Finlay, Richard J. (1997). ‘The Burns Cult and Scottish Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Kenneth Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty: Robert Burns—A Bicentenary Celebration. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 69–78. Holmes, Andrew R. (2009). ‘Presbyterian Religion, Poetry and Politics in Ulster, c.1770–1850’, in Frank Ferguson and Andrew R. Holmes (eds.), Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c.1770–1920. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 37–63. Jay, Elisabeth (1995). Mrs Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn (1997). ‘Introduction’, in Susan Ferrier, Marriage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, vii–xxiii. McGinty, J. Walter (2003). Robert Burns and Religion. Aldershot: Ashgate. McIlvanney, Liam (2002). Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late EighteenthCentury Scotland. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Oliphant, Margaret (1862). The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church, London. London: Hurst and Blackett. Oliphant, Margaret (1874). A Rose in June. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz. Oliphant, Margaret (1893). Thomas Chalmers: Preacher, Philosopher and Statesman. London: Methuen. Oliphant, Margaret (1986). The Rector. London: Virago. Oliphant, Margaret (1990). The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Elisabeth Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sinclair, Catherine (1836). Modern Accomplishments: or, The March of Intellect. Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes; London: James Nisbet and Co. Sinclair, Catherine (1837). Modern Society: or, The March of Intellect. The Conclusion of Modern Accomplishments. Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes. Sinclair, Catherine (1839). Holiday House: A Series of Tales. Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co. Sinclair, Catherine (1852). Beatrice; Or, The Unknown Relatives, 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley. Sinclair, Catherine (1857). Modern Superstition. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co. Toussaint, Benjamine (2016). ‘Untrammelled by Theory: Susan Ferrier’s Polyphonic Vision of Scotland and the Union in Marriage’, Scottish Literary Review 8/1: 33–43.

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17 New Trends Erskine of Linlathen, Irving, and McLeod Campbell Andrew Purves

Beginning in the mid 1820s, and extending through four decades, new trends emerged in theology in Scotland. These trends stand in opposition to the Reformed scholasticism of the continuing Westminster tradition. The move away from penal to personal categories in soteriology during this period indicates the influence of Romanticism upon evangelicalism. Formal and rational categories of thought gave way to highlight personal experience and the experience of the supernatural. In this the theologians here under discussion offered an evangelical response to the life of faith that reflected movements of thought within the culture. This response is seen in concern for the character of God, with stress on the love of God towards people rather than on God as lawgiver. Father–Son relations came into focus. There was a commitment to the Son’s assumption of actual, rather than idealized human nature at the incarnation. We find a revised approach to the atonement away from penal, legal, and forensic conceptions, towards relational and personal conceptions. Emphasis was placed on the saving efficacy of the life of Jesus Christ, not just on his death. Christian life was conceived in filial terms in which the believer shares in the life of God. Throughout there was a vigorous Christological approach. Finally, the new trends mark the recognition of charismatic experience with the Scottish church. The theologians representing these new trends were Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870), Edward Irving (1792–1834), and John McLeod Campbell (1800–72). Erskine was a layman with legal training. Irving and McLeod Campbell were parish ministers who were deposed from parish ministry within the Church of Scotland because of their theological developments. Whereas Erskine’s work was more apologetically oriented, with Irving and McLeod Campbell pastoral concerns were to the fore. McLeod Campbell is known for the most part through his major book, The Nature of the Atonement (1856). There is now a substantial secondary literature on this volume. Erskine was well known during his lifetime, and much published. Secondary sources are scarce. Irving was a renowned Scottish preacher in congregations in London, and, though he died a young man, left published theology and sermons. He is primarily known today as an early leader

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of the charismatic movement in Great Britain. However, his insistence on Christ assuming the wholeness of human nature at the incarnation has drawn recent comment. Although the three men did not form a movement, they were often in conversation and correspondence with each other. Common themes emerge; we find similar language and theological conceptions, especially between Erskine and McLeod Campbell. The three also shared an interest in the brief charismatic events that took place in the west of Scotland between 1828 and 1830 while McLeod Campbell was minister of the Row parish in Dumbartonshire. This chapter will highlight major texts and themes, noting key secondary literature in the bibliography. It will proceed in order of chronology: Erskine, Irving, and McLeod Campbell. Greater attention will be given to McLeod Campbell because of his ranked importance for Scottish theology.

Thomas Erskine of Linlathen Erskine is so titled because of his family estate to which he retired early from the practice of law to take up the study of theology. An Episcopalian by confession, his abiding goal was to rethink the prevailing Calvinism, and especially concerning what he called the character of God, making a spiritual and ethical appeal for a relational and experiential Christianity. Three texts illustrate these concerns: The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828), The Brazen Serpent (1831), and The Spiritual Order and Other Papers (1871). The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel is a small book that offers a fundamental anthropology: we are made to be dependent upon God. Love of God, expressed as filial trust, is the key, while indifference to God is cause for disorder and misery. For Erskine, humanity means dependence, and the need to be in a living relationship with God. A dynamic, pervasive life with God runs through all of his writing. The evil to be remedied by Christianity is the atheism of the heart which leads to moral deformity. It is the message of God’s love and grace towards us that converts the dependence of necessity into a dependence of love. Erskine quickly moved his reader towards his view that God’s forgiveness of sin is the means, not the end, contemplated by the gospel. God in Christ shows us the Father’s heart. While God condemns our sin, God’s forgiveness is to the end that offenders will be drawn back to the love of God, and thus sin, self-will, and independence should be rooted out. Erskine’s sense of God’s universal love is noteworthy. He writes of God’s love for the whole world and holds out hope for the restitution of all things by this love. God’s pardon is not conditional upon human beliefs and actions. Pardon precedes the confidence of obedient love, yet that, expressed as trust in God, is rightly called for. Forgiveness is the permanent condition of the heart of God that asks only filial trust in response.

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Erskine opposed justification as a judicial act of God imputing Christ’s righteousness to believers. Rather, justification is pardon known and believed, and lived out in love towards God, trusting that Christ is our advocate with the Father. Justification is living faith as filial trust. Key is Isaiah 44:22, ‘Return unto me, for I have redeemed you’. Faith is child-like participation in the life of God, knowing God as Father. All Erskine’s writings reflect these themes, often developed at length. Like Schleiermacher, he emphasized dependence, and displayed deep piety. Erskine, nevertheless, tended to operate within the bounds of conventional evangelical theology, bringing his own content to that framework. In The Brazen Serpent, a long book with no chapter breaks, Erskine develops a sustained argument. It is a criticism of penal atonement under the argument of Christ as our Head, the second Adam. At issue is new life: ‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (John 3:14–15; Num. 21:4–9). Jesus notes an incident from Jewish history where the people had denied God’s love. For this they were punished by biting serpents coming among them. The people pleaded with Moses for help, whereafter God, hearing Moses’ prayer, instructed him to put a brazen serpent on a pole. Whoever looked upon that raised serpent was healed and lived. Erskine explains that it was not forgiveness that was needed, but life. The story of the serpent typifies how God’s forgiveness and love were prior to and the condition for the healing. Erskine moves from the Israelites looking up at the brazen serpent in order to have life, to his contemporaries looking up to the cross of Jesus. Jesus, God in our nature, giving himself in a gift of love, is the representative man, the head of the nature. Our nature, fallen and sinful, dies on the cross, and is redeemed and lifted up to God. Here is manifest God’s sorrow over sin and God’s fitting of our nature for communion with God. The proof is Christ’s resurrection. Christ is the substitute for Adam, obedient unto death in love for us. Here unfolded is the character of God as the God of love. Two points: Christ as the representative and Head of our nature, and the rejection of a penal concept of the atonement, replaced by a concept of the love of God. Christ’s victory is our provision, the grace given. Christ came into the root of our nature, coming in direct touch with all evil and bitterness which he smote with the Father’s love. Drawing on that which was Christ’s provision, the Father’s love, we, by faith receive that same Spirit in which Jesus lived. That which Christ did in our nature, he has done in and for every person, which is to be received as a present possession and a future hope. It is the character of the new life to know Christ as our Head. Erskine attempted to offer a statement of the central tenets of Christian faith in a fresh way. He sought to make faith understandable and acceptable for his age. His appeal retains the objective content of Christianity as regards incarnation and atonement, but his primary movement is emphasis on a subjective response as the

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experience of new life. The Spiritual Order and Other Papers was published posthumously. Much is repetition of previous publications, but Erskine’s reflection on ‘the spiritual order’ merits attention. Jesus’ primary purpose was to proclaim the kingdom of heaven, essentially a moral universe, and to call people to submit to it. God, the King of that Kingdom, was the loving Father of all people. Jesus revealed the Father, and thereby God’s loving character, and God’s relation to them. Jesus taught that it was the Father dwelling in him that enabled him to do the works he did. The self-sacrificing love of God found in Jesus is Christianity’s central feature, and the sufficient ground of the absolute trust called for. There is a conscious demand within us for an inward goodness which implies a spiritual order. The moral quest leans upon spiritual qualities and the consciousness that they are obligatory. Christianity assumes that this spiritual order exists and that all people belong to it. A living love towards God is the only power which can enable us to be inwardly what we feel we ought to be. Erskine draws on the experience of dependence through which we are drawn into conscious and continuous apprehension of the love of God from which our love is derived. Erskine asserts that conscience is the spiritual organ of human relationship to God, the ‘point of contact’ through which God guides us. God, the living righteousness, not any theological abstraction, is the true object of human conscience and becomes the focus of human trust and love. This is achieved insofar as Jesus is the fit channel of the life and Spirit of God to the whole spiritual order, giving it its filial relation to the Father. God, thus, has the purpose of making us good, and life is an education with that purpose in view. God’s purpose is to raise us up to be partakers in God’s own righteousness and blessedness. Much of the book is given to Erskine’s theological exegesis of Romans. He begins with his central assertion: an inner consciousness or awareness that reveals a spiritual order to which we belong and to which we owe obedience. This obedience is filial trust, and is the ground for moral development. The basis of this possibility is the faith or filial trust of Jesus towards God. It is the purpose of God that we are ‘sons’, in virtue of having been created in the Son. We become partakers of the Son’s love, holiness, and blessedness by becoming partakers in his faith, in his filial trust in the Father. Christ is both object and subject in Christianity. He shows the Father’s love and he lives by the faith that rests on that purpose. It is Christ’s faith that we are called to enter into; believing that he is our Head and that he died for us, we are enabled to adopt his faith. Christ’s trust is the pattern of human righteousness, which is livingly reproduced in us by the indwelling of the Spirit. Abiding in Christ comes to be the truest expression of faith in its full development. Through our creation in Christ we have the capacity and responsibility of entering into Christ’s faith. Erskine sought to educate his readers towards a new understanding of the character of God as a self-sacrificing Father who loves all people. He pulled away

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from the dominant notion of God as Lawgiver, developing his thought by way of a vigorous Christology. He saw the atonement in terms of the life of Jesus who assumed our whole humanity and advocated a doctrine of the universal Headship of Christ and universal pardon. Perhaps there remains a tension between his earlier works and his posthumous work on final salvation, latterly tending in a universalist direction. Erskine came near to a doctrine of union with Christ through the Holy Spirit, but it remained undeveloped. He had a profound sense of the call to piety and moral improvement as the ends of sanctification. However, placing conscience into such a central position as the organ of spiritual growth seems dated today. Erskine was cited favourably by Thomas F. Torrance, who pointed up especially Erskine’s teaching on justification by faith as justification through the faithfulness of Christ. He notes critically, however, that near the end of his life Erskine pressed too far the doctrine of Christ’s Headship and universal pardon where it passed into the final salvation of all. A book-length exposition of Erskine was published by Don Horrocks, who is broadly appreciative, noting that he anticipated Barth in a number of ways, especially with his Christological focus (Horrocks 2004).

Edward Irving Irving was a tragic figure. Gifted as a preacher, he was eventually removed from his London congregation for encouraging speaking in tongues during worship. Creative and insightful as a theologian, he was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1833 on charges of heresy for insisting on the sinfulness of Christ in his human nature. He was subsequently a co-founder of a new congregation, the Catholic Apostolic Church. Irving died of tuberculosis at the age of 42. Irving advocated the Holy Spirit’s power in present experience. Before modern Pentecostalism, Irving, on the basis of a vigorous Christology and the sense of the living Christ, advocated a strong doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He was impressed by gifts of tongues that occurred around the Gare Loch during the ministry of McLeod Campbell. While McLeod Campbell remained sceptical of the divine origin, Irving was not; Irving was associated with apparent outpourings of the Spirit for the rest of his life, although he himself did not receive the gift of tongues. Irving’s writings were gathered together into a five-volume set, published in 1865. An ordination address, given in London in 1827, tells us something of his piety and perspective on ministry. In focusing on this address, we can construct an overview of his Christology, which was the reason for his dismissal from ordained ministry. These accounts are taken from Volumes 1 and 5 respectively. Irving developed his ordination sermon under five heads to present ‘the sacred character of a minister’. First, the minister needs to grow in knowledge, especially of the Bible in the original tongues. The minister is expected to be well-acquainted

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with the history of the Church and philosophy. Irving believed faith was under attack, so the minister was required to ‘seek thy God in thy closet and in thy study’. Second, the minister was to be a steward of the mystery of Christ, a student of the Psalms, and steady at prayer. Irving especially notes the burden of public prayer. Preaching comes next in order of preparation. ‘Preach thy Lord in humiliation, and thy Lord in exaltation’. Lastly, Irving points to the sacraments, which show forth the great mystery of godliness. Thus Irving urges continuing preparation in ministry. The third head is pastoral responsibility. This includes giving your benediction unto the flock, at all times and places, as with a bishop’s blessing. ‘Be thou the pastor always; less than the pastor never’. Irving encourages his ordinand to take an elder with him on home visits, recognizing the need to give spiritual counsel. He observes that if any say, ‘remember me in your prayer’, make a note and do not forget it. The pastor must be willing to give his life for all his people, for they are the Lord’s flock. The fourth head is to be mindful of duty as a churchman. Today, Irving reminds his charge, he is a member of the presbytery. London is awash with death, and the ordinand is informed that he is not just the minister for his congregation, but part of combined endeavours. Lastly, Irving speaks of his duties as a man. Reference is made to family, friends, and society more broadly. A minister is ‘a wayfaring man’, yet must still be master of his own house to give a pattern for all to see. The minister will seek money at his peril, yet must offer hospitality. Let responsible clothes and care of books be your riches. Be a man of good report, and in all things be faithful unto Christ, with no other allegiance; be strong in testimony against evil (Irving 1866: 537–9). Irving had a ‘high’ view of ministry as a sacred trust. Much was demanded, yet Christ gave much in return. The stress on the minister’s piety and study is evident also in the broad sweep of Irving’s published writing. There is nothing here that was especially innovative; yet the sense of standing within the long pastoral tradition from Gregory of Nazianzus through Chrysostom, Pope Gregory the Great, Bucer, and Baxter is apparent. Volume 5 of the collected writings includes ‘The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened in Six Sermons’ (taking up well over 400 pages!). Irving’s original intent was to develop his teaching on the origin, end, act, and fruit of the incarnation. However, such was the controversy over his teaching on the doctrine of Christ’s human nature, ‘that it was a manhood fallen, which He took up into His Divine person’, Irving felt compelled to write two more sermons, on the method of the incarnation and on the relations between the Creator and the creature in the light of the incarnation. Irving begins with a discussion that the eternal Word should take unto himself a body, and as such this was the holy will and pleasure of God. The core doctrine of the incarnation is that God willed from all eternity that the grace, mercy,

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forgiveness, and love of God be made known to all who love and honour his Son. The incarnation is the way by which God revealed that most tender and gracious aspect of his being, which otherwise would not be known. Thus Irving locates the incarnation in the mystery of God’s eternal will from before the foundation of the world, that is, pre-Fall, while maintaining that Christ’s humanity is post-Fall, that is, sinful and corrupt humanity. The end of the incarnation is the glory of God, summed up as God making himself known as Trinity, for the Son came from the Father and was conceived by the Spirit. The central and controversial discussion is the method of the incarnation by taking up fallen humanity. Did Christ’s flesh have the grace of sinlessness and incorruption from its proper nature or from the Holy Spirit? Christ’s flesh was received from his mother, but it was preserved sinless and incorruptible by the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit. The Son joined himself to fallen flesh and took it up into his own person in order to show that God was mightier than ‘the confederacy of sin’. The possibility of sin remained throughout Jesus’ life, but through the work of the Holy Spirit within, sin did not touch him. God, by uniting his Son to fallen humanity, reconciled the whole of humanity to himself, and is able to save as many as it pleases God. In this way, Irving argued for the universality of reconciliation and the individuality of election. This is the basis for Irving’s doctrine of atonement, or, as he put it, at-one-ment, in which the life of Christ, not just his death, is understood as the atoning exchange. Irving insists throughout that he is faithful to Christian orthodoxy, wherein the unassumed is the unredeemed. For this he was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Irving’s cause was taken up favourably by Karl Barth, via H. R. Mackintosh, who cited him. Mackintosh believed that Irving confused ‘corrupt’ with ‘corruptible’, thereby pushing too far in the direction of the possibility of sinning. Recently, Colin Gunton has revived interest in Irving’s Christology, noting especially the kenotic leaning, the distinctively pneumatological form of divine action in Christ, and the strong note of Cappadocian monarchia that allows Irving to recognize that the Son does not have to be conceived as being divine in the same way as the Father (Gunton 1988).

John McLeod Campbell McLeod Campbell was not an academic theologian. His adult life was spent in pastoral ministry, first in the parish of Row, until his deposition in 1831, then in an independent congregation in Glasgow. His theology was developed within contexts thrown up by pastoral ministry. McLeod Campbell’s writing is cumbersome and periphrastic; yet, he is noted for inventive theological categories. It is to the categories summoned to his task of rethinking atonement theology that

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attention is drawn; they are not those of the textbooks or the creeds. Seeking to find a path away from the penal theology of the Calvinists, he invented Christological and atonement language to carry his argument. It was during his ministry at the Row parish in Dumbartonshire that charges were made against McLeod Campbell’s teaching on assurance. In 1831 his Presbytery and Synod upheld the charges, culminating in the General Assembly deposing him from ministry in May of that year. The charges against him declared that he taught a universal pardon, and that assurance was of the essence of the faith, doctrines believed to contradict the Westminster Confession of Faith. Insofar as his doctrine was thought to deny election, he was opposed by the strict Calvinists; on the other side, Moderates were offended at the place assurance held in his preaching. McLeod Campbell sought to realize the divine mind in Christ as perfect sonship towards God and perfect brotherhood towards humankind. The incarnation appeared to him to develop naturally and necessarily as the atonement. Jesus savingly is God who has taken on fallen, sinful flesh, not an abstract humanity. Oneness in will, assuming a prior oneness in being between the Father and the Son, is central to McLeod Campbell’s teaching. It is the place where the relations between the Father and the Son are perceived to be redemptive for us. McLeod Campbell identifies Ps. 40:8, ‘Lo, I come to do thy will, O God’, as central. The will of God which the Son of God came to do and did was the essence and substance of the atonement. The will of God immediately contemplated is what God is, God’s eternal will of love towards us which by doing it and embodying it, the Son perfectly declared the name of God: Father. Even at the point of Christ’s deepest suffering unto death, McLeod Campbell sees Christ remaining faithful to the Father’s will which he had come forth to reveal by trusting it. The Son hears the Father’s voice, abides in the Father’s love, remains strong in the life that is the Father’s favour, drinks the cup of suffering, commends himself to the Father’s care, and from first to last does nothing of himself. All is done and said at oneness with the Father. Even in his desolation Christ is not alone, for the Father is with him. Everything Christ bore was borne also upon the Father’s heart. What we were to Christ’s heart in his sorrow and suffering over our sin, we were also to the Father’s heart. McLeod Campbell’s language points in the direction of a relational ontology. Relational imagery ripples through The Nature of the Atonement, and the filial life of the Son towards the Father is always emphasized, not least in the ends contemplated in the atonement—our restoration to sonship, which arises through the Son revealing the will of the Father to love us. Father– Son language is relational language in which neither the Father nor the Son can be spoken of in isolation. This is the meaning of the oneness in being between the Father and the Son, which is the ground for the oneness of will. The centre of McLeod Campbell’s soteriology is Christ’s mediatorial ministry from the Father and to the Father. The self-sacrificing love in which the Son of

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God wrought our redemption has two aspects; first, his dealing with us on the part of God and, second, his dealing with God on behalf of us, and these retrospectively and prospectively. Chapters 6 and 7 are the central and most famous in The Nature of the Atonement. They are the heart of McLeod Campbell’s central argument. The first third of the book sets the context for the retrospective and prospective aspects of the atonement; the second half negotiates around problems raised thereby, working out their implications. McLeod Campbell offers a fourfold Christological structure, in the manner of four open-ended boxes created by two intersecting perpendicular lines. Retrospectively, Christ deals with humankind on the part of God and deals with God on behalf of humankind. Thinking visually, we have the downward movement of God in Christ towards us and the upward movement of God in Christ towards God with respect to our past sins and how they are dealt with. Prospectively, the Son honours the Father in the sight of humankind and the Son deals with the Father on our behalf with respect to our future life in God. Again thinking visually, Christ reveals the life of sonship in response to God’s Fatherhood as the downward movement of God towards us and Christ offers the true human response to the Father as the upward movement of Christ towards the Father, into which life we participate. Thus we have two parallel movements from and to God, looking backwards and forwards respectively. McLeod Campbell defended the gospel of the love of God precisely at the point where the atonement is actual, that is, in and through the mediatorial bi-directional priesthood of Christ, from which light alone he sought to expound it. Christ’s priestly ministry reached both backwards to deal with our separation from God and forwards to bring us into communion with God. He broke with the conventional pattern, which was to see atonement only retrospectively. God in Christ acts in this twofold way, bringing God to us and us to God, bridging the gulf that separated between what sin had made us and what it was the desire of God’s love that we should become—our participation in eternal life through our adoption as ‘sons’ of God. Retrospectively, Christ deals with humankind on the part of God. Christ bears witness for God, revealing God, and as such suffering in his body the divine judgement against and sorrow over our sin. McLeod Campbell lays emphasis on Christ’s witness-bearing—witnessing to vindicate the Father’s name, to the excellence of the will of God against which we were rebelling, to the trustworthiness of the Father’s heart in which we were refusing to put confidence, and to the unchanging character of God’s love. Central is the love of God expressed as vicarious satisfaction over and against a penal theology of punishment. The sadness that is Christ’s suffering shows that our sins break God’s heart and bring God’s condemnation upon us. Insofar as sin involves suffering the judgement of God, Jesus suffers that judgement.

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God in Christ has entered into humanity’s sinful separation from God because it is the nature of divine love to suffer with humanity. What Christ suffered on the cross was not a punishment for imputed sin, but the revelation and bearing of God’s love. It is in Christ as the righteous person dealing retrospectively with God on our behalf that McLeod Campbell’s originality is seen in what came to be called his doctrine of vicarious penitence (a term he does not use). As God with us, Christ sees and knows sin for what it is. Christ turned to the Father and offered to God what we were unable to do. That oneness of mind with the Father, which toward man took the form of condemnation of sin, would in the Son’s dealing with the Father in relation to our sins, take the form of a perfect confession of our sins. This confession, as to its own nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man . . . He who would intercede for us must begin with confessing our sins. (McLeod Campbell 1856: 118)

How does this ‘Amen’ overcome God’s judgement? Christ responds to it with a perfect response and in that response he absorbs it. That response has all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of humankind, and by that perfect response the wrath of God is rightly met. This is a dogmatically controlled intuitive insight into the nature of the atonement that illustrates both the task and the risk of theology—the task, because McLeod Campbell seeks to apprehend the reality of God to which the texts bear witness; the risk, because he ventures into the mystery of God and our redemption, where there is always the danger of saying too much. It is debated whether so-called ‘vicarious penance’ is a valid theological construct. H. R. Mackintosh published a brief opinion in 1916. It struck Mackintosh as the fruit of devout and spiritual thought, avoiding a legal interpretation of the gospel. No one, he judges, would be more rewarded than to sit at the feet of McLeod Campbell when reflecting on the deepest problems of the cross of Christ. Nevertheless, Mackintosh notes there is no NT account that resembles the view that Christ repented of our sins vicariously. Also, the idea of vicarious penance is not true to life. One repents for one’s own sin, only. Penance not only implies, but includes, guilt. Can this be transferred to Jesus, who did not commit moral evil? How can someone be justly punished for something he or she did not commit? The notion of atonement as something provided by God means that the nature of atonement must be predicable of God. Can we predicate penitence of God? Mackintosh identifies promising contours for atonement theory. Vicarious penance points to a great inward experience of Jesus, a terrible spiritual anguish, where perfect holiness and love meet sin’s malice and passion against God. McLeod Campbell has opened a window to a deep truth. Our sins bore down upon Jesus in a terrible way such that any theory of the atonement must be

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mindful that he bore our sins deeply within himself, not in some way external to himself in an imputed manner. Further, vicarious penitence leads us to be aware of Christ’s true oneness with us. His identifying presence with us must lead him to know the shame for our sin and to take responsibility for it. Christ’s acknowledgement of God’s righteous judgement and bearing of it must have its place in an account of the atonement. What McLeod Campbell’s position finally lacks, according to Mackintosh, is a satisfying account of Christ’s death. Why was a verbal contrition not enough? Why must blood be drawn to make an atonement? Certainly McLeod Campbell was reaching for something ineffable yet wonderful, no less than the Christian confidence in God’s love and mercy revealed in Christ. Perfect repentance, in McLeod Campbell’s sense, means that when the sinner confesses his or her sins the gospel is that Christ has already answered for, and accepted the sinner. Confidence does not rest on any repentance the sinner makes, but on what Christ has already offered to the Father. For McLeod Campbell, Christ’s confession of our sin in response to divine condemnation of it must have contemplated our own participation in that confession and its consequence for us. Atonement is not just appeasement of the past but must look also to our future life with and in God, to restoration to a life of communion with God. Atonement must be seen in the light of the end contemplated: the meaning of communion with God is our participation in eternal life through union with Christ. To this end McLeod Campbell favourably cites 1 Peter 3:18. The remission of sins is directly related to the gift of eternal life. This end contemplated is not the legal title of an imputed righteousness but life in Christ, nothing less than participation in the mind and life of Christ in his life of sonship to the Father. To develop this general perspective of the ends contemplated in the atonement McLeod Campbell again appeals to the bi-directional mediatorial Christology, but now in prospective aspect. First, McLeod Campbell reflects on the Son’s honouring the Father in the sight of people, which is the ‘downward’ aspect. This has as its object our participation in the life of sonship, knowing, enjoying, and inheriting the Father as our Father. Believers are called to know the Father through knowing the Son in whom He is well pleased, and so may know of the Father’s desire towards us. We are called in Christ to enjoy the Father as our Father. McLeod Campbell directs us in Christ to know the Father’s heart towards us. We see the intended restoration of our orphan spirits to the Father and the Father of spirits to his lost children. Prospectively, dealing with God on our behalf, what Christ desires for us is nothing less than our sharing in his human fellowship with the Father. Christ has offered to the Father the true and perfect response to the Father’s love, which is accepted, and which now is to be reproduced in us. What God has accepted for us in Christ, is also what God has given to us in Christ. This is the power to confess

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our sins with our Amen to Christ’s confession of them. It is knowledge of our adoption as ‘sons’. This leads to worship of the Father, which is true ‘sonship’, our access into the holiest of all, the Father’s heart. We are established in a filial relation to the Father of our spirits. Thus is fulfilled the teaching of John 14:6, no one comes to the Father but by the Son. This is the great and all-including necessity that is revealed by the atonement. In response we make our ‘Amen’ to Christ’s ‘Amen’ by the grace of our union with Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our author moves from theistic language, with its reference to God, to filial language, with its reference to the Father. The atonement is not just a sharing in Christ’s benefits; it is a sharing in his filial love for the Father, a sharing in a relationship uniquely his. We know who the Father is and what is the desire of the Father’s heart towards us. This knowledge teaches us of our loss through sin and of the Father’s will to restore us from our orphan state to communion through adoption. To do this, Christ now presents his own righteousness in humanity expressed as perfect love towards and in service of God. Christ has consecrated a way into the holy company of God through the purification of his blood, enabling us, in his name, that is, in union with him through the Holy Spirit, not only to worship God in truth and to draw near to God, crying, ‘Abba, Father’, but also to serve God as we are called to do. We come to God only as God’s children or not at all, to share in his divine sonship. The foregoing is summed up by the wonderful statement: ‘Therefore Christ, as the Lord of our spirits and our life, devotes us to God and devotes us to men in the fellowship of his self-sacrifice’ (McLeod Campbell 1856: 225). McLeod Campbell’s theology of the atonement opens up fresh vistas of theological insight. In view of his reflection on the nature of the atonement, the doctrine never looks quite the same again. Yet its strength is also a problem: it is single-minded. He has taken one soteriological metaphor—our restoration to communion with the Father—and allowed it to open up the whole of the gospel. Other metaphors, of course, must also be included and developed to open up the soteriological vista in a comprehensive way. His arguments leave atonement theory incomplete, in part because of stern resistance to penal atonement. McLeod Campbell has been seen to fall short in an overemphasis on Father–Son relations at the expense of a robust doctrine of the Trinity. Although he developed a doctrine of the Son receiving and giving the Holy Spirit, it is perhaps more latent that explicit. Further, in his doctrine of the atonement McLeod Campbell focused on the saving efficacy of the life and death of Jesus with minimum discussion on his resurrection, which is surely part of a full expression of doctrine. Nevertheless, because his theology is briefly before us, as a corrective to what he took to be a diminished view of the gospel, we can look again at the biblical metaphors that express the majesty and holiness of God in legal terms and allow them an appropriate, though not a controlling, place.

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In 1868, McLeod Campbell was awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the University of Glasgow. In his laureation address, Principal John Caird declared that the heretic had converted the church. Subsequently, McLeod Campbell has been acknowledged as one of Scotland’s leading theologians, though not without his critics.

Bibliography Barth, Karl (2004). Church Dogmatics 1.2. London: T&T Clark. Bell, M. Charles (1985). Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. Burleigh, J. H. S. (1960). A Church History of Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, John McLeod (1856). The Nature of the Atonement. Repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999. Campbell, John McLeod (1873). Reminiscences and Reflections, Referring to His Early Ministry in the Parish of Row, edited with introduction by Donald Campbell. London: Macmillan. Erskine, Thomas (1831). The Brazen Serpent. Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes. Erskine, Thomas (1871). The Spiritual Order and Other Papers. Repr. Leopold Classic. Erskine, Thomas (2016 [1828]). The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel. Repr. Pickerington, OH: Beloved Publishing. Gerrish, Brian A. (1978). Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodloe, James C. (1997). John McLeod Campbell: The Extent and Nature of the Atonement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary. Gunton, Colin (1988). ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 41: 359–76. Horrocks, Don (2004). Laws of the Spiritual Order. Carlisle: Paternoster Press. Irving, Edward (1866). The Collected Writings of Edward Irving. London: A. Strahan. McIntyre, John (1992). The Shape of Soteriology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Mackintosh, H. R. (1913). The Person of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Purves, Andrew (2015). Exploring Christology and Atonement: Conversations with John McLeod Campbell, H. R. Mackintosh and T. F. Torrance. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Stevenson, Peter K. (2004). God in Our Nature: The Incarnational Theology of John McLeod Campbell. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Torrance, James B. (1973). ‘The Contribution of John McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 26: 295–311.

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Torrance, Thomas F. (1996). Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Tuttle, George M. (1986). So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian Atonement. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. Van Dyk, Leanne (1995). The Desire of Divine Love: John McLeod Campbell’s Doctrine of the Atonement. New York: Peter Lang.

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18 Free Church Theology 1843–1900 Disruption Fathers and Believing Critics Michael Bräutigam

Introduction This chapter offers a fresh perspective on the history of Scottish Free Church (FC) theology in the Victorian era through the lens of the church’s key theologians.¹ The FC tradition produced a rich variety of creative scholars who had a decisive influence not only on their own denomination but also on Scotland as a whole. In what follows, the history of FC theology from 1843 to 1900 shall be traced in two steps. First, this chapter deals with the ‘fathers’ of the 1843 Disruption who laid the foundation for theology and practice in the early FC. Second, the subsequent generation of FC theologians will be explored, in particular the ‘believing critics’ as they were called, who, by their openness to an innovative, historical-critical exploration of the Bible, caused serious controversy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Whilst it is the main intention of this chapter to chisel out the distinctive theological features of individual theologians, it goes without saying that these individuals were placed in larger historical, ecclesial, and cultural contexts, and references to these important factors will be given when appropriate.

The Disruption Theologians Nineteenth-century theology gave birth to a broad spectrum of original ideas and methods in theology. This is certainly true for Scottish theology in general and the theology of the Disruption fathers in particular. One could argue that, in effect, the Disruption theologians were nineteenth-century Scottish theology. The FC of Scotland emerged as a result of socio-political conflict. In the 1830s, during what is known as the Ten Years’ Conflict, a struggle over church–state relationships that had been smouldering in the Church of Scotland came to a head.

¹ The author wishes to thank Douglas N. Campbell, Ronald Christie, William Johnstone, Donald Macleod, John Scoales, and Rowland S. Ward for their helpful and constructive comments regarding an earlier version of this chapter.

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Contrary to the Moderates of the Established Church, the Evangelical party opted for the spiritual independence of the church from secular interference of the state. While the right of patronage allowed the patrons to nominate the minister of a congregation, the Evangelicals wished to uphold the view that no minister could be settled without the consent of the people. The conflict reached a crisis point in May 1843, when about a third of the Church of Scotland’s ministers, nearly five hundred clergymen, left the General Assembly and formed the FC of Scotland. The leading figures of this movement will occupy us in the remainder of this section: Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), the visionary pioneer with his practical emphasis on theology, the creative theologian Robert Smith Candlish (1806–73) who rescued the doctrine of adoption from obscurity, the learned William Cunningham (1805–61) and his resuscitation of Reformation theology, and George Smeaton (1814–89) with his innovative ideas on atonement theology and pneumatology.

Thomas Chalmers The leading figure of the Disruption was Thomas Chalmers, an exceptionally gifted speaker, prolific writer, social revolutionary, and church reformer with a wide range of interests. Chalmers served as Principal and Professor of Theology at the newly established FC ministry training institution, Edinburgh’s New College. His vision went beyond the confines of his denomination as he sought to establish a ‘godly commonwealth’ in Scotland and to inspire Christian mission around the globe (Brown 1982; Roxborogh 1999). As regards to theology, Chalmers has often been characterized as more of a practical than a systematic theologian. His greatest strengths lay primarily in the area of apologetics and only secondly in dogmatic theology (Adamson 2013, 2014). Chalmers’ theological programme has therefore been criticized by some as due to an alleged negligence of thought and expression (e.g. Rice 1979: 175, 188). One must not overlook, though, that his contribution is still significant as it gave shape to the way subsequent generations of FC theologians would ‘do’ theology within the context of church and society. The following characteristics of his theological vision deserve closer attention. First, Chalmers pursued a practical theology that was based on Scripture and nourished by what he called ‘experimental Christianity’ (1853: 124, 537). He preferred a theology that was empirical-scientific in method and relevant both to the individual believer and to society at large over an exclusively metaphysical approach to theology (Adamson 2014: 70). Chalmers lived in a world of great change, facing the challenges of growing industrialization, urbanization, and secularization. His gospel preaching, lectures, and attempts at social reform, such as his practical steps towards reviving the parishes and implementing poor relief, were fuelled by his experiential reading of Scripture, which was, in his view

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divinely inspired and thus authoritative for theology, church, and life (1845: 343–455). In his mature theological opus, the Institutes of Theology, he rejects an ‘unwarrantable dogmatism’ and argues for an inductive-analytical method (1849: xv). ‘[A] system of faith’, he claims, ‘may be the result of a process strictly observational’ (1849: 372). Subscribing to the Westminster Standards, he insists that he does not intend to introduce new doctrinal content, but to offer theological continuity and to apply doctrine to everyday life: ‘We are glad to quit the region of transcendentals, and alight upon earth among the wants, and the feelings, and the moral aspirations of our own familiar nature’ (1849: xx). This practical-theological emphasis meant that Chalmers remained rather disengaged with what he regarded as unhelpful speculations about the extent of the atonement, for instance, which was, of course, a recurring topic in Scottish Presbyterian theology at the time (Macleod 2010: 10–17). Chalmers had serious reservations about this debate in the first place, since in his view it led to either universalism or a restricted gospel preaching. ‘On entering upon this topic’, Chalmers writes, ‘I can not but express my regret that the question between universal and particular redemption should ever have been stirred’ (1850a: 388). Second, shaped by Scottish Common Sense philosophy and Baconian inductivism, Chalmers developed and pursued a form of natural theology that was distinct from a classic natural theological approach (Rice 1979: 176–83; Topham 1999: 165). While ‘the theology of nature sheds powerful light on the being of a God’, Chalmers writes, ‘and . . . can reach a considerable degree of probability, both for his moral and natural attributes . . . when it undertakes the question between God and man, that is what it finds to be impracticable. It is here that the main helplessness of nature lies’ (1835: 416). It was the intention of Chalmers, the apologist and evangelist, to draw attention to this ‘helplessness’ as he appealed to human conscience in his sermons and speeches and urged his audience to pick up the Bible for themselves and experience an encounter with God. The mature Chalmers, as Topham points out, establishes a ‘natural theology of conscience’ which ‘constituted the strongest presumptive evidence for the existence of a moral governor’ (1999: 165). In an original manner, Chalmers intended to link his own Reformed tradition—with its firm emphasis on the authority of the Bible and divine revelation—to the new developments in philosophy and science. Chalmers regarded it of some importance to acknowledge, especially, numerous new scientific findings and methods—and this leads to the third observation. Convinced of the timelessness of doctrinal truth on the one hand, Chalmers remained open to fresh application of scriptural truth in light of novel scientific developments on the other: [A]lthough the subject-matter of theology is unalterably fixed by that authority which dictated the volumes of inspiration, and which hath pronounced a curse on the man who shall add thereunto, yet is there not a constant necessity for

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accommodating both the vindication of this authority and the illustration of this subject-matter to the ever-varying spirit and philosophy of the times? (1850a: xviii)

This combined emphasis on faithfulness to doctrinal continuity and creative openness to admit the evidence of novel scientific findings to the theological discourse would be emulated by several subsequent theologians and became a hallmark of early FC theology. Developments in modern science had to be taken seriously, Chalmers was convinced. ‘The first Scotsman who read the Genesis narrative in the light of Geology’ (McCrie 1907: 149), Chalmers was open to the option of a ‘gap theory’ (1836–42), and was convinced that accepting a ‘higher antiquity’ of the earth than ‘is assigned to it by the writings of Moses’ does not necessarily undermine one’s faith (Miller 1857: 115). With his inter-disciplinary approach, Chalmers tried to bridge the widening chasm of faith and science in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland and he foreshadowed arguments recently put forward by the intelligent design movement (Adamson 2014: 66). Chalmers’ Scripture-based experiential approach, which stimulated his social concern and his openness towards incorporating developments in science into his theological agenda, set the standard for subsequent FC theology and church practice. It proved influential for other Disruption ‘fathers’, especially for Cunningham and Smeaton. The discussion moves next to Robert Smith Candlish who succeeded Chalmers as key leader of the FC in the first decades after the Disruption.

Robert Smith Candlish An eccentric and ‘wonderfully electric preacher of the evangel’, Robert Smith Candlish began his career as a scholar—as did most theologians in Scotland—in parish ministry (Macleod 1943: 284). He enjoyed an effective ministry in St George’s FC in Edinburgh, when he was appointed Professor of Divinity at New College in 1847. Candlish returned, however, to St George’s pulpit on the unexpected death of his successor. This move illustrates the characteristically high view of the parish ministry among, in particular, the first generation FC theologians. Candlish served as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1861, and a year later, after William Cunningham’s death, he was appointed Principal of New College, a post he retained until his death, making sure, though, that he could continue his ministry at St George’s. Candlish published a range of significant exegetical and systematic-theological works. Carefully navigating between the cliffs of ‘presumptuous and dogmatical theorizing’ on the one hand, and ‘loose and careless exegesis’ on the other, Candlish intended to offer a faithful account of scriptural teaching (1845: x). In

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Contributions towards the Exposition of the Book of Genesis (1843–62, 3 vols.), later revised as The Book of Genesis (1868, 2 vols.), Candlish highlights the importance of faith in a personal God for an adequate understanding of creation. A critical discussion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) is, however, missing; it took, in fact, some time before Darwin’s views came to be discussed in exegetical studies (Rogerson 2009). Overall, Candlish’s works reflect a clear adherence to the Westminster Standards: ‘I yield to no man in my admiration of the Westminster Assembly’, he writes; ‘I believe that its doctrinal decisions . . . will stand the test of time, and ultimately command the assent of universal Christendom’ (1865: 289). In Candlish’s view, the Confession brought out a particularly important aspect, which would become a defining factor of FC spirituality and church practice in Scotland, and especially in the Highlands. This was the view that the Lord’s Day was to be kept holy as the Christian Sabbath. According to Candlish, both the Church Fathers and the Reformers had a limited understanding of the Sabbath as they ‘contrast it far too strongly with the free and happy Resurrection-day’ (1866: 167). Candlish, however, admired the ‘Puritans and Presbyterians’, since they were ‘the first to go straight to the fountain of all truth, and draw pure water from thence alone; to ask simply what does Scripture teach’ in this respect (1866: 167). Candlish was also a strong advocate for exclusive Psalmody and he argued for a ban on instruments in worship services—although he was in later life more open to the question of instruments—both hallmarks of FC practice.² Candlish’s most original theological contribution was his creative move to rescue the doctrine of adoption from obscurity, which, in his view, eked out a meagre existence in the shadow of the doctrine of justification. He emphasized the fatherhood of God and the sonship of believers in his exposition on The First Epistle of John (1877), and, more prominently, in the first of the Cunningham Lectures of 1864, which stimulated a lively theological debate. In these lectures, Candlish stresses a high view of the fatherhood of God and rejects any form of creative or general fatherhood: ‘Let it be settled, then, as a great fundamental truth, that on whatever other ground the relation of fatherhood in God may rest, and in whatever other sphere of divine operation or creature experience it may unfold itself, – it cannot have its rise in creation’ (1865: 28). Candlish seeks to highlight the soteriologically relevant difference between a mere Creator–creature relationship and the—much more meaningful—bond between the divine Father and his believing child. Church of Scotland theologian and professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University, Thomas J. Crawford (1812–75) demurred. In his published lectures, Fatherhood of God (1866, 1868), he claims that humans after the Fall still lived in some form of filial relationship with God, since they were still in God’s ² The FC permitted hymns in 1872 and the use of musical instruments in 1883; these were banned in the post-1900 FC and the ban was lifted only recently, in 2010.

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image and likeness.³ ‘They are still children of God’, he claims, ‘though degenerate and apostate children’ (1868: 30). In Crawford’s view, adoption restores the broken relationship, whereas Candlish forcefully argues that sonship through divine adoption establishes an altogether new and permanent form of relationship between the believer and God, a bond that goes beyond a mere restoration of a broken relationship through the Fall. Candlish theologically relates human sonship with Christ’s sonship through participation, and he brings out the unique aspects of the doctrine of adoption as he carefully highlights both differences and commonalities with its neighbouring doctrines, namely of justification and regeneration (Trumper 2001: 363–71). For Candlish, as well as for Cunningham and Smeaton, doctrines that explored the accomplishment and the application of salvation took centre stage in the theological discourse. Candlish clashed with William Cunningham over the question of theological education. Candlish favoured the approach to diversify, that is, to found theological colleges in Aberdeen and Glasgow (a proposal that was ultimately accepted), whereas Cunningham preferred to keep just one central college in Edinburgh, at least until that College was fully equipped and financially secure. Their friendship was strained over the issue and this episode illustrates the challenges involved in establishing the young denomination and its education for ministers.

William Cunningham William Cunningham, scholar, pastor, and Moderator of the General Assembly (1859), was one of the most influential theologians of the FC tradition. Cunningham was appointed Professor of Theology in 1844, and a year later he followed David Welsh (1793–1845) in the chair of Ecclesiastical History. From 1847, following the death of Thomas Chalmers, he served as Principal of New College until his death in 1861. Cunningham had a considerable impact on several generations of FC ministers and theologians. ‘Very largely’, write Drummond and Bulloch, ‘Cunningham set the theological tone for the Free Church’ (1975: 19). He focused his efforts to a great deal on a reaffirmation of the theology of the Reformation, equipping his students both to detect and to debate what he considered heretical positions, namely views irreconcilable with those of the Protestant Reformers and their heirs. Cunningham embraced the theology of the Protestant Reformers and their successors for two reasons: He considered them faithful to the Scriptures and he appreciated that they were, in his view, free from contamination with theological novelty (Cunningham shared Chalmers’ aversion towards doctrinal novelties).

³ For a closer examination of the debate, see Trumper (2001: 346–97).

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‘We believe that the theology of the Reformation’, writes Cunningham, ‘in its great leading features, both as it respects doctrine in the more limited sense of the word, and as it respects the organization of the church as a society, is the unchangeable truth of God revealed in His word, which individuals and churches are bound to profess and to act upon’ (1866: 9). Historical debates surrounding the Reformation provided the context for doctrinal discussions in his lectures. His lectures in theology, posthumously published as Historical Theology (1863, 2 vols.) are ‘in effect a systematic theology, using the major controversies as occasions for elaborate treatments of the main themes of Christian dogmatics’ (Macleod 1993: 229). In Cunningham’s view, there was ‘no doubt that much the most important period in the history of the church is the Reformation from Popery, and the period intervening between that great era and the present day’ (1863: vol. 1, 7). Cunningham tended to side with the views of John Calvin and Francis Turretin, and as later expressed by the Westminster Divines (Beeke 1995: 220–1). He followed the French Reformer, since ‘Calvin was far above the weakness of aiming at the invention of novelties in theology, or of wishing to be regarded as the discoverer of new opinions’ (1866: 296). From Cunningham’s perspective, the doctrinal summit had been reached in the seventeenth century, and subsequent doctrinal formulation was to be dismissed as fanciful novelty: ‘Calvinism unfolds most fully and explicitly the whole system of doctrine revealed in the sacred Scriptures. It brings out most prominently and explicitly the sovereign agency of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in the salvation of sinners; while it most thoroughly humbles and abases men, as the worthless and helpless recipients of the divine mercy and bounty’ (1866: 529). Since in his view the sixteenth-century Reformers achieved a ‘restoration, then, of the doctrine, worship, and government of the church to a large measure at least of apostolic purity’ (1863: vol. 1, 461), Cunningham intended to recover and implement their theology in his own time and age (1863: vol. 1, 7). Some specific features of Cunningham’s theological programme merit closer scrutiny. Donald Macleod observes that Cunningham detected a hierarchy of truths in Scripture whilst he also addressed a hierarchy of heresies (1993: 229). ‘Everything which is taught in Scripture it is equally incumbent upon us, as a matter of duty or obligation, to believe, as every statement rests equally upon the authority of God’, Cunningham writes. ‘But there is a great difference’, he continues, ‘in point of intrinsic importance, among the many truths of different kinds and classes taught us in Scripture’ (1863: vol. 2, 503). Cunningham exhibits a strong view on the authority, inspiration, sufficiency, and infallibility of Holy Scripture (1878: 343–557), and highlights the significant role of the Holy Spirit’s activity in believers as they read and interpret Scripture (1878: 538–79). The doctrine of substitutionary atonement occupies a prominent place in Cunningham’s works (1863: vol. 2, 237–370). It is especially his theological focus on the crucified Christ that has had a lasting impact on FC theology—his heritage continues to live on in

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the publications of Donald Macleod (1940–) today, such as in his Christ Crucified (2014). Cunningham maintained the Westminster Confession’s position of particular redemption and he likewise emphasized that the free gospel offer to all was taught and preached (Macleod 1993: 230–1). The doctrine of justification takes a special place on Cunningham’s theological agenda (1863: vol. 2, 1–120), and he elaborates on the doctrine of assurance, a topic of intrinsic importance to FC spirituality, with theological precision and pastoral sensitivity (1866: 111–48). Interestingly, Cunningham preferred Zwingli’s interpretation of the Lord’s Supper over what he considered to be Calvin’s and Luther’s positions, and he devoted considerable space to this debate in his lectures (1866: 212–91). One ought to point out, though, that he was not a Zwinglian in the generally accepted sense, and neither, he argued, was Zwingli himself. In light of the growing influence of Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century Scotland, and the fact that even prominent Free Churchmen, such as Alexander Whyte, publicly expressed their appreciation for some aspects of Romanism, Cunningham felt he had to delineate the boundaries between Roman Catholic teaching and the doctrines of the Reformers and post-Reformation writers (Barbour 1923: 241–8, 386–95). He used strong language in his evaluation of Roman Catholicism—it was ‘Satan’s masterpiece’, he argued—and he was thus far less optimistic about ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church than his predecessor Chalmers (1863: vol. 2, 141). Both Socinianism and Arminianism receive extensive critical treatments (1863: vol. 2, 155–236; vol. 2, 371–513), and he strongly disagreed with the theological interpretations of his compatriots Thomas Erskine (1788–1870), John McLeod Campbell (1800–72), and Edward Irving (1792–1834), emphasizing that their ‘new’ theology meant a significant departure from the Westminster Standards (Honeycutt 2002: 46–76). With his robust stance on key doctrines of Reformation theology and his clear allegiance to the Westminster Confession, Cunningham set a benchmark for FC theology. While his heritage was challenged in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the proponents of continental higher criticism in the FC, Cunningham’s theological legacy has taken firm root especially in the Scottish Highlands, and it has been re-emphasized in post-1900 FC theology. The following section on Cunningham’s colleague, the New Testament scholar George Smeaton, completes this survey of the Disruption fathers.

George Smeaton George Smeaton, the youngest of the Disruption fathers, was strongly influenced by Thomas Chalmers. Smeaton studied under Chalmers in Edinburgh and later in life ministered in a church where Chalmers was an elder. Recognizing Smeaton’s academic capabilities, the FC appointed him in 1854 to the Chair of Divinity at

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Aberdeen’s FC College. Three years later, he moved to Edinburgh to serve as Professor of New Testament Exegesis at New College, where he taught alongside William Cunningham, James Buchanan (1804–70) and ‘Rabbi’ (John) Duncan (1796–1870). However, Smeaton’s aims to consolidate Chalmers’ vision of a unified FC and to strengthen the church’s traditional interpretation of the Westminster Standards, especially its teaching on the authority of Scripture, proved challenging. When Smeaton passed away in 1889, the face of the church had changed considerably as shall be explored in the second part of this chapter. The present purpose, however, is to explore the characteristic elements of Smeaton’s theology, first and foremost his creative contributions in atonement theology and Pneumatology. Smeaton explores central New Testament passages with a view to the theological implications of Christ’s death on the cross in two major works: The Doctrine of Atonement as Taught by Christ himself (1868), and The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by the Apostles (1870). In his insistence on a vicarious penal substitution view, Smeaton remains within the framework of the Reformed tradition whilst he offers some more nuanced interpretations (Kinnear 1995: 124–79). First of all, Smeaton makes clear that God is a just God who requires a perfect satisfaction for sin. God demonstrated his love in that he sent his Son Jesus Christ, who possessed the Holy Spirit in infinite fullness, and who gave himself as a perfect offering for sin and suffered its just punishment in the sinners’ place. According to Smeaton’s interpretation of the New Testament writers, their words ‘can convey no other meaning but this, that the Lord Jesus underwent the penalty we had merited, and was treated as an accursed person in our stead, and so freed us from the curse by vicariously bearing it’ (1870: 258). It was, however, not only through his atoning death, but also by his atoning life that Christ achieved our salvation (Kinnear 1995: 152–3). At his baptism, for instance, Christ, the ‘sin-bearing lamb of God’, made the sins of humankind his own, although he himself was sinless and lived a sinless life (1868: 65–79). Like his fellow FC theologians, Smeaton argues for the view of particular redemption: ‘The salvation is not won for any to whom it is not applied. All our Lord’s sayings assume this, and take it for granted (John x. 15). To suppose the opposite, would imply that a costly price had been paid, and that those for whom it was paid derived no advantage from it; which could only be on the ground that He wanted either love or power’ (1868: 323). Following Calvin, Smeaton stresses the theme of ‘union with Christ’ as it relates to the atonement (Kinnear 1995: 161–6). In Smeaton’s view, this union is to be considered as intimately as possible, as if the believers had accomplished the atonement on their own: ‘We have but one public representative, corporate act performed by the Son of God, in which we share as truly as if we had accomplished that atonement ourselves’ (1870: 162). ‘The atoning death of the Lord, on the ground of federal unity and substitution’, writes Smeaton, ‘was also our act; that is, was accepted as our act in him’ (1870: 211). And as the believers share in Christ’s death, they also share in his life: ‘The resurrection comes within the sphere of

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reward, and enabled Him to diffuse His life through His own people, redeemed to be His . . . and replenish them with the divine life which He procured for them’ (1870: 212). One particular sign of this new life through union with Christ is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believers. In 1882 Smeaton delivered the ninth of the Cunningham Lectures, which he published later as The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (1882). With his focus on the Holy Spirit, Smeaton aimed to fill what he considered a serious gap in contemporary theology: ‘We may safely affirm that the doctrine of the Spirit is almost entirely ignored. The representatives of modern theology, it is well known, have almost wholly abandoned it. Many of them deny the Spirit’s personality in the most open and undisguised manner. Some affirm that a dogma on this topic is not essential either to religion or theology, and that we may altogether dispense with it’ (1882: 1).

Smeaton was, in fact, not the only FC theologian to complain about this deficit; his colleague, James Buchanan, who succeeded Chalmers in the chair of Systematic Theology, had published a work on Pneumatology several decades earlier (The Office and Work of the Holy Spirit, 1842). The intriguing feature of Smeaton’s approach is his creative integration of federal theology and Pneumatology. Based on Robert Shillaker’s (2002) study, three important aspects of Smeaton’s proposal can be identified: First, Smeaton assumes that Adam was indwelt by the Holy Spirit, yet the Spirit departed from him after the Fall. ‘God gave the Spirit to Adam’, Smeaton writes, but ‘by his apostasy the Spirit departed, and he was left in possession of a mere natural or animal being, having not the Spirit’ (1882: 164–5). The second Adam, Jesus Christ, again possesses the Holy Spirit, and that in a very special sense. ‘The infinite fulness of the Spirit which was given to Him was constant and uninterrupted, and the result of the hypostatic union’ (1882: 41). Second, eager to safeguard the unity of Christ’s person, Smeaton claims that the Holy Spirit coordinates the communication between the human and divine natures in Christ: ‘The communication from the one nature to the other was by the Spirit, the EXECUTIVE of all the works of God’ (1882: 126, emphasis original). While Archibald Alexander Hodge took issue with what he considered Smeaton’s departure from ‘Church doctrine’ and ‘actual Bible teaching’ (1883: 454), Robert Shillaker showed that Smeaton’s approach was in fact not as unconventional as Hodge maintained, and that similar suggestions had been put forward by other Reformed theologians (2002: 185–94). Third, Smeaton emphasizes the ‘mission of the Spirit conjoined with that of the Son’ (1882: 117). Having atoned for human sin, Christ, the second Adam, sends the Spirit upon regenerate believers and the Spirit returns to humanity with all the benefits and blessings that it implies. Smeaton attached particular importance to the pastoral implications of the work of the Spirit in the individual believer and the church. Three of his six Cunningham Lectures are devoted to these aspects, and he encourages his audience to be filled with the Spirit.

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Smeaton was also keenly aware of the theological developments on the continent and he shared his insights with his students in the classroom (Shillaker 2002: 146–58). Smeaton monitored the increasing dominance of modern historical-critical scholarship in his own time, especially as pursued by the scholars of the Tübingen school (1868: 140–2, 416). The theology of the Disruption fathers, in fact, was not an insular phenomenon as sometimes suggested. On the contrary, both the Disruption theologians and especially their successors engaged creatively with the broad range of theological movements that flourished in the nineteenth century. This very interest challenged the internal cohesion of the FC towards the end of the nineteenth century, as will be discussed in the following part.

The Believing Critics The nineteenth century was marked by ground-breaking developments in biblical research carried out by scholars on the continent, in particular in what is today known as Germany. F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School suggested new approaches towards interpreting the Bible, and as the seeds of their innovative ideas travelled to Scotland, they found a fertile soil in the minds of the curious second generation FC theologians. Not everyone in the church was happy to see historical criticism blossoming in the FC colleges, and the ensuing conflict, its causes and context, and, of course the scholars involved, will be considered next. The group of pious scholars who triggered the lengthy disputes in the FC towards the end of the nineteenth century intended to remain—by and large— faithful to the Westminster Confession, yet they embraced new developments in science and, especially, historical-critical research. The ‘believing critics’, as they became known, included in their number Andrew Bruce Davidson (1831–1902) and his student William Robertson Smith (1846–94), Marcus Dods (1834–1909), and Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831–99). Davidson and Smith even journeyed to Germany to learn from Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) et al. and returned with novel insights that caused a stir in the FC (Maier 2009: 86–122). The believing critics ‘helped to root Continental theology and philosophy in Scottish soil, and paved the way for the time, not so far distant, when Wellhausen, Ritschl, Herrmann and Harnack would be household words in the manses of the land’ (Cheyne 1999: 27). During this time attention shifted from the theological concerns of the Disruption theologians—such as questions of the extent of the atonement, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or Christian assurance— to the even more fundamental aspect of the nature and authority of the Bible. This phenomenon was not unique to the Scottish context. The publication of the Reimarus Fragments in the late eighteenth century, of the Leben Jesu (1835) by Strauss in Germany (Life of Jesus, 1846), and the Vie de Jésus (1863) of Renan in France (Life of Jesus, 1864), for instance, triggered a fresh debate as to how one

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could understand the Bible and its supernatural claims (Adams 2013). It opened a chasm between modern scholars on the one hand who intended to look at the Bible through the lens of what they considered scientific historical-critical research, and traditional Christian worshippers on the other who read the Bible in the context of the church (Adams 2013: 567–8). This contrast was at the heart of the late nineteenth-century Protestant theological controversy, both in Britain and on the continent, yet it played out differently in the various contexts. In the Scottish FC, the debate flared up between individual professors at the FC colleges and the various church courts, at times resulting in reprimands and in one instance even in a withdrawal of a professorial chair. A characteristic feature of the Scottish debate is its distinct focus on the nature of the Old Testament. Several of the believing critics in the FC colleges were Old Testament and/or Hebrew language scholars, such as Davidson, his pupil Robertson Smith, and George Adam Smith (1856–1942). The following section explores some key representatives of the ‘believing critics’ in more detail.

A. B. Davidson and William Robertson Smith After a period tutoring Hebrew, Davidson was appointed assistant to ‘Rabbi’ Duncan in 1858, and he succeeded him as Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at New College in 1863. Influenced by the Göttingen orientalist Heinrich Ewald (1803–75) and his pupil Julius Wellhausen, Davidson cautiously yet tenaciously introduced FC students to cutting-edge historical-critical methods, although initially he himself did not go as far in his Old Testament criticism as his German contemporaries (Davidson 1861; Needham 1993). Davidson’s main interest, in fact, was in the area of linguistics—his Introductory Hebrew Grammar of 1874 saw eighteen editions in his lifetime and the twenty-seventh edition was published in 1993 (ed. James Martin). His talented student Robertson Smith, however, embraced higher criticism more openly and caused significant controversy. In 1870, when Robertson Smith was still in his early twenties, he was already appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the FC’s theological college in Aberdeen. In his inaugural lecture, entitled, ‘What History teaches us to seek in the Bible’, Smith sets the stage for his programme of historical-critical research. In the lecture, Smith comes to the conclusion that the proper way of approaching the Bible is by way of ‘the honest practice of a higher criticism’ (1912: 233). Higher criticism, in Smith’s view, ‘does not mean negative criticism. It means the fair and honest looking at the Bible as a historical record, and the effort of everywhere to reach the real meaning and historical setting, not of individual passages of Scripture, but of the Scripture Records as a whole’ (1912: 233, emphasis original). While Smith still underscores the importance of faith in this context, the new trajectory is obvious: historical research plays the dominant role in the theological enterprise. A few

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years later, Smith published an entry on the ‘Bible’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, in which he adopted innovative findings of historicalcritical research, such as the documentary hypothesis (1875: 637). Smith argues that ‘a considerable portion of the New Testament is made up of writings not directly apostolical’, and he adds the rhetorical question as to whether one ought not to side with the opinion of ‘an influential school of modern critics, that a large portion of the [NT] books are direct forgeries, written in the interest of theological tendencies, to which they sacrifice without hesitation the genuine history and teaching of Christ and his apostles?’ (1875: 643). FC representatives were alarmed. Although the FC College Committee’s special report on Smith’s writing judged that it did not present sufficient ground to ‘support a process for heresy against Professor Smith’, it still considered his statements ‘of a dangerous and unsettling tendency’ (Free Church of Scotland 1877: 5, 10). The publication of the article triggered an avalanche of debates and meetings in various church courts and committees that lasted for several years. Smith’s allegiance, the church party feared, was more to what he considered modern scientific historical research than to traditional church practice. His 1880 publication of a piece on ‘Hebrew Language and Literature’ was the last straw in a highly charged dispute. Even though Smith received support from influential clergymen, such as James S. Candlish (1835–97) and Robert Rainy (1826–1906; for some peculiar reason his former teacher A. B. Davidson remained quiet in the background; Kidd and Wallace 2013: 254), he was removed from his post in 1881. The Assembly expressed its concern that Smith had issued in his article ‘statements which are fitted to throw grave doubt on the historical truth and divine inspiration of several books of Scripture’ (Thomson 1881: 21). In their view, Smith showed ‘a singular and culpable lack of sympathy with the reasonable anxieties of the Church as to the bearing of critical speculations on the integrity and authority of Scripture’ (Thomson 1881: 21). Smith retained his status as a minister, yet he ceased to exercise it (although he had never served in a pastoral capacity anyway), and moved to Cambridge to teach Arabic. Robertson Smith was not the only believing critic to be threatened with trial for heresy. Marcus Dods and A. B. Bruce, who both supported Smith during his lengthy trial between 1876 and 1881, faced a similar fate.

Marcus Dods and A. B. Bruce Dods caused considerable controversy with his sermon on Revelation and Inspiration in 1877. The Bible, he argued, was riddled with inaccuracies, and one might thus as well ‘give up the claim of absolute, thoroughgoing, literal infallibility’ (1877: 9). The minimal consensus, in Dods’ view, was that the Bible conveys to believers an accurate idea of the revelation of God. As regards inspiration and his

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interpretation of the Confession’s position on it, Dods was also notoriously elusive: ‘[T]hough I cordially accept the statement of the Confession’, he writes, ‘that all the books which compose our Bible are “given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life”, I at the same time evacuate the term “inspiration”, at least as regards the historical books, of the meaning which is commonly supposed to attach to it’ (1877: 8). The Presbytery of Glasgow expressed their concern at what they regarded as Dods’ suspicious statements regarding inspiration and they initiated an investigation into his published sermon. The Committee of the Free Presbytery of Glasgow considered Dods’ sermon to be ‘open to grave objections’, but did not recommend that any action should be taken (‘Report of the Committee’ 1878: 190). Dods reluctantly withdrew his sermon, but that was not the end of the story. His critics appealed to the FC Assembly and the case was brought to the 1878 General Assembly where, however, a comfortable majority voted in favour of Dods—predominantly due to Robert Rainy’s influence—and the case was dismissed. By that time it became evident that a large number of FC commissioners were happy to allow for at least a moderate form of biblical criticism (Kidd and Wallace 2013). The Confession, the majority agreed, allowed for some latitude in this respect. That this view continued to remain the majority’s position subsequently is illustrated by the fact that Dods was, with very little opposition, appointed to the chair of New Testament Exegesis at New College in 1889. In his inaugural address, Dods takes a critical stance on the doctrine of verbal inspiration, he highlights the important progress made by textual criticism and commends F. C. Baur for ‘opening a new era’ in the history of New Testament criticism (1889: 30–1). By accepting and disseminating German historical-critical scholarship—which was anathema to the more conservative voices in the FC— Dods manoeuvred himself again into a difficult position. In early 1890, a petition was presented to the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh that called on the Church to issue a libel against Dods on account of the ‘dangerous and compromising character of the views promulgated by Professor Dods’ (‘Petition to Free Presbytery’ 1890: 5). The 1890 General Assembly’s decision in favour of Dods illustrates the extent to which the ideas of the believing critics had by then permeated the FC. At this same Assembly, Dods’ Glasgow colleague, Bruce’s case was also heard. Bruce had been appointed Professor of Apologetics and New Testament Exegesis, at the FC’s Glasgow theological college in 1875. In his Kingdom of God, Or Christ’s Teaching According to the Synoptical Gospels (1889), Bruce employed, similar to Dods, synoptic source criticism in the tradition of Bernhard Weiss (1827–1918), contending that the gospel writers exercised considerable liberty in their use of the logia source (1889: 4–5, 26). According to Bruce, one finds in Luke, for instance, ‘modifications, omissions, and additions’ of Jesus’ words (1889: 14, emphasis original). The FC College Committee investigated the book and concluded that Bruce’s assertion did not warrant a formal procedure (‘Special Report’, 1890). Nevertheless, Bruce, together with Dods, was summoned before the 1890

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General Assembly, and his critics and supporters were given the opportunity to raise their concerns and offer their support. Bruce, who was also invited to speak, argued that his ideas had been taken out of context, and also expressed his grief over having been ‘misunderstood by good men’ (‘Special Report’, 1890: 177). Ultimately, the commissioners of the Assembly concluded that whilst Bruce’s views were imprudent, they saw ‘no ground for a process against him for teaching views which are opposed to the standards of the Church’ (‘Special Report’ 1890: 179). Bruce continued in his professorship and he tended to express himself more carefully in his subsequent writings (Strickland 2014: 200). This assessment of the believing critics exposes significant trends in late Victorian FC theology; three underlying factors of the debate call for a closer inspection. The episode of the heresy trials in the FC reflects the widening gulf between different parties within the church. There is, for one, a growing alienation between the academy and the church. Originally, the FC College had been conceived—very much in the spirit of Chalmers—as servant of the church, to prepare students ‘for the ministry of the gospel’ (Chalmers 1850b: 491). Laypeople now watched with suspicion as a new guild of (almost independent) academic scholars emerged, who were, from their perspective, only loosely connected with the church. The believing critics, judged from the viewpoint of the conservatives, were pursuing an impious scientific-critical interpretation of Holy Scripture. Well-educated lay church leaders were growing wary, wondering whether one now had to be a trained historical-critical scholar in order to understand the New Testament properly. Another divisive factor in the Scottish debate revolved around the interpretation of the Westminster Confession. Much of the debate was in fact not about the Bible per se but about one’s view of the Confession’s stance on it (see Kidd and Wallace 2013). The problem, of course, was that the Confession was rather silent on issues such as authorship, sources, readership, authorial intention, and purpose. The length of some of the heresy proceedings can be attributed to this dilemma, namely that the Confession itself did not express how much latitude there was for any form of moderate bible criticism (Rogers and McKim 1999: 203–6; Kidd and Wallace 2013: 248–50). In general, however, criticism, as understood by the believing critics, ought to serve a constructive purpose. Their intention, for the most part, was not to find faults or to detect internal inconsistencies in the Bible, but to clarify valid questions of authorship and sources, and they were by and large more cautious in their biblical critique than their German contemporaries. Whilst many in the church considered the believing critics’ interest in historical research as a significant departure from the traditional positions laid out by James Bannerman (who had written a work on Inspiration: The Infallible Truth and Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, 1865), and, of course, Cunningham, there were some conservatives in the church who showed more openness towards these new developments. FC minister Hugh Martin

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(1821–85), for instance, admitted that the Confession did navigate him ‘into no bondage on questions of verbal or plenary inspiration’ (1890: 4, emphasis original). Irenic voices such as Martin’s, however, could not dissipate the deep-seated mistrust between the different parties. The third factor in the debate had to do less with theology and more with a sense of cultural belonging. Looking at the controversy over the believing critics through the cultural-anthropological lens, a distinct pattern emerges. In general, the Confession was interpreted in more lenient terms in the Lowlands, whereas its interpretation and, even more importantly, its implementation were observed in much stricter ways in the Highlands. The Gaelic-speaking Highland congregations exhibited a deeply pious spirituality, adhered more firmly to the Sabbath principle, and subscribed more strongly to traditional Calvinist orthodoxy than the English-speaking Lowland congregations, who were more directly exposed to economic growth, and scientific and technological progress (Meek 1993a: 346–7; MacLeod 2000: 9–37, 125–78). When analysing the conflict over the believing critics, one therefore also has to include the geographical and cultural dimensions immanent to the debate: language, world-view, religious upbringing, and expression of spirituality. These significant differences between the Gaelic Highland congregations and the parishes in the Lowlands are reflected in the landmark decision in the church in the last decade of the nineteenth century (Meek 1993b: 405–6). In 1892, the Declaratory Act was passed when the majority of the General Assembly opted for a more lenient exegesis of the Westminster Confession. Dissatisfied with the decision, a number of predominantly Highland churches broke away from the FC to form the Free Presbyterian Church in 1893. Furthermore, from the 1860s onwards a union between the FC and the United Presbyterian Church had been looming and was repeatedly discussed at the Assembly. Whereas the Lowlanders broadly supported the idea, the Highlanders were generally against a union with what they considered to be too progressive a body. Mostly Highland clergy with a strong allegiance to the Westminster Confession continued to resist the union, which became a reality a few years later when the FC of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church merged and formed the United FC in 1900. The small dissenting remnant (about 2 per cent) who refused to join this union continued as the FC of Scotland, and, after having won a court case in 1904, slowly restructured the denomination and built up again a FC College on the Mound, adjacent to New College, where it remains to this day (renamed as Edinburgh Theological Seminary in 2014).

Conclusion The nineteenth century is marked by an increasing tension between growing secularization and modernization on the one hand, and a fresh expansion of

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religion and religious experience on the other (Osterhammel 2009: 1239–78). This tension is characteristically reflected in the history of early Scottish FC theology. A clear commitment to the theological values of the Reformed tradition as expressed, especially, in the Westminster Confession, is allied with a readiness to apply theological doctrine to a changing church and society, and with the intention to develop, in conversation with new movements on the continent, new paradigms for theological thought and method. This chapter concludes with a brief reflection on these three observations. First, the Disruption fathers creatively combined a subscription to traditional teaching and doctrines with fresh applications in a changing world. Chalmers et al. insisted on the authority of Scripture and affirmed its divine inspiration and infallibility. In their view, biblical doctrine was most accurately and comprehensively defined by the Protestant Reformers (in particular, Calvin) and in postReformation Reformed theology, and they expressed their distinct allegiance to the formulations of the Westminster Standards. This had clear implications for church governance, religious worship, and Sabbath observance in FC congregations and the commitment to the Confession took particularly strong roots in the Scottish Highlands. From the very beginning, the pioneers of the church sought to establish a strong link between theology and church, between the FC College(s) and the congregations. A FC professor was both scholar and minister with pastoral duties towards his students and the church at large. For some, like Chalmers, these duties extended even beyond the borders of the church. In a rapidly changing society, Chalmers sought to apply theology in a practical way to meet what he considered the desperate needs of society. Chalmers inspired a renewed vigour for missions and evangelism and he paved the way for a theologically informed social concern that was ground-breaking in the context of a ‘free’ church and is still informative for evangelical free churches today (Beutel 2007). Second, the first generation of FC theologians presented creative new interpretations of traditional Protestant doctrines. Cunningham and Smeaton defended the doctrine of (penal) substitutionary atonement, exploring in great detail the vicarious nature of Christ’s obedience both in life and in death. Whilst some, like Chalmers, for instance, doubted the expediency of the particular redemption position, the majority argued for it and defended it against what they considered Arminian distortions of atonement theology. Candlish managed to unearth the forgotten doctrine of adoption and inspired a lively theological debate in Scotland in the 1860s. George Smeaton introduced new ways of thinking about the Holy Spirit’s activity in Jesus Christ and the believer and his ideas continue to stimulate theological research even today. Like no other, Cunningham has shaped the theological particularities of the FC and his legacy was rediscovered and re-emphasized in post-1900 FC theology, especially by John Macleod (1872–1948), and, most notably, Donald Macleod (1940–), who in many ways can be called Cunningham’s successor.

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Third, the FC theologians were eager to reconcile faith and science, and in their attempts to do so they formulated creative theological suggestions—one thinks of Chalmers’ ‘gap theory’, for instance. In times of an immense proliferation of the natural sciences, they engaged in a creative conversation with other disciplines, and they were open to acknowledge and to adopt new insights and methods into their own theological programmes. It was this very attempt, namely to find ways of reconciling faith and piety with a rigorous commitment to scientific historicalcritical study, that proved challenging in late Victorian FC theology. At that time, the emphasis shifted towards the fundamental question of how the Bible was to be read and interpreted in light of modern historical criticism—a question that was often answered differently in the College(s) as compared to the presbyteries and congregations. The second generation FC theologians struggled as they tried to keep the balance between ‘believing’ and ‘criticism’, and the church wrestled with the question as to how much leeway the Confession allowed for a moderate form of biblical criticism. These questions led to internal disputes and even the formation of a new denomination (Free Presbyterian). The believing critics still generate interest today—see, for instance, Maier’s (2009) recent work on Robertson Smith—and there is still much to learn from this episode with a view to attempts of reconciling rigorous scientific theological research with faith and worship today. Victorian FC theology produced a rich variety of ideas and traditions that left their mark on the religious and theological landscape in Scotland and beyond. Their challenge, namely, how to interpret and to apply the Christian truth faithfully in an ever-changing context is also ours.

Bibliography Archival Sources Free Church of Scotland (1877). Special Report of the College Committee on Professor Smith’s Article ‘Bible’. Edinburgh: E. MacLaren and MacNiven. ‘Report of the Committee of the Free Presbytery of Glasgow on Dr Dods’ Sermon’ (1878). Free Church of Scotland Assembly Papers Part II: Case of Rev. Professor Smith; Case of Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D. Edinburgh: John Greig and Son. Proceedings and Debates of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, Held at Edinburgh, May 1881. John Thomson, ed. Edinburgh: Ballantyne, Hanson and Co. ‘Petition to the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh from Mr M. Macaskill and a Mr W. Sinclair’. Free Church of Scotland Assembly Papers, No. II, Case of Prof Dods, D.D., Edinburgh 1890. ‘Special Report by the College Committee with reference to certain writings of Professors Dods and Bruce’, App. IV, Proceedings and Debates of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, 1890, Report V, pp. 33–45.

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Primary Literature Bruce, Alexander Balmain (1889). The Kingdom of God, Or Christ’s Teaching according to the Synoptical Gospels. New York: Scribner & Welford. Buchanan, James (1842). The Office and Work of the Holy Spirit. Edinburgh: John Johnstone. Candlish, Robert Smith (1845). An Inquiry into the Completeness and Extent of the Atonement, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: John Johnstone. Candlish, Robert Smith (1865). The Fatherhood of God: Being the First Course of the Cunningham Lectures. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Candlish, Robert Smith (1866). ‘The Sabbath’. In Christianity and Recent Speculations: Six Lectures by Ministers of the Free Church. Edinburgh: John Maclaren, 153–87. Candlish, Robert Smith (1868). The Book of Genesis: Expounded in a Series of Discourses, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Candlish, Robert Smith (1877). The First Epistle of John: Expounded in a Series of Lectures. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Chalmers, Thomas (1835). On Natural Theology, vol. 2. Glasgow: Collins. Chalmers, Thomas (1836–42). ‘Remarks on Curvier’s Theory of the Earth, in Extracts from a Review of that Theory which was contributed to The Christian Instructor in 1814’. In The Works of Thomas Chalmers: Tracts and Essays on Religious and Economical Subjects, vol. 12. Glasgow: William Collins, 347–72. Chalmers, Thomas (1845). On the Miraculous and Internal Evidences of the Christian Revelation; and the Authority of its Records. New York: Robert Carter. Chalmers, Thomas (1849). Institutes of Theology, vol. 1 (2 vols.). Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, vol. 7, ed. William Hanna. New York: Harper & Brothers. Chalmers, Thomas (1850a). ‘Notes on Hill’s Lectures in Divinity’. Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, vol. 9, ed. William Hanna. New York: Harper & Brothers, 178–489. Chalmers, Thomas (1850b). ‘Address at the Opening of the Free Church College, November 1843’, Posthumous Works of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, vol. 9, ed. William Hanna. New York: Harper & Brothers, 490–503. Chalmers, Thomas (1853). A Selection from the Correspondence of the late Thomas Chalmers. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. Crawford, Thomas J. (1868). The Fatherhood of God, 3rd edition. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Cunningham, William (1863). Historical Theology: A Review of the Principle Doctrinal Discussions in the Christian Church from the Apostolic Age, 2 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Cunningham, William (1866). The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

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Cunningham, William (1878). Theological Lectures. London: James Nisbet. Davidson, Andrew B. (1861). ‘The Recent Introductions to the Old Testament’, The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, vol. 10. London: James Nisbet, 725–62. Dods, Marcus (1877). Revelation and Inspiration: The Historical Books of Scripture—a Sermon, 3rd edition. Glasgow: John N. Mackinlay. Dods, Marcus (1889). Recent Progress in Theology, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Macniven & Wallace. Hodge, Archibald Alexander (1883). ‘Review of The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit by George Smeaton’, The Presbyterian Review 4/14: 453–4. Martin, Hugh (1890). The Westminster Doctrine of the Inspiration of Scripture, 4th edition. London: J. Nisbet. Martin, James D. (ed.) (1993). Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar. London: T&T Clark. Miller, Hugh (1857). The Testimony of the Rocks. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. Renan, Ernest (1864). The Life of Jesus, trans. E. Wilbour. London: Trübner and Co. Smeaton, George (1868). The Doctrine of the Atonement, As Taught by Christ Himself. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Smeaton, George (1870). The Doctrine of the Atonement, As Taught by the Apostles. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Smeaton, George (1882). The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Smith, William Robertson (1875). ‘Bible’, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, vol. 3, 634–48. Smith, William Robertson (1880). ‘Hebrew Language and Literature’, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, vol. 11, 594–602. Smith, William Robertson (1912). ‘What History teaches us to seek in the Bible’, in Lectures and Essays of William Robertson Smith, ed. John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal. London: Adam and Charles Black, 207–34. Strauss, David Friedrich (1846). The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. Marian Evans. London: Chapman Brothers.

Secondary Literature Adams, Nicholas (2013). ‘The Bible’, in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 567–88. Adamson, Steven C. (2013). ‘The Apologetics of Thomas Chalmers: The Influences, Methods, and Effects of Chalmers’ Rebuttals to Objections to Christianity’. PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen. Adamson, Steven C. (2014). ‘The Apologetic Distinctives of Thomas Chalmers’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 32/1: 63–74. Barbour, George F. (1923). The Life of Alexander Whyte. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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Beeke, Joel R. (1995). ‘William Cunningham’, in Michael Bauman and Martin I. Klauber (eds.), Historians of the Christian Tradition: Their Methodology and Influence on Western Thought. Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 209–26. Beutel, Harald (2007). Die Sozialtheologie Thomas Chalmers und ihre Bedeutung für die Freikirchen. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Brown, Stewart J. (1982). Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Nigel M. de S. (1993). ‘Smith, William Robertson’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 782–83. Cheyne, Alec C. (1993). ‘Chalmers, Thomas’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 158–61. Cheyne, Alec C. (1995). ‘Bible and Confession in Scotland: The Background to the Robertson Smith Case’, in William Johnstone (ed.), William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 24–40. Cheyne, Alec C. (1999). Studies in Scottish Church History. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1975). The Church in Victorian Scotland: 1843–1874. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1978). The Church in Late Victorian Scotland: 1874–1900. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Honeycutt, Michael W. (2002). ‘William Cunningham: His Life, Thought, and Controversies’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Johnstone, William (ed.) (1995). William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Kidd, Colin and Valerie Wallace (2013). ‘Biblical Criticism and Scots Presbyterianism Dissent in the Age of Robertson Smith’, in Scott Mandelbrote and Michael LedgerLomas (eds.), Dissent and Bible in Britain, c.1650–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 233–55. Kinnear, Malcolm Andrew (1995). ‘Scottish New Testament Scholarship and the Atonement c1845–1920’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. McCrie, Charles G. (1907). The Confessions of the Church of Scotland: Their Evolution in History. Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace. Macleod, Donald (1993). ‘William Cunningham’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 229–31. Macleod, Donald (2010). ‘Reformed Theology in Scotland’, Theology in Scotland 17/2: 5–31. Macleod, Donald (2014). Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement. Nottingham: Intervarsity.

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MacLeod, James Lachlan (2000). The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. Macleod, John (1943). Scottish Theology: In Relation to Church History since the Reformation. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Maier, Bernhard (2009). William Robertson Smith: His Life, his Work and his Times. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Meek, Donald E. (1993a). ‘Gaelic’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 344–49. Meek, Donald E. (1993b). ‘Highlands’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 402–7. Needham, Nicholas R. (1991). The Doctrine of Holy Scripture in the Free Church Fathers. Edinburgh: Rutherford House. Needham, Nicholas R. (1993). ‘Davidson, Andrew Bruce’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 102–3. Osterhammel, Jürgen (2009). Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: C. H. Beck. Rice, Daniel F. (1979). ‘An Attempt at Systematic Reconstruction in the Theology of Thomas Chalmers’, Church History 48/2: 174–88. Rogers, Jack B. and Donald K. McKim (1999). The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock (reprint of the 1979 edition). Rogerson, John (2009). ‘What Difference Did Darwin Make? The Interpretation of Genesis in the Nineteenth Century’, in Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson (eds.), Reading Genesis after Darwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 75–91. Ross, K. R. (1993). ‘Dods, Marcus’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 250. Roxborogh, W. John (1999). Thomas Chalmers: Enthusiast for Mission. Carlisle: Paternoster. Sell, Alan P. F. (1987). Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples, 1860–1920. Exeter: Paternoster. Shillaker, Robert Mark (2002). ‘The Federal Pneumatology of George Smeaton (1814–1889)’. PhD thesis, Highland Theological College/UHI Millennium Institute. Smend, Rudolf (1995). ‘William Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen’, in William Johnstone (ed.), William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 226–42. Strickland, Michael (2014). ‘Redaction Criticism on Trial: The Cases of A. B. Bruce and Robert Gundry’, Evangelical Quarterly 86/3: 195–209.

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Topham, Jonathan R. (1999). ‘Science, Natural Theology, and Evangelicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Thomas Chalmers and the Evidence Controversy’, in David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (eds.), Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 142–74. Trumper, Tim J. R. (2001). ‘An Historical Study of the Doctrine of Adoption in the Calvinistic Tradition’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, New College. Wolffe, John R. (1993). ‘Candlish, Robert Smith’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, Nigel M. de S. Cameron (organizing editor), David C. Lachman, David F. Wright, and Donald E. Meek (general editors). Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 134.

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19 Episcopalian Theology 1689–c.1900 Rowan Strong

Until the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1689, Episcopalian theology (understood as Scottish theology devised by Scots committed to an episcopal polity as opposed to Presbyterian government), had no separate ecclesial identity from their Presbyterian colleagues. Both parties remained within the one Church of Scotland until the untidy end of the reign of James VII. However, following the incapability of Episcopalian Scots to give the new monarchy of William and Mary their unequivocal support, and their adoption of a non-juring stance towards their oaths to James VII as inviolable, Episcopalians were gradually evicted from the now officially Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This eviction of Episcopalian clergy, beginning after 1689, intensified following the Jacobite rebellion in 1715. Although Presbyterian intolerance was at odds with royal policy, which was anxious to retain as much of the loyalty of William III’s new subjects as possible, the reality was that ecclesiastical polity in the Church of Scotland from 1689 was permanently in the control of the Presbyterians in the General Assembly. These Presbyterians, predominant in the south of Scotland, were keen to return the favour of Episcopalian intolerance towards them, and their more extreme adherents, the Covenanters, since the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. But until 1715, north of the river Tay, many Episcopalian ministers retained their parishes as the General Assembly’s hold was weaker that far from the Scottish centre of government. In the north of Scotland Episcopalians enjoyed popular support, though their worship was almost identical with their Presbyterian opponents. But following the failure of the 1715 rising, northern Episcopalian parish ministers were summarily evicted as a result of the fright the now Hanoverian regime received. Consequently, the only Episcopalians permitted public worship until 1792 were those who ‘qualified’ according to law, by praying for the monarchies of William and Mary, Anne, and the successive Hanoverians, using the English Book of Common Prayer. This legal outcome for juring Episcopalians resulted from the appeal to the Court of Session of the Reverend James Greenshields between 1709 and 1712 from the General Assembly’s ruling preventing him from officiating at public worship using the Book of Common Prayer. The Court of Session found against Greenshields’ argument that he was not a member of the Church of Scotland and therefore not subject to its authority. Greenshields then appealed successfully to

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the House of Lords, the ultimate British legal authority since the union of the two countries in 1707 (Clarke 2004). However, this argument was inevitably presented in a legal framework. More explicit theological undergirding for non-juring Episcopalian identity was slow to evolve. In contrast to those Episcopalian chapels qualified and tolerated according to law, the great majority of Episcopalian Scots followed the lead of the non-juring bishops and clergy and were subjected to penal laws for their Jacobitism. As illegal and persecuted non-jurors, Scottish Episcopalians developed links with their English counterparts. The English non-jurors, though equally illegal, did not experience the same official and religious persecution because, unlike the Scots, they largely eschewed rebellion, and were too few in England to constitute a serious political threat. English non-jurors had nothing like the widespread support among the populace that their Scottish counterparts did in the northeast and Gaelic regions of Scotland, but they did have a theological acumen that supplemented arguments for a divine-right episcopacy among Scots Episcopalians in the first half of the eighteenth century. The small group of English non-jurors were vocal and talented in arguing for their position that the long-standing Anglican theology of passive obedience and divine right monarchy meant that they were the true Church, and it was the official Church of England that was in schism. But the English non-jurors were also a divided community, and it was the hardline rump of the English non-jurors—those who maintained Jacobite obedience and developed an ecclesiology for an independent Church understood as catholic and episcopal—that were most influential on their equally Jacobite Scottish Episcopalian counterparts. As well as theological influence, the ecclesiastical links between the two non-juring communities included Scottish bishops participating in the consecrations of English non-juring bishops in the 1690s, and English non-jurors returning the favour for the Scots in 1711. Before 1689 there were only a very few Scottish Episcopalians proposing a theology of divine-right episcopacy against the prevalent Presbyterian theology that it was their polity which was to be found in the New Testament. With very few exceptions, prior to 1689 Episcopalian defence of episcopal government had largely relied on Erastian arguments, based on the royal will as supreme head of the Church; a position which Presbyterians opposed as headship over the Church belonged properly to Christ (Raffe 2012: 35–6). The most influential theological work for divine-right episcopacy among Episcopalians was by the controversialist pamphleteer, John Sage. His book, The Principles of the Cyprianic Age, with regard to Episcopal Power and Juridisdiction (1695) became considerably more weighty in the lengthier second edition in 1701. Sage’s work formed the beginning of a belated theological identity for Scottish Episcopalians, alongside their bishops’ contentious and gradual development of an episcopal polity for their adherents.

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Prompted by similar moves among the English non-jurors, the Scots non-juring bishops began to organize the separate existence of their Church by perpetuating their episcopal succession in 1705. Yet, they were divided over the extent of royal authority in their Church. The older ‘college’ party of bishops wanted to maintain ecclesiastical government by the bishops collectively, as a college, with bishops nominated solely by their Stuart monarch. The newer ‘young Turks’ wanted a full-blown diocesan structure with bishops elected by the clergy of each diocese. This division, and the English non-juring links, combined to create further division over the Eucharist. Exacerbating divisions over episcopal authority and the royal supremacy, the Usages Controversy, beginning in 1717, was a sign of new-found theological confidence among the younger generation of Episcopalian clergy. The diocesan party, most influenced by the English non-jurors, advocated what were known as the liturgical ‘usages’—the mixing of water with the wine at the Eucharist; prayers for the dead; the invocation of the Holy Spirit, known as the epiclesis, over the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer; and the prayer of oblation included in the same prayer. In a repeat of the battles between Richard Hooker and the conformists and the Presbyterians in the sixteenthcentury Church of England, the diocesan pro-usages party advocated that where Scripture was not explicit the tradition of the Church should be followed. The college non-usages party believed such liturgical changes required the explicit endorsement of Scripture or they could not be allowed (Cornwall 1993a). Along with the issue of diocesan and royal authority, the Usages Controversy split the non-juring Episcopalians, a division which, along with penal legislation, contributed to their decline over the eighteenth century as the victorious usagers, alienating more traditional Episcopalians, began to alter the worship of their Church around the Eucharistic liturgy that became known as the Scottish Communion Office. Pre-eminent in the advocacy of the Eucharistic usages and diocesan episcopacy was Bishop Thomas Rattray in his Essay on the Nature of the church, and a Review of the Elections of Bishops in the Primitive Church (1728). The work became a standard component of Episcopalian apologetic theology, arguing for the divine institution of episcopacy. Rattray (1684–1743) had become the leader of the diocesan party, and was established as the most learned and influential theologian in his nascent Church. He had significant influence on the development of Episcopalian sacramental theology and ecclesiology. Most of his writing was not published until the nineteenth century, but his lasting influence centred around the emergence of the Scottish Communion Office which he wished to see conform to ancient Eastern examples, having worked on a translation and edition of the Eastern liturgies of the early Church (Strong 2004b). Rattray’s influence was one of the principal ingredients in shaping the standard text of the Scottish Communion Office, embracing the usages, as later developed by Bishops Robert Forbes

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and William Falconer in their edition of 1764 (Dowden 1922: 15). This liturgy also expressed the influence of Forbes as set out in his A Catechism dealing chiefly with the Holy Eucharist (1737–8), upholding a moderately realistic theology of presence and sacrifice of making the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice available to worshippers in the present (Douglas 2012: 342–4). Resolution between the diocesan and college parties did not eventuate until 1743 when the bishops, meeting as an Episcopal Synod—the sole governing body of the Church until the late nineteenth century—agreed on a body of canons. The canons enshrined the victory of the diocesan party by recommending ‘in the strongest manner’ the Scottish Communion Office, and deferring any Jacobite royal authority within the Church until such time as Providence restored their Church to a legal establishment (Strong 2002: 14–15; German 2017). This unity and organization came not a moment too soon, as within two years Episcopalians would once more be oppressed by harsher penal laws as a result of the failure of the 1745 rebellion, though none of the bishops and only one priest participated. The priest, as a chaplain in the Jacobite army (where Episcopalian clans were prominent), was subsequently executed with a traitor’s death of being hung, drawn, and quartered (Strong 2002: 15–16). In addition to this clerical theology, during the first half of the eighteenth century there was also a flowering of mysticism among a small group of northeast Episcopalian clergy and gentry. This region remained one of the heartlands of Episcopalianism in Scotland into the nineteenth century, whose eighteenthcentury adherents were also fervent in their Jacobitism. This looking to a monarch in exile in France and then Rome may help account for the influence of French Quietism among this personally connected group. They were also influenced by the works of the Scots John Forbes of Corse (1593–1648) and Henry Scougall (1650–78), but more directly by Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80) and Madam Guyon (1648–1717). These French mystical writers advocated a passivity before God and the inculcation of a more personal religion in an era when French Catholicism was dominated by moral casuistry and systematic theology. The theological driving force behind the Episcopalian group was George Garden and, to a lesser extent, his brother James, Professor of Divinity at King’s College, Aberdeen. James’s Comparative Theology (1699) went through a number of editions, advocating the love of God as the heart of theology. George’s active defence of Bourignon, most notably in his famous Apology for Mme Bourignon (1699), led to his deposition from the Church of Scotland and, as an Episcopalian, was an obstacle to his becoming a non-juring bishop. The group’s connection with the French mystics was substantial and not limited to their writings. They corresponded with Bourginon’s most enthusiastic disciple, Pierre Poiret (1646–1719), a French Protestant, and publisher and disseminator of Bourignon’s and Guyon’s writings. Members of the group also corresponded with Guyon herself. Also influencing the Scots were the works of Archbishop Francois Fenelon (1651–1715), advocate

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and supporter of Guyon. According to their historian, these Episcopalians were reacting against the ferocious theological dogmatism of contemporary victorious Presbyterianism, wishing instead to emphasize the love of God, tolerance, sacramental grace, and prayer as the basis for a personal religion of inner joy and peace (Henderson 1934: 12–60, 27, 37). They have also been seen as part of a wider Enlightenment mysticism of the period, with links to similar groups in England, Germany, and Switzerland (Riordan 2018).¹ The other major theological outcome of these Episcopalians attracted to mystical theology was the devotional treatise of Alexander Forbes, Lord Pitsligo (1678–1762), the most popular figure among them, and a prominent commander in the 1715 and 1745 rebellions. His Thoughts concerning Man’s Condition and Duties in this life was written in the 1730s when he was in exile on the continent for his part in the 1715 rebellion, but was not published until 1765. In most respects it was an unremarkable work of ascetic theology, advocating a converted life from a fallen human condition by turning to God as the source of life and love. Nevertheless, the work was irenic in its use of a Catholic framework of spirituality by an Episcopalian, and by its moderation towards ascetic practices amidst the realities and trials of human existence. Pitsligo makes a distinction between true and perfect conversion. Perfect conversion will only be ours when will live in post-mortem bliss in the nearer presence of God. True conversion may be said to happen, when our hearts are touched with a sincere desire of forsaking our own will, in order to do the will of our heavenly Father . . . But true conversion may be attended with may Imperfections . . . we may begin our journey from this world to the heavenly Jerusalem, with a very sincere intention; but then we may be very often entangled with the things of this miserable world . . . but as we fall, so we may get up again, and go on our journey the best we can; for we are never to despair of the help of God. (Pitsligo 1854: 88–9)

Worn down by penal laws, divided among themselves until the mid-eighteenth century, and subject to Church of Scotland proselytism, Episcopalians shrank from approximately one-third of Scots at the end of the seventeenth century to an estimated tiny community of 11,000 adults in 1800 (Strong 2002: 19). Given their parlous situation, reduced almost completely to their heartlands of the north-east crofting and fisher communities, and a shrinking Gaelic adherence in the western highlands under pressure from Evangelical revivalism there, it is surprising that any theological coherence survived at all. Two major influences can be found among the clergy, both deriving from England. The means of transmitting English theology was through the Scottish bishops, as the few young men preparing for the ¹ For further discussion, see the essay by Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, Chapter 21 in Volume I.

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priesthood came to live with them to be taught theology, a practice that survived well into the nineteenth century, often after candidates were educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen. The scope of Episcopalian theology into the early nineteenth century can be shown from the work published by Bishop George Gleig (1753–1840) in his Directions for the Study of Theology (1827). Gleig was undoubtedly the most learned and published Episcopalian theological author of his day, writing for a number of conservative magazines, and editing the final volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1793. Written as letters to his son to equip him theologically as a priest, the long work is characteristic of eighteenth-century Anglican theology in providing an extensive defence of natural theology, then going on to uphold the classic Christian doctrines of revelation—the Trinity, the Fall, Atonement, Justification, Sanctification, and Predestination. More particular to Episcopalianism was the chapter on baptismal regeneration; and the Church as a divine society founded by Christ, entrusted to the Apostles, and then to their successors the bishops; before going on to the Lord’s Supper. Following the English Whig theologian, Daniel Waterland (1683–1740), Gleig also found baptism to be the ‘instrument’ of regeneration intended by Christ, a view he exegeted from Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus (Jn. 3:5); and as ‘essential’ from the story of St Peter’s baptism of Cornelius and his household after they had received the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44–8). Gleig repudiated the view that in the case of adults it was preaching and conversion that brought regeneration ‘independent of water baptism’ (Gleig 1827: 250–1). For Gleig, the Church was ‘established by Christ’ but with an authority ‘entirely spiritual, not interfering in the smallest degree with the authority of any form of civil government’. He spent very little space on the Church, beyond affirming it was a visible society established by Christ before any part of the New Testament was written; or on the episcopate, beyond affirming that from Clement of Rome onwards bishops and priests believed they had received offices conferred on them by the Apostles, which was why they were often such willing martyrs (Gleig 1827: 287, 289–90). With one of the principal poles of their identity focused around the Holy Communion liturgy, it is not surprising that the theology of the Eucharist should form a raison d’être for Episcopalians. The principal historian of Anglican Eucharistic theology divides the great majority of Anglican writers on the Eucharistic presence of Christ into what he calls ‘moderate’ and ‘immoderate realism’. Moderate realist theologians, the more dominant strand, used language affirming to a greater or lesser degree a ‘real’ or physical presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species. ‘Immoderate realists’ distanced themselves from such ‘fleshly’ or physical language, preferring language of spiritual presence and eating (Douglas 2012: 293, 297). The Eucharistic theology that came to have broad acceptance among eighteenth-century Episcopalians was known as virtualism. It was an understanding associated with the theology of the English juring High Church sacramental

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theologian, John Johnson (1662–1725). Johnson was sympathetic to the non-jurors, and his theology was the catalyst for the English non-jurors’ 1718 revision of the Eucharistic liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer which prompted the Usages Controversy among non-jurors in England and Scotland. Upholding a doctrine of Eucharistic non-corporeal sacrifice, Johnson’s most popular book was The Unbloody Sacrifice and Altar Unvail’d and Supported, in two parts (1714 and 1717). Johnson upheld a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, not corporeally, but with the virtue and power of the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit (hence the term virtualism), a presence that was independent of the believer’s faith and therefore was not receptionism (Cornwall 1993b: 120–3). Both Gleig, and the writer of the first Episcopalian treatise explicitly on Eucharistic sacrifice, Bishop Alexander Jolly (1756–1838), singled out Johnson’s book as commendable (Gleig 1827: 312; Jolly 1847: ix). However, Gleig departed from Johnson in maintaining the Eucharist is not a sacrifice in itself, not even a commemorative one, but was rather a ‘feast upon a sacrifice’ (Gleig 1827: 317–20). Jolly, in his book (published initially in 1831), however, did maintain that the Eucharist is commemorative of the redeeming sacrifice of Christ and therefore sacrificial language was appropriate. In doing so, Jolly most often quoted a much earlier English exponent of the doctrine than Johnson and the non-jurors, namely, the seventeenth-century divine Joseph Mede (1586–1638). Jolly’s theology accorded with the predominant views of most eighteenth-century English High Churchmen, affirming what Brian Douglas defines as moderate realism (Cornwall 1993a: 136; Douglas 2012: 505). By the later nineteenth century the theology of Gleig and Jolly was surpassed by that of Scots upholding the native Episcopalian tradition but also influenced by emerging Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism. As Jolly’s biographer admits, his theology was, by that time, viewed as moderate, even as ‘low’ (Walker 1878a: 138), though in its time it sought to uphold real presence and Eucharistic sacrifice without the taint of Roman transubstantiation. Also, as Jolly’s title reveals, like all Episcopalian theological writers in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, including Gleig, Jolly was fervent in connecting his work to patristic theology as this was a period where they viewed the Church as at its purest. As a consequence, Episcopalian theologians in the period covered by this chapter were intensely steeped in patristic writers. It is a strange quirk of theological history that the Anglican layman John Hutchinson (1674–1727), a Yorkshire land agent with a modest education, formulated a theological system that became predominant among English and Scottish High Churchmen in the later eighteenth century. Hutchinson’s twovolume work, Principia, was so named because it sought to refute Isaac Newton, and to make the claim that Scripture was not only sufficient for revelation and morals, but also for science. In order to master the revealed physics of Scripture a knowledge of its original Hebrew was required. In his summary of the theology,

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Robert Andrews outlines how the ‘convoluted hermeneutic’ of Hutchinson depended upon going back to the Hebrew before the Masoretic text (about 500 ) when vowel points were added to the scriptural Hebrew text, giving the theology the ability to ascribe a variety of meanings to each Hebrew word. While Hutchinsonianism has rightly been called odd, reactionary, and obscurantist, it did appear to provide a learned alternative to Newton’s natural philosophy by a theology that, unlike Newton, was genuinely Trinitarian (Andrews 2015: 113–18). It was the priest of Longside, Aberdeenshire, John Skinner (1721–1807), who provided the link between the English High Church Hutchinsonians and his Scottish Episcopalian clerical brethren in the northern part of the country where the non-juring tradition associated with the Scottish Communion Office was strongest. Skinner, the learned father of Bishop John Skinner of Aberdeen, provided at his home the theological education for many of the candidates for ordination in the 1780s (Strong 2002: 17). In an account of Hutchinsonianism in his Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (1788) Skinner quotes Hutchinson on the information about the physical world to be discovered in the Hebrew scriptures. That the Hebrew scriptures nowhere ascribe motion to the body of the sun, nor fixedness to the earth: That they describe the created system to be a Plenum without any Vacuum at all, and reject the assistance of gravitation, attraction, or any such occult qualities for performing the stated operations of nature, which are carried on by the mechanism of the heavens, in their three-fold condition of Fire, Light, and Spirit, or Air, the material agents set to work at the beginning. (Skinner 1788: vol. 2, 673)

Skinner’s closing comment in his section on Hutchinson’s theology indicates how he believed it combated attacks on orthodox Trinitarian theology from those influenced by Newtonian science and Unitarianism. Others . . . having impartially examined Mr Hutchisons’s works . . . were happy to think that they had thereby acquired more excellent ideas of christianity, and could more successfully combat the Arian, Socianism, and deistical opposers of it, by his use of the Scripture-Artillery, than by all the dry metaphysical jargon of the Schools . . . that a serious respect to, and diligent study of, the language in which Jehovah was pleased to reveal himself first to man, should be despised and scoffed at by those who ought to know better, and that too in an age, in which there are so many hostile troops of dangerous errors set in battle-array against the saving truths of gracious promises delivered to us, in that language. (Skinner 1788: vol. 2, 677–8)

The lone dissenter from this dominant northern Hutchinsonianism was Bishop Jolly (Walker 1878a: 72). In the south of Scotland, where there were few Episcopalians and clergy, the dominant theological presence in the early nineteenth century was Bishop Gleig.

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Gleig’s theology has been described by his biographer as ‘semi-Pelagian’ in its strong opposition to Calvinism and the untrammelled sovereignty of God, an opposition evident among all contemporary Episcopalian clergy. This antiCalvinism is particularly noticeable in a number of articles Gleig wrote in 1808 for the High Church journal, the British Critic. His biographer believed that just as the more extreme Calvinists of his day over-emphasized the totality of man’s debasement and guilt of original sin, Gleig minimized this (Walker 1878b: 247–8). In contrast, according to the nineteenth-century Episcopalian biographer William Walker, the northern Hutchinsonians, in their opposition to prominent Socianianism, turned in the direction of Sabellianism, tending to downplay the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity (Walker 1878b: 71–2). For the first half of the nineteenth century the Scottish Episcopal Church was naturally preoccupied with its restoration to legality, and developing almost from scratch the infrastructure of public worship and life following its submission to the Hanoverian dynasty in 1788. This new royal loyalty was a consequence of the death of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, leaving the sole remaining direct Stuart claimant to the throne his brother, Henry, a Roman Catholic cardinal. This renunciation of the Stuart royal allegiance, which had been a major undergirding of Episcopalianism, required a theological revision of Episcopalian identity. That fundamental reconstruction of Episcopalianism was led by the younger John Skinner (1744–1816), who had been consecrated coadjutor Bishop of Aberdeen in 1783, and was not himself a Jacobite. At a meeting of the Aberdeen clergy in 1786 they and their bishop passed a number of resolutions, the first two of which set out the new ecclesiology of the Episcopalians. I. That the Church of Scotland is a spiritual Society, founded by the authority of Jesus Christ the Supreme head of the Church, and derived thro’ a lineal Succession of Bishops from the Apostles, and is therefore independent of the authority and sanction of all civil powers for the continuation of that Succession; the administration of the Sacraments, and the holy offices of religion necessary to the Salvation of men; and for the government of her members by such discipline, as she shall see most conducive to their spiritual welfare. II. That the Church of Scotland, resting upon her spiritual powers alone, cannot admit of those political attachments that have been attributed to her, and which have been made the foundation of many severe laws and restrictions; And that she has never made the profession of any particular political principles, or the adherence of any particular party, a term of communion. (Strong 2003: 145)

The resolutions contained a blatant rewriting of Episcopalian history in their claim that their Church ‘has never made the profession of any particular political principles, or the adherence of any particular party, a term of communion’, as Jacobitism had been one of the core beliefs of Scottish Episcopalianism. Jacobitism, however, was never purely a political allegiance, and it had a theology of

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sacred monarchy and the inviolability of vows within it. But it was replaced by a theology of the Church as a purely spiritual community brought into being by Jesus Christ, independent of all political authority; a divine commission transmitted through the Church by the episcopate as lineal successors of the apostles. At the time, this explicit claim to a Christological foundation and independent authority for their Church remained one made only by the clergy of the Diocese of Aberdeen. However, follow-up meetings by the clergy of other dioceses throughout that year made it evident there was overwhelming support for it, though a tiny minority remained stubborn adherents to Jacobitism. Consequently, when Charles Edward Stuart died, the Episcopal Church was prepared to move beyond the Stuarts because it had completed its ecclesiological preparation for an ongoing identity (Strong 2003). While this theological reconstruction was the precondition for the successful passing of a Relief Act in 1792 it still left Episcopalians divided between the former non-juring congregations, and those who had ‘qualified’ for toleration according to law by using the English Book of Common Prayer, congregations which remained independent from the Scottish bishops. The union between these two factions required the adoption by the formerly non-juring clergy and bishops of the ThirtyNine Articles of Religion and the use of the Book of Common Prayer alongside the Scottish Communion Office. This was effected by Bishop John Skinner, at a convention of the clergy held at Laurencekirk in 1804. It was left to Bishop Jolly to provide the theological justification for the move in an address to the clergy. His address (Skinner 1788: 545–9; Grub 1861: vol. 4, 116–20) overcame clergy reluctance to such an unprecedented confession of faith by addressing the principal opposition, which was to Calvinism, particularly as found in Article 17 on predestination and election. Jolly did so by appealing to a history of non-Calvinistic English subscribers. Anti-Calvinism had continued to be the unanimous position among the formerly non-juring clergy (Walker 1878a: 74). The majority former Jacobite anti-Calvinist Episcopalians were not the only Episcopalians in Scotland. Evangelical Episcopalians were represented in the qualified chapels, most of which united with the Episcopal Church after the convention of Laurencekirk. One of their ministers, the moderate Evangelical Daniel Sandford, became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1806, as part of the continued effort to reconcile the two sides. However, a minority of Evangelical Episcopalians continued their independent existence, and other separated chapels developed during the nineteenth century. This Episcopalian Evangelicalism was, like British Evangelicalism generally, with the major exception of Methodism, predominantly Calvinist. Its initial advent in southern independent chapels was something of a shock to the northern clergy when, in 1826, Edward Craig the Evangelical minister of St James’s chapel, Edinburgh, attacked the professor of the theological college, James Walker, for upholding baptismal regeneration. Walker was the first professor of theology in his Church, a theological college having been established,

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initially in his home, then at the new college at Glenalmond in 1847, before finally locating in Edinburgh, finishing up at Coates Hall in 1891 near the grand edifice of the new Episcopalian cathedral. The historian of Evangelical Scottish Episcopalians in their independent chapels demonstrates that they upheld the characteristic theological markers of British Evangelicalism as delineated by David Bebbington, though particular stimulus was provided for their emphasizing total depravity and justification by faith alone as part of conversionism, and vicarious or substitutionary atonement, because of the prevalent High Church doctrines of baptismal regeneration, the necessity of good works as an outworking of baptism, and Eucharistic sacrifice (Meldrum 2006: 117–33). While a belief in divine biblical inspiration was common to both Evangelicals and High Churchmen across Britain in the period covered by this chapter, traditional Episcopalian theology used the patristic writers as an accurate and dependable authority in interpreting Scripture. Evangelical Episcopalians also stood out from the predominant High Churchmen by their advocacy of millennialism; in their case, pre-millennialism became noticeable in the 1840s where it preceded this trend in wider British Evangelical Anglicanism (Meldrum 2006: 146–7). However, the Calvinism, albeit in a moderate form, of these Episcopalian Evangelicals, made it more difficult to bring about a union of the independent chapels with the Scottish Episcopal Church, which had repudiated this theology in the eighteenth century. This goal became more important during the later nineteenth century because of the number of new Evangelical chapels, largely caused by a repudiation of the influence within the Episcopal Church of Tractarianism and Ritualism, and the Scottish Communion Office. Such independent congregations affirmed they were ‘English Episcopal’ chapels, claiming allegiance to the Church of England; but they were largely congregational in polity, though with some episcopal ministry supplied by former colonial Evangelical bishops living in England. Their largest number was fourteen in 1855, but by 1900 this had fallen to nine, for whom the liturgy and the theology of the Scottish Communion Office particularly remained conscientiously a barrier too high to cross (Meldrum 2006: 282, 363). More representative of the mainstream tradition of Episcopalianism, as it developed out of the north-east heartland, was the theology of Patrick Cheyne who, in 1857, gave a series of Lenten sermons on the Eucharist which he subsequently published. Cheyne was the priest of St John’s, Aberdeen, and the sermons were catalysed by the prosecution in the Church of England in 1856 of George Anthony Denison, Archdeacon of Taunton, for his sermons on the real objective presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Denison was a traditional High Churchman, as was Cheyne in its Scottish form, and he had been prompted to preach by the Gorham Judgement, in which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council found the Evangelical George Gorham’s repudiation of baptismal regeneration was a

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permissible doctrine in the Church of England. As Denison’s most recent historian makes clear, the archdeacon’s concern as a High Churchman was to uphold the reality of God’s grace in the sacraments, which led him from baptism to the doctrine of the Eucharistic real presence of Christ (Cardell-Oliver 2015: 228–9). The following years, beginning with Cheyne’s published sermons, saw the Eucharist again predominate in Episcopalian theology in what became known as the Eucharistic Controversy. It was sharpened by the influence of Tractarian theology as propounded by Bishop Alexander Forbes of Brechin in his primary charge in 1857, on the same subject as argued for by both Denison and Cheyne. Cheyne’s sermons were part of the campaign organized by the advanced Tractarian, John Comper, priest in charge of the congregation at Stonehaven, to test the legality of teaching the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist within the Episcopal Church. Cheyne propounded such a presence, independent of the believer’s faith, and also Eucharistic sacrifice. But it was when he attempted to define the means whereby Christ was present in the sacrament, though avoiding the language of transubstantiation, that his opponents accused him of failing in that endeavour and thus coming within the prohibition of Article 28 which stated: Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of the Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

Cheyne’s language, while avoiding the technical Aristotelian terms of the theory of transubstantiation, certainly upheld the same outcome—the actual physical presence of Christ in those sacramental elements. When we speak of the Real Presence, I mean as the Church means, that after consecration the whole Christ, God and Man, is really, truly, and substantially present in the Eucharist under the forms of bread and wine . . . Christ is present, not in faith, nor in virtue and grace, but in Himself, in His whole Person, in that very body which he took of the Blessed Virgin Mary and united to the Godhead, and which suffered in the Cross and rose again. (Cheyne 1858: 22)

Cheyne was repudiating the virtualism of eighteenth-century Episcopalianism in favour of what he called ‘a Real, Objective Presence’ of Christ, and claiming that this was what ‘the Church means’ by Eucharistic presence. Cheyne’s opponents among the Aberdeen clergy presented him for trial in 1858 before Bishop Suther and the priests of the diocese. Their argument was that the Church did not mean what Cheyne claimed it meant by Eucharistic presence, and that his use of the word ‘substantially’ smacked of transubstantiation. They also objected to his claim about Eucharistic sacrifice: that ‘the sacrifice of the Eucharist is substantially the same as the sacrifice of the Cross, because the priest is the same in both’

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(Cheyne 1858: 33). The consequence that Cheyne drew from this theology of the Eucharistic presence of Christ—that of adoration of Christ in the Eucharist—was also used in the indictment against him, when he preached: ‘We do not kneel to the outward and visible signs of the sacrament; we kneel to the Lord Himself invisibly present under the forms of bread and wine, though even to these outward things, after consecration, we give religious honour’ (Cheyne 1858: 46). Cheyne’s presenters accused him of espousing and inculcating Roman Catholic doctrine in their Church. There was evident division among the priests of the diocese, for and against Cheyne, though the bishop was obviously opposed, and the Aberdeen meeting degenerated into public wrangling. Finally, after some days, the bishop suspended Cheyne from his office as a priest until he renounced the teaching in his sermons. Cheyne appealed to the Episcopal Synod which, by a majority of all but one, decided against Cheyne, finding that his teaching was ‘erroneous and more or less in contradiction to and subversive of the doctrines of the Church’. The sole dissenter was Bishop Alexander Forbes of Brechin (Pennie 1987). Alexander Penrose Forbes (1817–75) was the most prominent theologian of the Scottish Episcopal Church during the mid-nineteenth century. He was the first Tractarian to become a bishop in Britain when, in 1847, he was consecrated Bishop of Brechin at the age of thirty. He came from an old Episcopalian family with strong links to the former qualified chapel in Edinburgh, and had been a disciple of Edward Pusey when at Oxford as an older student, after a short career in the Indian civil service cut short by illness. Forbes came to theological prominence in 1857 when, in his first charge to the tiny number of priests in his diocese, he also upheld an objective understanding of the Eucharistic presence of Christ, thereby exacerbating the Eucharistic Controversy begun by Cheyne. His charge, like Cheyne’s sermons, became the subject of a formal presentment of Forbes to the Episcopal Synod in 1858, lodged by one of the Brechin priests who had been the other candidate for Bishop of Brechin when Forbes was chosen. Also like the Cheyne case, the presentment alleged that Forbes had undermined the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice by teaching the unity of the cross and Eucharistic sacrifice. In fact, Forbes had been particularly careful to argue that the sacrifice of Christ was not limited to Calvary but embraced the whole of his life lived sacrificially in obedience to his Father, so that as the living and glorified Christ he was able to represent this sacrifice to the Father (Forbes 1857: 39–42). Forbes was also accused of advocating the adoration of the Eucharistic elements, which indeed he had done in this initial synod address: ‘Either Christ is present, or He is not. If He is, He ought to be adored; if He is not, cadit quaestio’ [the question falls] (Forbes 1857: 31). Finally, in his advocating a ‘Real Objective Presence’ Forbes was accused, contrary to Article 29, of teaching that those without a living faith who received Holy Communion also received Christ. This accusation also had grounds to it, as Forbes asked, rhetorically, why St Paul in 1 Corinthians should have regarded

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unworthy reception as a serious matter if the wicked only merely received bread and wine and not Christ? (Forbes 1857: 26–9; Strong 1995: 125). Forbes concluded his charge by upholding the Scottish Communion Office, because he saw that liturgy as more supportive of his Eucharistic theology compared with the Book of Common Prayer’s Holy Communion service. Being a bishop and the son of a leading Episcopalian, the Edinburgh judge John Hay Forbes, made Forbes’ trial more awkward for the Scottish bishops than that of Cheyne. They were not disposed to agree with Forbes, any more than they were with Cheyne, and in their opposition to his overtly Tractarian theology they had Episcopalian supporters. These supporters came not just from among the southern clergy for whom, like the Scottish bishops, an Anglicizing agenda of conformity with the Church of England was very significant; opposition also came from among some of the traditional northern High Churchmen. These northerners including the leading presenter of Forbes, William Henderson of Arbroath, born in Brechin and educated at King’s College, Aberdeen. Henderson also favoured conformity with the Church of England and consequently opposed the Scottish Communion Office. Like the bishops, these northern High Churchmen were particularly opposed to the Rome-ward sympathies they saw in Forbes’ theology. There was also opposition among the Episcopalian laity, with a petition signed by 103 of them headed by Lord Wemyss, also objecting to the un-Protestant nature of Forbes’ teaching and valuing conformity to the Church of England. This Anglicizing agenda was a particularly prominent aspect of the culture of the landed classes in Scotland, among which the Episcopal Church was disproportionately strong. But Forbes and Cheyne also had their supporters, both in Scotland and England where their trials were causes célèbres in Anglican circles. The Tractarian leaders, Edward Pusey and John Keble, were to the fore, always anxious about Forbes’ tendency to pessimism lest he convert to Rome. Other northern Episcopalians were drawn by his support for the Scottish Communion Office; while more recent Anglo-Catholics, such as John Comper, applauded his theology for its specific Catholic content. However, such supporters were probably a minority within the Episcopal Church. Forbes was tried before the Episcopal Synod in 1860, and the bishops found against him in the first two charges—that his teaching was ‘unsanctioned’ and ‘inconsistent’ with the Articles and formularies of the Church. They found the third charge, of teaching against Article 29, to be ‘not proven’. The episcopal judges then mitigated their sentence of erroneous teaching somewhat illogically, by allowing his plea that his teaching be regarded as his own tolerable opinions, without claiming the authority of the Church for them. So Forbes was censured and admonished, but not deprived as Cheyne was (Strong 1995: ch. 4). The Eucharistic Controversy, and the Tractarianism that prompted it in Forbes’ case, though not so evidently in Cheyne’s, divided the tiny Scottish

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Episcopal Church. It was a theological division quite removed from contemporary Anglo-Catholic ritualism that sought to enshrine that theology in worship, because neither Forbes nor Cheyne was a ritualist; the former inclined to restrict such tendencies among the younger enthusiasts in his diocese. In the end neither side prevailed. The immediate effect of the dispute, and the influence of avant garde Tractarianism, was to divide the northern Episcopalians. It also made it more difficult for the Church to reconcile the remaining independent chapels to itself, confirming their suspicions of an anti-Protestant Romishness in the Episcopal Church. However, in the longer term the controversy made the Church more theologically tolerant. From almost uniformly espousing a High Church theology equally opposed to Evangelicalism, Calvinism, and Roman Catholicism, the survival of Tractarian theology as a matter of permissible opinion left it free to be propagated within that Church. This room for Tractarian manoeuvre is evident, for example, in the later work of Forbes on the Thirty-Nine Articles— his major work in two volumes published in 1867–8. In these volumes Forbes set out to do what John Henry Newman had attempted in 1840 with his notorious Tract 90 that ended the Tracts for the Times—to interpret the Thirty-Nine Articles in a Catholic sense, and, more particularly, with a viewpoint sympathetic to Roman Catholic dogma and teaching. Forbes did so on the basis of what he proposed to be the ‘organic unity’ of the Church before and after the Reformation, an historical myth upheld both by the traditional High Church, Tractarians, and Anglo-Catholics. Forbes’ basis for his theology was, therefore, not idiosyncratic; nor was it just personal, though there was clearly a dimension of this involved, as Forbes had come very close to converting to Rome in the immediate aftermath of the Eucharistic Controversy (Strong 1995: 172–3, 203). The work was Forbes’ major theological contribution to the Anglo-Catholic reunion campaign with Rome initiated by his mentor Pusey as a consequence of the calling of the First Vatican Council by Pope Pius IX. Forbes shared with Roman Catholic theology an emphasis on revealed dogmatic truth, and believed the Church had a teaching magisterium, though this resided in the diocesan bishops not the papacy. He fully supported Pusey’s concern lest the ultramontane faction gain dominance at the Vatican Council and this result in a definition of papal infallibility that placed a further barrier to hopes of reunion between the Church of England and Rome. Pusey believed it was imperative to support more moderate Roman Catholic voices, and to this end he published his first Eirenicon in 1865. This work was one of three similar books outlining a reunion proposal by making a distinction between official dogma and popular piety, and placing most of the Anglican objections to Rome in the latter category. Forbes’ contribution was to show how the official teaching of both Churches was indeed mostly compatible, as Pusey argued. This argument was not just an end in itself for Forbes; he believed that a union of Catholic Churches would result in a serious counter to the march of rationalism and scepticism in the nineteenth century, as well as to theological

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liberalism (or ‘Latitudinarianism’ as he labelled it), a view he went into in some detail in his 1863 charge to his diocese. His counter to theological liberalism was to locate truth principally in the dogmatic formularies of the undivided Catholic Church, as accurately encapsulating divine revelation (Forbes 1867–8: vol. 1, 259–60). Divinely revealed truth would, in turn, manifest in moral lives as those believing the revealed truth about the good God lived it out. It was a connection between faith, truth, and morals that Forbes had long upheld. In the present day there is a great jealousy of the principle of dogma. It is imaged that a true Christian morality, a holy Christian sentiment can exist without it; that Creeds, professing to give us very definite statements on supernatural subjects, are by the very imperfection of language and thought, only trammels to the soul, which is thereby kept from aspiring to the indefinite. Yet this is unreasonable, for there can be no Christian morals without Christian definite faith. Dogma is to morals as cause is to effect, will to motion. Christian morality is dogma in action, or practical faith. Indeed, to make men receive and practice a morality severe and painful to human nature, one must give great and positive reasons for so doing: when the morality is superhuman, the motives must be also. Virtues imply beliefs. Nay more, the very fact of Christian morality and its realization in the world implies a set of dogmas at its back, perfect like unto itself. (Forbes 1867–8: vol. 1, 132–3)

On this basis Forbes, in his magnum opus, addressed the contemporary issue that motivated Pusey and himself. Forbes maintained that infallibility was found only in the undivided Church before the schism between East and West. He repudiated the idea of doctrinal development, famously expounded by Newman in his last work as an Anglican. Forbes saw such development as a detrimental consequence of Catholic division, which could only be rectified in a truly ecumenical council of Catholic Christendom, including both East and West (Chapman 2012: 118), a perpetual shibboleth of Anglo-Catholic hopes. The outcome of all this early ecumenical theological work was virtually futile. Notwithstanding Forbes’ concern to combat contemporary liberalism and rationalism, something the ultramontanes and Pius IX thoroughly agreed with, their solution was to boost the countervailing authority of the Roman Church. Consequently, their predominant influence ensured the Vatican Council resulted in 1870 in the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility. It did indeed fuel British anti-papalism and, as Pusey and Forbes feared, made Anglo-Catholic hopes for reunion even more unrealistic and distant. In contrast to the more dogmatic theology of Forbes, Episcopalian theologians of the later nineteenth century tended to focus on liturgical scholarship. This concern is epitomized in the work of the scholarly Bishop of Edinburgh, John Dowden (1840–1910), formerly professor of theology at the theological college. It was a return to the subject of Bishop Thomas Rattray, and indicative of the

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premier place of liturgical worship and the Scottish Communion Office in the identity of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Dowden’s posthumous work, The Scottish Communion Office, 1764 (1922) is still authoritative, and his liturgical scholarship was influential within his Church during his lifetime (Strong, 2004a). Among lesser theological writers in the later nineteenth-century was George Hay Forbes (1821–75), Alexander’s younger brother, who published his work at his own Pitsligo Press while priest of the Episcopal congregation at Burntisland, Fifeshire. Also primarily a liturgical scholar, he was passionate in defence of the native Episcopalian tradition, editing the works of Bishop Rattray and liturgies of medieval Scotland (Davies 2017). However, his principal influence on the Episcopal Church of his day was as the editor of two series of periodicals for Episcopalians. His one original published work, The Christian Sacrifice in the Eucharist (in three parts, 1844, 1851, 1854) was influenced by John Johnson and English Tractarians. He advocated a moderate realist position, affirming the change in Eucharistic elements as due to the action of the Holy Spirit, though the substance of the bread and wine remained after the change was accomplished (Douglas 2012: 408; Kornahrens 2008), suggesting a position akin to Lutheran consubstantiation.

Bibliography Primary Literature Cheyne, Patrick (1858). Six Sermons on the Doctrine of the Most Holy Eucharist. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. Forbes, Alexander Penrose (1857). Primary Charge delivered to the Clergy of his Diocese at the Annual Synod. London: Joseph Masters. Forbes, Alexander Penrose (1867–8). An Explanation of the Thirty Nine Articles, 2 vols. Oxford: J. Parker & Co. Gleig, George (1827). Directions for the Study of Theology. London: Thomas Cadell. Grub, George (1861). An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, 4 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonstone & Douglas. Henderson, G. (ed.) (1934). Mystics of the North East including Letters of James Keith, M.D., and others to Lord Deskford and Correspondence between Dr George Garden and James Cunningham. Aberdeen: Spalding Club. Jolly, Alexander (1847). The Christian Sacrifice in the Eucharist considered as it is the Doctrine of Holy Scripture, embraced by the Universal Church of the First and Purest Times, by the Church of England, and by the Episcopal Church in Scotland, 2nd edition. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. Pitsligo, Lord [Alexander Forbes] (1854). Thoughts concerning Man’s Condition and Duties in this life and his Hopes in the World to Come, 4th edition. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

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J.S. [John Sage] (1695, 2nd edition 1701). The Principles of the Cyprianic Age, with regard to Episcopal Power and Jurisdiction. London: Edward Jones. Skinner, John (1788). Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, 2 vols. Edinburgh: R. N. Cheyne. Skinner, John (1818). Annals of Scottish Episcopacy, from the Year 1788 to the Year 1816 Inclusive. Edinburgh: A. Brown & Co. Walker, William (1878a). The Life of the Right Reverend Alexander Jolly DD. Edinburgh: David Douglas. Walker, William (1878b). Life of the Right Reverend George Gleig. Edinburgh: David Douglas.

Secondary Literature Andrews, Robert M. (2015). Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732–1807. Leiden: Brill. Bebbington, David (1989). Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman. Cardell-Oliver, John (2015). ‘George Anthony Denison (1805–1896): A Georgian High Churchman in Victorian Times’. PhD thesis, Murdoch University. Chapman, Mark (2012). ‘Pusey, Alexander Forbes and the First Vatican Council’, in Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer (eds.), Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement. London: Anthem Press, 115–32. Clarke, Tristram (2004). ‘Greenshields, James’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 68965, accessed 10 May 2017. Cornwall, Robert D. (1993a). The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Nonjuror Thought. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Cornwall, Robert D. (1993b). ‘The Later Non-Jurors and the Theological Basis of the Usages Controversy’, Anglican Theological Review 75: 166–86. Davies, John Reuben (2017). ‘The Brothers Forbes and the Liturgical Books of Medieval Scotland: Historical Scholarship and Liturgical Controversy in the NineteenthCentury Scottish Episcopal Church’, Scottish Church History Society 47: 128–42. Douglas, Brian (2012). A Companion to Anglican Eucharistic Theology, Volume 1: The Reformation to the 19th Century. Leiden: Brill. Dowden, John (1922). The Scottish Communion Office 1764. Oxford: Clarendon Press. German, Kieran (2017). ‘Non-Jurors, Liturgy and Jacobite Commitment, 1718–1746’, Scottish Church History Society 47: 74–99. Kornahrens, Wallace Douglas (2008). ‘Eucharistic Doctrine in Scottish Episcopacy, 1620–1875’. PhD thesis, St Andrews University. Meldrum, Patricia (2006). Conscience and Compromise: Forgotten Evangelicals of Nineteenth-Century Scotland. Carlisle: Paternoster.

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Pennie, Gibb N. (1987). ‘The Trial of the Rev. Patrick Cheyne for Erroneous Teaching on the Eucharist in Aberdeen in 1858’, Scottish Church History Society 23: 77–93. Raffe, Alasdair (2012). The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Riordan, Michael B. (2018). ‘The Episcopalians and the Promotion of Mysticism in North-East Scotland’, Scottish Church History Society 47: 31–56. Strong, Rowan (1995). Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Strong, Rowan (2002). Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strong, Rowan (2003). ‘The Reconstruction of Episcopalian Identity in Scotland: The Renunciation of the Stuart Allegiance in 1788’, Scottish Church History Society 33: 143–64. Strong, Rowan (2004a). ‘Dowden, John (1840–1910)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/art icle/32883, accessed 6 June 2017. Strong, Rowan (2004b). ‘Rattray, Thomas, of Craighall (1684–1743)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/23166, accessed 23 May 2017.

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20 Scottish Theology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Andrew R. Holmes

The nineteenth century witnessed a Scottish turn amongst Presbyterians in Ireland. This was in part a reaction to an influential yet minority strand of New Light Presbyterianism that was associated with theological moderation and Irish patriotism in the previous century. By contrast, Presbyterian evangelicals pledged allegiance to a Scottish theology as defined in the Westminster Standards and understood on the basis of Common Sense philosophy, induction, and the plenary inspiration of the Bible. They also traced their roots to the arrival of Scottish settlers to Ulster in the seventeenth century and were proud that their church was the first child of Presbyterian Scotland. This chapter considers how this definition of Scottish theology was connected to political identity and the commitment of Presbyterians in Ireland to the maintenance of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1800). Against the backdrop of theological liberalism and political radicalism, it begins with the appropriation by conservative Presbyterians of the Scottish Enlightenment and how that was embodied for Irish Presbyterians in Thomas Chalmers. The commitment of Scottish and Irish Presbyterians to the synthesis of Common Sense philosophy and Calvinist theology was accompanied by a robust interpretation of a shared history. Presbyterians in both countries revered their early modern ancestors. They claimed that Presbyterian persistence and principle was the foundation of civil and religious liberty in the United Kingdom and would likewise promote global Presbyterian unity in the aftermath of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843. Yet, Irish Presbyterians were increasingly distressed as this shared definition of Scottish theology was undermined from the 1870s by Presbyterians in Scotland who advocated modern criticism and acquiesced in Irish Home Rule.

Calvinism, Common Sense, and Chalmers Throughout the early modern period, Presbyterians in Ireland were tolerated, resented, or ill-treated depending on the identity of their opponents and the balance of political power. Against that uncertain background, church structures

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were fitfully yet gradually established in the seventeenth century, and in 1691 a General Synod of Ulster met for the first time and would remain until 1840 the largest Presbyterian grouping in Ireland. In terms of theology, Presbyterian ministers in 1700 were committed to the Reformed theology of the Westminster Standards. In 1698 the Synod resolved that all those licensed to preach ought to subscribe to the Westminster Confession, and in 1705 those who had not subscribed were required to do so before ordination. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a formidable Presbyterian community in north-east Ireland, yet their numerical and structural presence was not matched by political power. They found themselves as dissenters in a confessional state in which the status and privileges of the episcopal Church of Ireland and the landed elite were protected by penal laws. These circumstances helped promote political dissent, which was itself shaped by theological developments (McBride 1998). Under the influence of early Enlightenment thought, a controversy over subscription to human-made statements of faith disrupted the Synod of Ulster in the 1720s. An extensive pamphlet debate was conducted between Old Light supporters of subscription and New Light supporters of non-subscription, many of whom were forced out of the Synod in 1726. Though New Light was confined to better-off sections of Presbyterian society in east Ulster, it had a moderating influence on the Synod and a general atmosphere of tolerance developed. In the early 1780s an investigation by the Synod found that only four out of fourteen presbyteries continued even a nominal form of subscription. In this atmosphere of moderation, ministers began to publicly discount Calvinist theology, particularly the doctrine of election and the extent of Christ’s atoning death on the cross; a handful of more advanced thinkers began to question the divinity of Christ. Contemporaries and historians have linked the ‘reign of New Light’ with the Scottish Enlightenment and political radicalism. The personification of that link was Francis Hutcheson, an Irish Presbyterian who has been described as the ‘Father of the Scottish Enlightenment’ owing to the influence he exerted as the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow between 1729 and 1746 (Carey 2015). At Glasgow, Hutcheson delivered a curriculum in English rather than Latin, and offered a mixture of civic virtue and Whig politics that had a substantial influence amongst groups on both sides of the Atlantic struggling to assert their rights. In Scotland, Hutcheson encouraged the dominance of the Moderate party, and in the American colonies his moral philosophy inspired the move towards independence. In Ireland, Hutcheson’s direct influence can be traced in the Presbyterian origins of modern Irish republicanism with the formation of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast in October 1791 and the ill-fated Irish rebellion of 1798 (McBride 1998: chs. 7 and 8). One of the principal architects of the Society was William Drennan, a medical practitioner educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh, whose father, the Rev. Thomas Drennan, was a close friend of Hutcheson. The influence of Hutcheson’s brand of classical

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republicanism was clear in Drennan’s call in April 1791 to form a ‘benevolent conspiracy’ that would, amongst other ends, promote ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ through the formation of a republic in Ireland (Agnew 1998: 357). For evangelicals in the nineteenth century, the Presbyterian flirtation with Irish separatism was something to be ignored or explained away as the natural outcome of bad New Light theology. Besides, the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the wake of the 1798 rebellion had forever changed the dynamic of Anglo-Irish relations and Presbyterians would quickly become steadfast supporters of the Union. New Light Presbyterianism was a pursuit of the so-called ‘thinking few’ and most Presbyterians remained religiously conservative, however that term is defined (Holmes 2006a; McBride 1998: ch. 3). Though their influence on the religious tone of the Synod was limited, the Old Light party continued to defend the necessity of subscription to the Westminster Confession. Other branches of conservative Presbyterianism grew rapidly during this period, most notably the Seceders. Despite the Irish Secession needlessly dividing into Burgher and AntiBurgher factions in 1747, by 1818 both had united to form the ‘Presbyterian Synod of Ireland, distinguished by the name Seceders’ with eighty-three Burgher and thirty-one Anti-Burgher congregations. It was from the Old Light party and the Seceders that Presbyterian evangelicalism gained ascendancy in the nineteenth century. This was a local manifestation of the general upsurge of evangelical sentiment throughout the Atlantic world from the 1770s in response to the revolutionary mood of the times. In terms of Presbyterians in Ireland, it led to the expulsion of a handful of Arians from the Synod of Ulster in 1829, the coming together of the Synod and the Seceders to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1840, and the remarkable outbreak of religious revival that affected Presbyterian Ulster in 1859. Though committed to Calvinist theology, conservative Presbyterians were still shaped by the Age of Reason. In basic terms, most Presbyterian ministers of whatever theological tendency or grouping received their university education at the University of Glasgow, and the most popular course for these students was moral philosophy. It has been calculated that of all students who matriculated in moral philosophy between 1730 and 1795, over 68 per cent were from Ulster. As a consequence, so-called liberal and conservative students received the same instruction from Scottish Moderates such as Hutcheson (1730–46), Thomas Craigie (1746–52), Adam Smith (1752–64), and Thomas Reid (1764–96) (Spencer 2006). It seems that conservative Presbyterians were selective in their appropriation of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and were able—to their satisfaction at least—to reconcile this with Scottish Reformed theology. In particular, the Common Sense epistemology formulated by Thomas Reid and disseminated by Dugald Stewart was extensively appropriated throughout the evangelical world (Gauvreau 1994). This was reflected in the work of James McCosh, one of the first

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to define the Scottish philosophical tradition. After a stint as a Free Church minister in Brechin, McCosh was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen’s College, Belfast, in 1851, before becoming president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1868. Reflecting the move amongst Scottish philosophers from the promotion of moral and social virtue in the eighteenth century to the study of logic and perception in the nineteenth, McCosh defined Scottish philosophy in terms of Common Sense realism. Members of the Scottish school were those who employed the Baconian method and ‘selfconsciousness as the instrument of observation’, and on the basis of the evidence thereby gathered reached ‘principles . . . which are prior to and independent of experience’ (McCosh 1875: 4, 6–7). McCosh identified Hutcheson as one of the architects of the Scottish philosophy, but, as an evangelical Calvinist, he criticized Hutcheson’s moral system as ‘self-righteous in its injunctions, and pagan in its spirit’ (McCosh 1875: 85). Partly from a concern that Glasgow University was responsible for the weakening of Calvinism in the eighteenth-century church, Irish Presbyterians championed the extension of college education in Ireland. This desire was met with the opening in 1815 of the college department of the Belfast Academical Institution. Until the early 1840s and the foundation of Queen’s College, Belfast (1845), the various Presbyterian bodies recognized the education received at ‘Inst’ as the equivalent of an arts degree from a Scottish university. The consequence of this move was significant for the intellectual outlook of the Irish church and led to a collapse in the number of Irish ministers educated in Scotland. Yet Scottish influence was not diminished, especially in the philosophy curriculum at Belfast Inst, which was delivered by William Cairns, the professor of logic and belles-lettres (1815–48), and John Young, professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy (1815–29). They were both Scottish Seceders and selfconfessed evangelicals, and were included in McCosh’s The Scottish Philosophy (1875) as adherents of the Common Sense tradition. McCosh noted that they ‘created and sustained for a number of years a strong taste for mental science in the Irish province of Ulster, from which the founder of the Scottish philosophy had come’; yet he took a dim view of Young’s socializing in Belfast at the expense of higher concerns, and was not impressed with the clarity of Cairns’ Moral Freedom (1844) (McCosh 1875: 367, 379). Young’s death in 1829 heralded a period of conflict between Presbyterian evangelicals and Belfast Inst. The controversy centred on his replacement, John Ferrie, a former chaplain at Glasgow University who was accused of having sympathy with the Arians and repudiating Common Sense philosophy. The various phases of the dispute in the 1830s saw Ferrie’s supporters and opponents both attempting to claim that Scottish philosophy supported their position; ironically, it was evangelicals who defended the tradition founded by Hutcheson and perpetuated by Reid and Stewart (Holmes 2014a).

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For McCosh, the principal architect of the synthesis between Scottish Calvinism and Scottish philosophy was Thomas Chalmers. McCosh claimed that before Chalmers there was a false antagonism between Scottish philosophy and Calvinism; the former ‘magnified human nature, and tended to produce a legal, self-righteous spirit’, while the latter ‘humbled man and exalted God, enjoining such graces as faith, humility, and penitence’. By reconciling the two, Chalmers had ‘greater influence in moulding the religious belief and character of his countrymen than any one since the greatest Scotchman, John Knox’. Chalmers’ theology was Scripture-based and ‘substantially that of the old Scotch divines from Knox downwards’, but it was ‘pervaded by a new and fresh spirit; it has less of a stern aspect; it is tolerant; it is catholic. The stream has descended from the stern rocks of the sixteenth, and is sweeping along amid the fertility of the nineteenth century’ (McCosh 1875: 393, 399). Chalmers’ combination of Scottish philosophy and theology was praised by Irish Presbyterians. He embodied their definition of Scottish theology and reminded them of their Scottish origins. Chalmers visited Ireland twice, in 1827 and 1842, and in 1836 his daughter Agnes married William Hanna, son of Samuel Hanna, the first moderator of the Irish General Assembly and professor of theology for the church. During Chalmers’ second visit, some of his former students from Ireland presented him with an address that spoke of their ‘unalterable respect and esteem’ for him and claimed kinship with the martyrs of the early modern Kirk (‘Address’, 1842). The author of the address was William Gibson, a minister in County Monaghan and later Belfast who would become professor of Christian ethics for the denomination. When Chalmers died in 1847, Gibson listed his many claims to fame, including as a ‘profound divine, the accomplished exponent of a sound theology’. The Scottish character of Chalmers’ thought was obvious. His was emphatically the theology of Scotland—a theology warm, healthy, spiritstirring, the nurse of manly sentiment, the incentive to generous and noble deeds. It was the theology of his country’s purest times, with whose decay and renovation have been associated alike the national decline and glory. None of his compeers did so much as he to recommend it; none could so effectually conciliate men of taste and cultivation to the ‘offence of the Cross’, or illustrate, out of such varied intellectual stores, its harmony with science and philosophy, clothing it in the embellishments of genius. (Gibson 1847: 13–14)

There was also praise for Chalmers’ careful statement of the limits of natural theology, defence of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and ‘the resolute, but sober spirit of inductive investigation’ on which his lectures proceeded (Anon. 1830: 414, 415). Daniel Gunn Brown, another of Chalmers’ students, argued that Scottish theology was a product of the early modern struggle for civil and religious liberty, and could be characterized by the interplay of reason and Scripture.

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These circumstances had produced a theology that had a ‘firm, and close, and well-wrought texture’, and a ‘high-toned independence’. Chalmers, along with Andrew Thomson, was responsible for its revival by bringing together biblical teaching and sound philosophy. Once more, it was the Scottish commitment ‘to pursue knowledge in the true spirit of the Baconian philosophy’ that was the most notable feature of their theology and set them apart from English theologians who were wanting in ‘Scripture stamina’. Brown concluded by reminding Irish Presbyterians that they were also ‘the descendants of those patriarchs, whom the red hand of persecution drove from their father-land to these shores’ (Brown 1832: 279, 280, 285, 286).

Ulster-Scottish History and Support for the Free Church Brown’s comments draw attention to the fact that the Irish definition of Scottish theology was founded upon a shared history. The early nineteenth century in both Scotland and Ireland witnessed a resurgence of interest in the Presbyterian past as evangelicals sought inspiration from Knox, Melville, and the Covenanters (Forsyth 2004; Holmes 2014b). The work of Thomas McCrie and others described an early modern religious culture that was dedicated to Reformed theology and Presbyterian ecclesiology. Adherence to these had brought prosperity and peace to Scotland and Ulster in comparison to Catholic Ireland. Furthermore, the narrative installed Presbyterians as the originators of British civil and religious liberty. By confronting popish and prelatic tyranny, they had fought and died for liberty during the 1640s and the Williamite wars. For them, the United Kingdom was a Presbyterian project. This mattered in the early nineteenth century because it seemed that the enemies of early modern Presbyterianism were resurgent; Catholic Ireland was gaining self-confidence from the political campaigns of Daniel O’Connell, while the Church of England was being undermined by the growing acceptance of forms of so-called crypto-Catholicism. The Irish Presbyterian most associated with this narrative was James Seaton Reid (Allen 1951). His three-volume History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1834, 1837, 1853) remains the standard account and was in part written to provide resources and support for the revival of Presbyterian evangelicalism in the Synod of Ulster. Reid followed the work of Presbyterian historians such as Patrick Adair in the seventeenth century and James Kirkpatrick in the eighteenth who firmly placed the origins of Presbyterianism in Ireland with the arrival of Scots to Ulster after 1600. The ministers who accompanied the settlers were God’s chosen instruments for the regeneration of Ireland, and Reid and his co-religionists in the nineteenth century appropriated this vision and sought to imitate their early modern predecessors. In 1837 Reid was appointed professor of ecclesiastical history, church government, and pastoral theology for the Synod,

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and in 1841 he became regius professor of church history at the University of Glasgow, where he remained until his untimely death in March 1851. During his tenure in Glasgow, he was an assiduous teacher and clerk of Senate, and introduced the teaching of civil history to the university. Reid’s narrative had wider purchase and his History was well reviewed in Scotland and the United States. The Presbyterian Review, organ of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland, was full of praise. The reviewer was particularly taken with the practical benefits of the application of Presbyterian principles and the unity of their seventeenth-century co-religionists, which he hoped would ‘be imitated in our own day by our future Assemblies’ (Anon. 1834: 642). The reviewer expressed the desire of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland to renew ministerial communion with the Synod of Ulster. This had been broken in 1818 after the General Assembly refused to clarify its Declaratory Act of 1799 about unqualified preachers that had the effect of excluding Irish clergy from Scottish pulpits. Evangelicals in Scotland blamed the ‘deadness, scepticism, and heresy’ of the eighteenth century for this state of affairs and wanted to restore the connection owing to the actions taken by the Synod of Ulster to ensure orthodoxy and to spread the gospel (Anon. 1835a: 315). ‘United in doctrine and assimilated in the mode of worship; watered by the same dews of heaven; looking for the realization of the same blessed hope, and cheered by the same celestial prospects, why should there not be a close and intimate communion between both that they may mutually strive together for the evangelization of the nations?’ (Anon. 1835b: 580). Given these shared commitments, it was natural that Presbyterians in Ireland supported the Evangelical party in their struggles against Moderates and the British state during the 1830s. The Belfast press followed events in Scotland with increasing concern, and Irish Presbyterians routinely affirmed the principles of non-intrusion and spiritual independence. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland unanimously stood with the Free Church of Scotland in May 1843 and were the first church to express their support. Addressing the inaugural Free Church Assembly, the Irish moderator, the Rev. James Denham, stated that they were ‘compelled to recognise you as the Church of our fathers – the Church distinguished by our principles’. For his part, Chalmers referred to the ‘identity’ of the two churches, and observed that the Irish church acted as an exemplar of an endowed yet spiritually independent church (‘Assembly’, 1843). The Irish Assembly in July unanimously expressed their unequivocal support for the actions of the Free Church. The Assembly saw it as an enormous privilege to witness the stand taken by the Free Church ‘to the great truths for which our common forefathers in olden time contended’, and recognized ‘that Church alone as the legitimate representative of those from whom the Presbyterian Church in Ireland has always regarded it the noblest distinction to be descended’ (General Assembly 1843: 220–1). This sense of common Presbyterian identity would be repeated at commemorations of the bicentenary of the Westminster

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Assembly in 1843 and the tercentenary of the Scottish Reformation in 1860. On both occasions, Presbyterian unity on the basis of the Westminster Confession of Faith was asserted against the perennial threats of popery, prelacy, and an English-dominated government that was often insensible to Presbyterian concerns (Holmes 2014b: 144–9). These themes were repeated by Irish Presbyterians for the rest of the century and in various forms. Both colleges of the Irish church—the Presbyterian College, Belfast (1853) and Magee College, Derry (1865)—pledged allegiance to the Westminster Standards and sought to uphold the Scottish theology against the threats of ritualism and philosophical idealism. At the opening of Magee College in October 1865, the Banner of Ulster identified these threats—‘when the apostolic simplicity of Christian worship is marred by the meretricious glitter and the senseless mummery of exploded superstitions, when philosophy is straying into labyrinths of the mystical, and claiming kindred with the supernatural, and all systems of thought and life are exposed to the experimentum crucis of an unsparing criticism’. Given these challenges, the ministers and professors of the Irish church must take their place alongside orthodox theologians such as William Cunningham, Robert Smith Candlish, Patrick Fairbairn, and Thomas M’Crie (Editorial 1865). When the Presbyterian newspaper the Witness was launched in January 1874, its dedication to Scottish theology was clear: ‘The Church of Knox, Melville, and Henderson – the Church for which Scottish martyrs bled, and less belauded Irish worthies “took joyfully the spoiling of their good” – the Church of Chalmers and Cunningham, and Candlish, and Cooke – to her doctrines, her institutions, and her polity – we trust ever to be found a faithful and true “Witness” ’ (Editorial 1874). This devotion to the sufficiency of the resources of the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition was expressed in 1877 with the formation of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches Holding the Presbyterian System. Irish Presbyterians were keen advocates of the organization, and James McCosh was its principal advocate; the first three meetings of the alliance were held in Edinburgh (1877), Philadelphia (1880), and Belfast (1884) (Hoeveler 1977).

The Scottish Betrayal of Scottish Theology Until the 1870s, Irish Presbyterians were confident that they shared with their Scottish co-religionists an understanding of Scottish theology founded on the Westminster Confession, Common Sense philosophy, and the plenary inspiration of the Bible. However, there was increasing unease amongst Irish commentators that some Scottish theologians failed to uphold the doctrines of the Westminster Standards that they had subscribed at their ordination, most notably William Robertson Smith, Marcus Dods, Henry Drummond, and A. B. Bruce. They claimed that these individuals threatened orthodoxy by adopting a disingenuous

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course; they had accepted the conclusions of German criticism but not the naturalistic assumptions on which these had been made. Equally alarming was the attempt of the Scottish churches to reconsider the terms of subscription, sometimes even the principle (Cheyne 1983: 60–87). The right to revise statements of faith was acknowledged, but Irish writers were virtually unanimous that the Westminster Confession was unlikely to be surpassed. An editorial in the Witness expressed these concerns in April 1879. In both the Free Church and the Church of Scotland ‘there have been lamentable departures from the old orthodox faith’, and this was especially worrying because it had occurred amongst college principals and professors. By contrast, they could report ‘with exceeding satisfaction’ that there was no error within the Irish church and that error outside was being tackled. They cited as evidence the statements of Irish writers recently published in major theological journals and delivered as addresses in the colleges. For instance, in a closing lecture at Magee College, J. J. Given, professor of oriental literature and hermeneutics, had reviewed the criticism of the gospels offered by F. C. Baur, D. F. Strauss, and Ernest Renan. The Witness was eager that Scottish Presbyterians listened attentively to Given’s plea: ‘When, above all, will men learn to despise those rotten rags of rationalism, now cast aside in great part by the Germans themselves, and cease to import them for the purpose of rehabilitating some effete form of British infidelity?’ The article concluded with thankfulness that ‘the tendency of religious thought among ourselves [was] so sound and satisfactory’ and hoped ‘that the time will never come when either our professors or ministers will be driven from their moorings, and tossed about by the winds of German rationalism or a pretentious, but false and uncertain, criticism’ (Editorial 1879). Irish Presbyterians proved to be consistent critics of the adoption of German criticism by Scottish theologians. Thomas Croskery, professor of theology at Magee College, contributed a lengthy article to the British and Foreign Evangelical Review on The Scotch Sermons (1880), a volume edited by William Knight, professor of moral philosophy at St Andrews. The essays were all contributed by Church of Scotland ministers and expressed a broad church theology that aroused significant opposition in Scotland. The contributions of W. L. McFarlan of Lenzie were especially indiscreet and led to an inquiry before the Scottish General Assembly (Drummond and Bulloch 1978: 240–3). As part of the negative reaction to the Sermons, Croskery observed that it could ‘scarcely be doubted that a wave of Moderatism is beginning again to roll over the breadth of orthodox Scotland’, a movement that was ‘wanting in all the characteristics’ of Scottish theology and philosophy. The book was ‘a curious mixture of hazy mysticism and hard rationalism’ that verged on Socinianism because of its failure to affirm that Christ’s death was satisfaction for divine justice. He was especially impatient with the Scottish use of Schleiermacher and how the basis of authority had switched from the factual and historical revelation of the Bible to a religious consciousness or philosophical ideal. Despite the contents of the Sermons, Croskery was confident

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about the religious future of Scotland as he could ‘hardly believe that mysticism, which is an alien growth in the Scotch mind, can be but a temporary phase of thought’ (Croskery 1880: 621, 622, 623, 649). Thomas Witherow, the professor of church history at Magee, noted in 1889, ‘a spirit of restlessness’ abroad that prioritized novelty and excitement over truth. In particular, there had been significant changes in the Free Church of Chalmers, Cunningham, and Candlish, for now ‘some of those who occupy their place, are plotting to throw overboard the Westminster Confession and denying doctrines that have been maintained by orthodox Presbyterians all the ages down from John Calvin and John Knox’ (Witherow 1889: 8, 9). George Hanson, the minister of Rathgar congregation in Dublin, considered that A. B. Bruce’s The Kingdom of God (1889) had ‘the appearance of a free-thought manifesto; its statements are at times ostentatiously heterodox; its criticism is severely destructive, and the ordinary evangelical positions are surrendered without compunction and almost without reserve’. Hanson was glad that Bruce had not fallen foul of ‘his ecclesiastical tormentors’ in the Free Church, yet in his opinion Bruce’s book was ‘critically unreliable, I had almost said dishonest, intrinsically inconsistent, structurally defective, contradictory of his previous writings, and irreconcilable with his ordination vows’ (Hanson 1890: 260, 261, 292). The Witness was more decided in its interpretation of the actions of the Free Church in regard to Bruce as their lenience was ‘surely an omen of that Church’s decadence’ (Editorial 1890). Irish pronouncements on Scottish criticism were increasingly aligned with the Princeton Theology in the United States. Associated with Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, it asserted fidelity to the Reformed tradition of Augustine, Calvin, the Westminster divines, and Francis Turretin, and stressed the plenary inspiration of Scripture on the basis of induction and Common Sense philosophy (Noll 2001). Croskery and Witherow were overseas editor of the Presbyterian Review, successor to Hodge’s Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, and Robert Watts, one of Hodge’s Irish pupils, was appointed professor of theology in Belfast in 1866. The Belfast college was in part modelled on Princeton Theological Seminary and Watts’ curriculum dutifully followed his mentor’s lead. Watts was a dogged and powerful critic of what he saw as a theological downgrade amongst Scottish Presbyterians who had modified their understanding of Calvinist theology and adopted biblical higher criticism and materialistic forms of evolution (Watts 1888, 1890). In response to John Tyndall’s infamous ‘Belfast Address’ of 1874 before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Watts could only define evolutionary theory in terms of Tyndall’s anti-religious naturalism. By contrast, Presbyterians in Edinburgh made peace with evolution as their attention was diverted instead towards threats from biblical criticism and philosophical idealism (Livingstone 2014: chs. 2 and 3). Clearly for Watts, Scottish critics were not representatives of the true Scottish theology and challenged the doctrines of creation and general revelation. Watts

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drew inspiration from his mentor Hodge and William Cunningham, the defender of confessional exactitude and principal of New College, Edinburgh from 1847 to 1861. Significantly, he dedicated his first major book, a response to Robertson Smith’s The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881), to Chalmers, Cunningham, and Hodge. The British Quarterly Review praised the volume as ‘a powerful antidote against the insidious poison which is sapping the faith of many in the objective reality of Old Testament revelation’ (Review 1882: 253). Watts lamented Robertson Smith’s adoption of German higher criticism that had cut up the Old Testament into various fragments and destroyed the factual character of the historical record it contained. Like Croskery, Watts was confident that when ‘the Christian people of Scotland come to know how utterly unhistorical, illogical, and, to speak mildly, how unethical “the newer criticism” is, they will soon discard it and avenge themselves, and our common Christianity, of such irreverent speculations’ (Watts 1882: 82, 100). Watts responded to believing criticism as a systematic theologian in The Rule of Faith and the Doctrine of Inspiration (1885), a defence of the plenary and verbal inspiration of the Protestant Bible. To do so he employed Hodge’s ‘Princetonian’ method that sought to demonstrate that the doctrine was taught in Scripture, that it conformed to Christian experience, that it was ‘sustained by the testimony of genuine Science and sound Philosophy’, and that theories in opposition to it were ‘unscriptural, contrary to Christian experience, unscientific and unphilosophical’ (Watts 1885: xv). Watts’ opponents within the Free Church of Scotland admitted his logical power, but believed that he lacked a sense of proportion. Marcus Dods, a regular focus of Watts’ censure, referred to the Belfast professor in the same terms as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, as ‘one of those unhappily constituted men who cannot write unless they are angry’. Dods claimed that Watts had never properly considered whether theological formularies reflected reality and that his writings failed to show that he had ‘ever seriously pondered the matters he discusses. He is essentially an advocate, not a judge’ (Dods 1891: 319). Despite Dods’ comments, Watts was widely praised for his defence of traditional positions, and he became the principal British opponent of believing criticism. A review in the Expository Times of The New Apologetic (1890) claimed it was ‘one of those masterly productions which have made Professor Watts not only famous but formidable, and for which he deserves the thanks of all the Churches’. The volume was ‘the work of a master in Israel’ who, if successful ‘in arresting the present down-grade in theology’, would ‘be the honoured instrument of Britain’s rescue from Rationalism’ (Scott 1891: 114–15). The Theological Monthly of the Free Church claimed that the work was ‘among the most successful efforts to assert and maintain the doctrines of the Westminster Standards’. The reviewer was particularly pleased with his ‘very searching review’ of Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World, which the reviewer considered Socinian in tendency and ‘one of the most dangerous books to true evangelical Christianity which has issued

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lately from the press’ (Williamson 1891: 108, 114, 115). Watts attracted to Belfast some conservative students from Scotland, and when he died in 1895 the Free Presbyterian Magazine noted that ‘the Irish Presbyterian Church has lost its greatest theologian, and the Calvinistic system, one of its ablest exponents and defenders’ (D.B. 1896: 32, 33). At various stages in his career, he was offered chairs at Aberdeen (1876), Melbourne (1887), and Charleston, South Carolina (1894), and was widely supported within the Free Church for a vacant chair at New College, Edinburgh, in 1889 (Holmes 2018: 58). Tensions between Scottish believing criticism and Irish conservatism were evident at a Presbyterian Conference held in Belfast in October 1894. James Denney, then minister in the Free Church congregation of Broughty Ferry, delivered an address in which he based the authority of Scripture on personal experience rather than the truthfulness of the historical record (Denney 1894). This was too much for Matthew Leitch, professor of biblical criticism in Belfast, who stated that the truth of revelation was linked with its historical character and that neither naturalistic science nor historical criticism had proved the Bible to be historically untrustworthy (Leitch 1894). Leitch would later dismiss George Adam Smith’s infamous 1901 claim that modern criticism had won the day and it was only necessary now to ‘fix the amount of the indemnity’ (Leitch 1902). Denney’s position was also criticized by Samuel Law Wilson who noted the essential interplay between experience and text—‘The Christ of experience was necessarily first of all the Christ of history’ (Wilson 1894: 18). Wilson was more generally concerned that the real enemy of religion was not science but popular literature with its, ‘elegant, agreeable, smooth-tongued, “dining-out” theology’ that ‘empties the Scriptures of their meaning, substitutes uninspired materials for inspired in the evolution of belief, sets up a defiant individualism against the historic consciousness of Christendom, resolves the grace of God into a “sweet reasonableness”, and insists that Christianity shall commit suicide by renouncing everything Christian’. Wilson discussed a variety of contemporary authors, including Kailyard fiction and George MacDonald, leader of ‘a reactionary movement against Calvinism’. MacDonald had exalted ‘the individual consciousness over any objective rule of faith’, while the Kailyard writers aimed ‘to convince us of the uselessness of all theology’ (Wilson 1899: 8–9, 272, 316, 324). The Irish church remained conservative, yet Scottish believing criticism did make its influence felt. This was reflected in an increase in the number of Irish ministers educated at Edinburgh: between 1840 and 1870, the number was twenty-eight; between 1871 and 1910, it was fifty-five (Barkley 1986–7). Thomas Walker, the professor of Hebrew in Belfast, had been educated by A. B. Davidson at New College and in his admiration for Robertson Smith openly challenged approaches based on the Princeton Theology, Common Sense, and over-adherence to the Westminster Confession (Holmes 2006b: 361–4). Walker received support from younger ministers who agreed that the third-level education they received was

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out of date and that ‘Ulster is the place to which good Scotch philosophies go when they die’ (Anon. 1890: 132–3). Scottish believing criticism was gradually accepted and Robertson Smith embraced as an evangelical whose approach was in advance of his times. During the unsuccessful attempt to find him guilty of ‘modernism’ in 1927, Professor J. E. Davey reminded his accusers that the Robertson Smith case had shown ‘so conclusively’ the harmony of modern criticism with the standards of the church. The Free Church Assembly had ‘dared not condemn his views but only pronounced them unsettling, and now those very views are taught in all their colleges as true and conservative’. What ‘was unsettling fifty years ago ought surely not be unsettling by this time! And in Ireland our religious associations are more with Scotland, our own ecclesiastical mother, than with America and Princeton or Dayton, Tennessee’ (Record 1927: 123). The Scottish influence was obvious at Magee College with the appointment of two Free Church professors, David Smith to the chair of theology in 1909 and James Strahan to the chair of Hebrew in 1915. Smith had made his considerable reputation with his first book, The Days of His Flesh (1905), an attempt to demonstrate the historicity of the New Testament record. It was a publishing phenomenon, going through sixteen editions and translated into various languages (‘In memoriam’, 1932). Smith’s general approach was that the Bible was not a ‘storehouse of doctrines’ but ‘a literature of revelation’ that developed historically (Smith 1918: 126). In a work on the atonement, Smith focused upon the love and fatherhood of God and rejected as inadequate the view that Christ’s death was solely sacrificial. An American reviewer referred to the work as ‘a wonderfully liberal performance’ for a Scottish theologian and evidence that ‘even for so theologically backward a land as Ulster . . . Calvinism is dead in North Ireland and South Scotland’ (Faulkner 1921: 275). James Strahan had been employed as A. B. Davidson’s assistant in Edinburgh and would later write the standard biography of his mentor (Strahan 1917). His various publications, such as Hebrew Ideals (1903, 1906) and The Book of Job Interpreted (1913), accepted modern criticism and sought to derive moral and spiritual instruction from the conclusions. In 1910 he came to work for James Hastings in the Scottish capital and contributed a series of articles to Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. His article on Old Testament criticism hailed the triumph of modern criticism for replacing the ‘incredible dogmas’ of verbal and plenary inspiration with ‘a credible conception of the Bible as the sublime record of the Divine education of the human race’ (Strahan 1912: 318). Strahan’s appointment in 1915 caused controversy. Though some were concerned about his adoption of modern criticism, most felt that the appointment of another Scot reflected badly on the ability of the Irish church to produce suitably qualified candidates. Furthermore, there was alarm that Strahan was supposedly ‘a Radical Home Rule sympathiser’ (Editorial 1915). The Irish concern with the adoption of modern criticism in Scotland was not simply theological, it was also

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political. Many associated with the Free Church acquiesced in W. E. Gladstone’s support for Irish Home Rule as they hoped to gain his support for the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. For the Irish church, this was a betrayal of their shared history and Presbyterian identity (Holmes 2009: 636–7). They claimed that a Home Rule government would be dominated by the Catholic majority who would take their lead from Rome. Surely their early modern forebears had been united against the same threat of Rome Rule? Since the 1840s, they had made common cause with Scottish evangelicals in defence of Presbyterian principles, which, they believed, had promoted civil and religious liberty and laid the basis for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Yet as the century progressed, Irish Presbyterians were increasingly alarmed that their Scottish co-religionists were betraying this shared understanding of theology by adopting believing criticism and acquiescing in the demand for Irish Home Rule that threatened the integrity of the United Kingdom. For nineteenth-century Irish Presbyterians, Scottish theology was both a doctrinal and political identity.

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (1830). ‘Dr Chalmers and the Divinity Class in the University of Edinburgh’, Orthodox Presbyterian 1: 334–8, 372–7, 407–19. Anon. (1834). ‘Dr Reid’s Ulster Church’, Presbyterian Review 5 (September): 603–46. Anon. (1835a). ‘Renewed Communion with the Synod of Ulster’, Presbyterian Review 6 (March): 304–27. Anon. (1835b). ‘Present Condition and Prospects of the Synod of Ulster’, Presbyterian Review 6 (May): 563–82. Anon. (1890). ‘Professor Walker’s Closing Address’, Presbyterian Churchman, new ser., 132–3. ‘Address to Dr Chalmers’, Belfast News-Letter, 2 September 1842. Agnew, Jean (ed.) (1998). The Drennan-McTier letters 1776–1793. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission. ‘Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland’, Banner of Ulster, 23 May 1843. Brown, D. G. (1832). ‘Characteristics of the Scottish Theology’, Orthodox Presbyterian 3 (May): 278–86. Croskery, Thomas (1880). ‘Scotch Sermons’, British and Foreign Evangelical Review 29. D.B. (1896). ‘The late Rev. Professor Watts, D.D., LL.D.’, Free Presbyterian Magazine 1 (May): 29–33. Denney, James (1894). ‘The Authority of Scripture’, Presbyterian Conference held under the Auspices of the Presbytery of Belfast, October 1894: Papers and Addresses. Belfast, 74–84.

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Dods, Marcus (1891). ‘Survey of Recent English Literature on the New Testament’, Expositor, ser. 4, 3: 317–20. Editorial (1865). Banner of Ulster, 12 October. Editorial (1874). ‘Our First Issue’, Witness, 3 January. Editorial (1879). ‘Religious Thought in the Irish Presbyterian Church’, Witness, 11 April. Editorial (1890). ‘The Free Assembly and Professors Dods and Bruce’, Witness, 27 June. Editorial (1915). ‘The Coming Assembly’, Witness, 4 June. Faulkner, J. A. (1921). Modernism and the Christian Faith. New York: Methodist Book Concern. General Assembly (1843). Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. 1. Belfast, 1840–50. Gibson, William (1847). The Teacher From the Tomb: A Discourse on the Life and Character of the Late Dr Chalmers. Belfast. Hanson, George (1890). ‘Bruce’s “The Kingdom of God” ’, Presbyterian Churchman, new ser. 7: 260–4, 288–93. ‘In memoriam. Professor David Smith, D.D.’, British Weekly, 6 October 1932, 3. Leitch, Matthew (1894). ‘The Presbyterian Conference in Belfast’, Presbyterian Churchman, new ser., 204–6, 225–7. Leitch, Matthew (1902). ‘Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament’, Presbyterian and Reformed Review 13: 132–43. McCosh, James (1875). The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical. From Hutcheson to Hamilton. London. Record (1927). Record of the trial of the Rev. Prof. J.E. Davey by the Belfast Presbytery, and of the Hearing and Appeals by the General Assembly, 1927. Belfast. Review (1882). Review of Robert Watts’ The Newer Criticism and the analogy of faith’, British Quarterly Review 76 (July): 253. Scott, James (1891). ‘The New Apologetic’, Expository Times 1 (February): 114–15. Smith, David (1918). The Atonement in the Light of History and the Modern Spirit. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Strahan, James (1912). ‘Criticism (Old Testament)’, in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1908–26, vol. 4, 315–18. Strahan, James (1917). Andrew Bruce Davidson. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Watts, Robert (1882). The Newer Criticism and the Analogy of Faith. A Reply to Lectures by W. Robertson Smith On the Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 2nd edn. Edinburgh. Watts, Robert (1885). The rule of faith and the doctrine of inspiration. London. Watts, Robert (1888). The reign of causality: a vindication of the scientific principle of telic causal efficiency. Edinburgh. Watts, Robert (1890). The new apologetic; or, the down-grade in criticism, theology and science. Edinburgh.

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Williamson, H. M. (1891). ‘The New Apologetic, or the Down-Grade in Criticism’, Theological Monthly 5 (January–June): 107–15. Wilson, S. L. (1894). The Authority of Scripture. With Special Reference to Dr Denney’s Address at the Recent Conference. A Paper Read at the North Belfast Clerical Club, and Published at its Request. Belfast. Wilson, S. L. (1899). The theology of modern literature. Edinburgh. Witherow, Thomas (1889). The jubilee at Gortnessy. An address delivered at Gortnessy on Sabbath, the 10th of March, 1889, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of that congregation. Londonderry.

Secondary Literature Allen, Robert (1951). James Seaton Reid: A Centenary Biography. Belfast: W. Mullen. Barkley, J. M. (1986–7). Fasti of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland 1840–1910, 3 vols. Belfast: Presbyterian Historical Society. Carey, Daniel (2015). ‘Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment: Reception, Reputation, and Legacy’, in Aaron Garrett and J. A. Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1: Moral, Politics, Art, Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33–76. Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1978). The Church in Late Victorian Scotland: 1874–1900. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Forsyth, Neil (2004). ‘Presbyterian Historians and the Scottish Invention of British Liberty’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 34: 91–110. Gauvreau, Michael (1994). ‘The Empire of Evangelicalism: Varieties of Common Sense in Scotland, Canada, and the United States’, in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (eds.), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219–52. Hoeveler, J. D. (1977). ‘Evangelical Ecumenism: James McCosh and the Intellectual Origins of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches’, Journal of Presbyterian History 55: 36–56. Holmes, Andrew R. (2006a). The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, Andrew R. (2006b). ‘Biblical Authority and the Impact of Higher Criticism in Irish Presbyterianism, c.1850–1930’, Church History 75: 343–73. Holmes, Andrew R. (2009). ‘Presbyterian Religion, Historiography and Ulster Scots Identity, c.1800 to 1914’, Historical Journal 52: 615–40. Holmes, Andrew R. (2014a). ‘From Francis Hutcheson to James McCosh: Irish Presbyterians and the Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century’, History of European Ideas 40: 622–43.

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Holmes, Andrew R. (2014b). ‘The Scottish Reformations and the Origin of Religious and Civil Liberty in Britain and Ireland: Presbyterian Interpretations, c.1800–1860’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 90: 135–54. Holmes, Andrew R. (2018). The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingstone, David N. (2014). Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. McBride, I. R. (1998). Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Noll, Mark A. (ed.) (2001). The Princeton Theology, 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method—From Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, 2nd edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Spencer, Mark G. (2006). ‘ “Stupid Irish teagues” and the Encouragement of Enlightenment: Ulster Presbyterian Students of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, 1730–1795’, in David A. Wilson and Mark G. Spencer (eds.), Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World: Religion, Politics and Identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 50–61.

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21 Hume amongst the Theologians David Fergusson

‘A country may influence a generation of its children by reaction hardly less than by imitation’ (Kemp Smith 1935: 6)

Introduction David Hume (1711–76) has long enjoyed the reputation of being a scourge of religion. His writings include attacks on arguments for the existence of God, the character of the clergy, the superstitions of the faithful, and the moral deficits of religious enthusiasm. For the most part, he is rightly regarded as a sceptic or practical atheist for whom religion had no useful function. While the Scottish Enlightenment was a movement that flourished on moderate Presbyterian soil, its doyen was an outlier who championed a deep-seated religious scepticism.¹ Living and dying without the aid of religion, Hume famously provoked the perplexity of Boswell who was discomposed by the realization that the Great Infidel was a thoroughly civil and sensible man (Mossner, 1980, 588). Hume himself seems to have been less than sanguine about the likely influence of his work. While he lay dying, he suggested to Adam Smith that it would take several centuries before his criticism of superstition gained widespread acceptance (Hume 1935: 245). This may appear quite prescient, though Hume would doubtless have relinquished claims to clairvoyance. In Scotland today a majority of the population tell pollsters that they belong to ‘no religion’. Have we then become a land of Humean sceptics? In some respects, this may be happening since the majority, particularly younger Scots, seem like Hume indifferent to the claims and practices of faith. Without being openly hostile, they have merely lost interest,

¹ In his magisterial study, Jonathan Israel locates Hume politically and religiously within the moderate Enlightenment rather than its more radical inflection (Israel 2011: 209–32). This binary division may be challenged, at least in the case of Hume’s views of religion (Israel 2011: 209–32). In treating Hume as another providential deist, Israel implausibly contends that his thought does not exclude miracles or the divine governance of the world.

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believing that they can live well without the belief or practices of their forebears. But, in other respects, we might doubt this public adherence to Humean philosophy. The ‘nones’ still exhibit a striking religious diversity, even if their subscription to its institutional forms has waned. Many believe in the supernatural, continue to pray, and to regard themselves as spiritual people. To observe contemporary forms of superstition that would have left him shaking his head if not his feet, we need only note the remarkable numbers who rub Hume’s big toe on his statue upon Edinburgh’s High Street. This essay examines the reception of Hume’s views on religion amongst Scottish theologians and philosophers of religion. It proposes that he was largely viewed by the theologically minded as a convivial opponent rather than a bitter foe. Though remaining an awkward conversant who asks difficult questions and refuses to be co-opted by moderate forms of religion, Hume has always been valued. His work deserves attention as a perennial point of reference and not merely as a staging post to an alternative philosophy. And in his resistance to easy theological closure, he may perform a valuable service for the age of the soundbite, the slogan, and anti-intellectual trends.

Hume in his Context Hume is generally regarded amongst philosophers as an arch sceptic. If not an outright atheist, then he is an agnostic who cast doubt upon the key tenets of faith and showed that we can have an adequate account of the world, human nature, and morals without recourse to faith. Soon after its publication, Kant came upon the German translation of the Dialogues. Though not yielding to all its conclusions, he was deeply impressed (Winegar 2015). He rewrote sections of the first Critique to accommodate Hume’s challenges to the design argument. After Kant, German theology tended to eschew natural theology. This is evident both in Schleiermacher and the school of Ritschl, where attention is devoted either to Christian experience or history rather than the older arguments of the rationalists. Within the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Hume’s scepticism has become almost a default position. J. S. Mill, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and W. V. O. Quine all attached themselves to Hume’s religious scepticism, as did John Anderson and J. L. Mackie in Australia and Annette Baier in New Zealand. Within contemporary analytic philosophy, Simon Blackburn and Daniel Dennett represent similar inflections of Hume’s scepticism. But what about the theologians in his native land? Here a complex story emerges, beginning with Hume’s own interaction with the clergy of eighteenth-century Scotland. Early on, Hume appears to have lost whatever faith had been inculcated in his youth. From his reading of philosophy as a teenager, he abandoned quickly and

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decisively the prevailing beliefs of Presbyterian Christianity. Nor is there evidence from any subsequent stage of his life that he found practical benefit in the regular worship or rituals of the church. The earliest literary example of his scepticism is the essay on miracles, first published in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), though drafted much earlier. Influenced by French work on the subject, Hume pours scorn on reports of miracles. His argument is not so much that miracles can never happen, only that in fact it is never reasonable to believe in such reports (Harris 2015: 228–30). Described as a violation of a law of nature by a deity, a miracle, according to Hume, must be contested by the universal experience of humankind with respect to the regularity of nature (Hume 2000: 83–99). The balance of probability will always incline towards scepticism, especially when we consider the ways in which accounts of miracles lack multiple attestation, abound principally amongst superstitious peoples, and vary across religions. Of Miracles confirmed the general impression that Hume’s philosophy was unfriendly to religion. He quickly became a marked man, drawing the fire of critics of such as the Anglican William Warburton (Mossner 1980: 289–90). A decade later, Hume decided to publish The Natural History of Religion. Again the timing may have been significant, for he had recently been subjected to an attempt to excommunicate him by the General Assembly of 1755 (Harris 2015: 354–68). The Natural History purports to be a scholarly study of the origins and forms of religion, but its sub-text reveals some searing criticisms of the more proximate forms of Christianity that flourished in post-Reformation Scotland. Quoting from Chevalier Ramsay, an eighteenth-century Scottish Catholic writer, he states, ‘The grosser pagans contented themselves with divinizing lust, incest, and adultery; but the predestinarian doctors have divinized cruelty, wrath, fury, vengeance, and all the blackest vices’ (Hume 1993: 192). It might be added that a significant number of theologians have similarly recoiled from the doctrine of double predestination. And Hume may have wished to lend his support to what he regarded as the civilizing of religion. Hume’s masterpiece was the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Drafted in the 1750s, he continued to revise the final sections during his last illness and made arrangements for its publication in his will. The Dialogues constitute a series of profound but civilized philosophical disagreements over the intellectual claims of religion. Their focus is natural theology, though the arguments of Philo, particularly in relation to the problem of evil, are intended to be destructive of any form of classical theism. The closing section, where Philo’s resting place appears to be an ‘attenuated Deism’ (Gaskin 1988: 219), has puzzled commentators. Is this merely a dramatic concealment of Hume’s scepticism or does it represent a minimal belief in God? Although it seems unlikely that Hume finally accedes to any form of religious commitment, the tenor of the Dialogues

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with its carefully crafted conclusion suggests at least the following (Garrett 2012; Fergusson 2013). Hume had long made his peace with the moderate clergy, some of whom were amongst his best friends. His final years in Edinburgh were a time of literary success and social acclaim. He was more comfortable in the Athens of the north than in Paris, and scholars like Robertson, Blair, and Ferguson—all ministers of the Kirk—were valued conversation partners. By contrast, Hume found the exponents of the French Enlightenment to be aggressive and vindictive. Writing to Hugh Blair in 1765, he spoke of Voltaire as someone who never forgives and never thinks any enemy beneath his notice (Israel 2011: 201). In Edinburgh, life was more congenial. He continued of course to disagree with the moderate literati on matters of faith, but the discussion was friendly and urbane in its recognition that the arguments of natural theology could not easily be confirmed or falsified by philosophical reasoning. This reflects Hume’s conviction that it is more important to belong to a company of ‘men of letters’ amongst whom civil disagreements can be debated than to adhere to a single sect, party, or system (Harris 2015: 298). Second, Hume acknowledged the civilizing force of some forms of religion. If not himself a practitioner, he could concede that some churches had morphed into more peaceful, conciliatory, and socially constructive institutions since the time of the Reformation. This might explain the preference for the Anglican via media and its form of establishment in The History of Great Britain, over against the more American style of church–state relations favoured by Adam Smith. According to Hume’s estimate, a state-recognized church was more likely to tame the forces of superstition and enthusiasm and to control the socio-political power of the clergy in ways that were socially constructive (Jordan 2002). This preference for an established church, with its greater stress on ritual and observance rather than doctrinal conformity, seemed to have a genuine appeal for Hume (Whelan 2014: 161–211). How did later theologians react to all this? In what follows I shall identify three different types of reception amongst Hume’s theological critics.

Hume as Sophist First, there are those who regarded Hume as a sophist whose work was marked more by a desire for literary fame than by a serious engagement with the deepest questions confronting human beings. Here Hume is the object of a critical hermeneutics of suspicion. Often remarked upon was his tendency to undermine social morals as a result of scepticism surrounding the objectivity of values. William Warburton was not alone in regarding Hume’s views as likely to destabilize the social order by ‘unhinging the national religion’ and ‘unloosing all the hold it has on the minds of the people’ (1778: 248). This surely was the fundamental objection to his candidacy for chairs in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

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One of the most splenetic reactions was that of the Aberdeen philosopher James Beattie in his famous essay On Truth (1770). Appealing to the ineluctable dictates of common sense, Beattie regards Hume’s scepticism as frivolous and pernicious. One thing we certainly know: the fashion of sceptical systems soon passeth away. Those unnatural productions, the vile effusion of a hard and stupid heart, that mistakes its own restlessness for the activity of genius, and its own captiousness for sagacity of understanding, may, like other monsters, please for a while by their singularity; but the charm is soon over; and the succeeding ages will be astonished to hear, that their forefathers were deluded, or amused, with such fooleries. (Beattie 1818: 299)

This colourful attack on Hume was memorialized in a painting by Joshua Reynolds which depicts Beattie crushing the enemies of truth, two of whom are recognizable as Hume and Voltaire. Although Reynolds’ painting guaranteed Beattie literary fame, Hume for his part dismissed him as that ‘bigoted silly fellow’ (Mossner 1980: 582; Harris 2015: 442–5). While this reaction to Hume was extreme, not least through its bombastic depiction in Reynolds’ painting, there are clear signs that a significant body of theological opinion in mid-eighteenthcentury Scotland viewed him with some unease. Several later writers also remained troubled by the sophistic tenor of Hume’s work. In a perceptive discussion of the essay on miracles in 1927, A. E. Taylor judged Hume to be merely a clever thinker, rather than a serious philosopher who sought to ‘give account of the real world in all its fulness’ (Taylor 1927: 53–4). For Taylor, Hume’s location in a coterie of ‘gentlemanly loiterers’ did not augur well for serious reflection. But such judgements are surely too severe. Hume’s persistence in the face of personal criticism and the brilliance of the Dialogues should be acknowledged. The sections on the problem of evil are as serious and hard-hitting as anything in the literature. In addition, Hume’s pioneering of a philosophical naturalism—sometimes known as the ‘science of man’—distinguishes him as a leading figure for a significant school of thought. His work is not merely playful or frivolous or self-seeking. He is the standardbearer for an empiricist approach that has tended to dominate Anglo-American analytic philosophy. By contrast with this reaction, other theological voices were ready to accommodate Hume. As we have already noted, his friends in the moderate party protected him from ecclesiastical censure; on the publication of Beattie’s diatribe, they leapt to his defence. Hugh Blair complained to Beattie that he was too severe, describing Hume as ‘worthy, humane and good natured’ (Mossner 1980: 580). Alexander ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle confirmed this impression by eulogizing Hume as ‘the best-natured man in the world’ (Carlyle 1861: 221). Moreover, Blair suggests a positive function of Hume’s philosophy. Again to Beattie, he writes that ‘a little

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fluctuation, now and then, to the sceptical side, tends perhaps to humble the Pride of Understanding, and to check bigotry; and the consequences as to practice, I am enclined to think, are not very great’ (Mossner 1980: 580).

Hume as Catalyst Blair’s comments point to two further types of reaction to Hume. One of these regards Hume as performing a necessary service by preparing the way towards a more reliable account of our knowledge of the world. We might describe this as the ‘catalytic’ reception of Hume. Kant famously remarked at the outset of the first Critique that Hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber—the same might be said of several Scottish theologians and philosophers of religion. In this context, Hume’s work has come (perhaps surprisingly) to be bracketed alongside the philosophy of Reid as establishing a distinctively Scottish realist school which places our beliefs in the external world, the self, duty, and God on a sounder epistemic basis. On this reading, Hume’s scepticism had the effect of generating amongst Scottish philosophers a counter-reaction that was generally beneficial for the ends of religion. His philosophy was the catalyst that led philosophers and theologians towards a more robust system of thought. In other words, Hume’s usefulness lay in showing us how not to do it. His sceptical conclusions point us in another direction. Hence, instead of viewing his philosophy as a resting place, later thinkers saw it a valuable staging post to a more assured critical realism. Although a minister of the Kirk, Thomas Reid wrote almost nothing about theology. Yet his philosophical work is deeply theistic in viewing the constraints of our human nature providentially. By divine design, we are equipped constitutionally to know the world and to live well in it. There is no doubt that Reid himself viewed Hume as the stimulus here. In a letter to Hume, Reid describes the work of the Philosophical Society, also known as the ‘Wise Club’, which had been formed in Old Aberdeen in 1758. A little Philosophical Society here . . . is much indebted to you for its entertainment. Your company would, although we are all good Christians, be more acceptable than that of Saint Athanasius . . . If you write no more in morals politicks or metaphysicks, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects. (Mossner 1980: 273)

Initially a reaction to Hume, Reid’s common sense realism eventually became the default setting of much subsequent Scottish philosophy both at home and abroad. Not only did it prove a bulwark against Humean scepticism for John Witherspoon and James McCosh in America, it also provided an antidote to German idealist speculations with their pantheist leanings. In the formation and subsequent

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defence of a robust Scottish realism, Hume was the decisive catalyst.² Amongst Scottish theologians, Thomas Chalmers adopted this strategy in the early nineteenth century. Common sense philosophy allied to a revitalized design argument was the best rejoinder to Hume. Here the theologian could rest on safe ground. By appealing to the instinctive and primary suggestions of our human nature, the philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart ‘restores the feeling of security to our intellectual processes which the Philosophy of Hume so laboured to unsettle’ (Chalmers 1940: 127). At the Wise Club, George Campbell, Professor of Divinity at Marischal College, presented a paper on miracles which eventually became a much longer dissertation offering a sustained and measured response to Hume. Not all of Campbell’s arguments were successful, but his general claim that we are indebted to a much greater extent to the testimony of others for our knowledge of the world than Hume’s empiricism conceded is probably correct, as also are some of the critical comments he offers on Hume’s definition of a miracle. Here again, Hume was appreciated as the means for deeper reflection on the subject. First published in 1762, Campbell’s essay on miracles ran through numerous editions and was to become a leading response to Hume’s essay. Campbell challenged Hume’s definition of a miracle by arguing for a broader, contextual account that generated its own credibility by making sense of an attendant world-view. In addition, he advanced a robust defence of testimony, arguing for its legitimacy even in the case of single first-hand reports of unique events. Yet it irked him that Hume offered no public response. In subsequent editions of the essay, Hume made only one small though significant change to the argument. This was the somewhat deflated claim in the 1767 edition that no testimony for any miracle ‘has ever possibly amounted to a probability’ as opposed to ‘can every possibly amount to a probability’ which Hume had asserted in the original version (Campbell 1874: 1–2; Suderman 2001). At times, Campbell’s castigating of Hume overstepped the mark, running too close to the censorious attacks that we noted earlier. For his part, Hume was appreciative of Campbell’s scholarly attention, though some of his intemperate remarks irritated him. In an exchange with Hugh Blair, he remarked that Campbell, though ingenious, was a little too zealous to be a philosopher (Mossner 1980: 292). Nevertheless, Campbell’s line of response on miracles was widely shared by other Scottish thinkers including Reid and Alexander Gerrard in Aberdeen, George Gleig an Episcopalian theologian who wrote the entry on miracles in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and later George Cook and George Hill in St Andrews (Stewart 2005: 36). On a wide range of subjects, Scottish writers adopted similarly positive and generative readings of Hume, without ever quite agreeing with him. Robert Flint, ² McCosh surely overstated his case in claiming without sufficient evidence that Hume’s philosophy led to a deathbed despair (McCosh 1875: 132–3).

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Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh (1876–1903), defended the design argument against Humean criticisms in his 1876 Baird Lectures on Theism, a work which ran to numerous editions in the late nineteenth century. One of the finest theological scholars of the age, Flint cut through much of the earlier froth about the design argument by declaring that the criticisms of Hume and Kant had forced scholars to consider the fundamental principles on which it was based. ‘Hume and Kant did the design argument a greater service by directing attention to the principles on which it proceeds’ (Flint 1886: 389). The argument was not so much about seeming contrivances in nature which could produce a strong psychological effect upon the observer; it was instead about the explanatory scope of scientific law, order, and emerging complexity in a Darwinian world. In this respect, Flint’s Theism correctly anticipated the more plausible versions of the design argument around today, for example that of Richard Swinburne. Here the appeal is to temporal order (the universal sway of productive natural laws), rather than spatial order (the fit of species to environment, or the interlocking of parts in a complex organ). Once again Hume was the acknowledged stimulus to a deeper philosophical reflection which yielded a more critical and cautious formulation of the design argument. With its meticulous analysis of the primary sources, James Orr’s 1903 study is the finest example of engagement by a Scottish theologian with Hume’s work. Formerly a professor in the United Presbyterian Church, Orr moved to the Chair of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at the United Free Church College in Glasgow in 1900. His study of Hume characterizes his philosophy as a vital intellectual exercise, an ‘experimentum crucis’ (Orr 1903: 11). If its sceptical outcomes reveal the weakness of its empiricist base, this is nevertheless instructive. Here Orr moves in a more idealist direction by arguing that our consciousness of order, intelligence, and value in the world cannot be explained by a principle that itself is ontologically less than these. Hence Hume’s scepticism is checked by Orr’s commitment to a broader and non-naturalist explanatory framework. When turning to theological matters, Orr finds grounds for revising Hume’s views on the design argument, the history of religion, and the probability of miracles. Focusing on the last of these topics, he repeats a long Scottish tradition of challenging both Hume’s definition of a miracle as a violation of nature and his scepticism regarding the veracity of testimony. With a stronger attention to context, Hume’s dismissal of miracles can be overcome. This set of criticisms is evident from Campbell through Chalmers and Cunningham to Orr, all of whom seemed confident of their capacity to rebut Hume’s classical criticism (Stewart 2005). The philosophy of Hume is thus to be surpassed but only through an Aufhebung which requires serious consideration of its sceptical trends. While Hume’s work does not provide a terminus for our enquiries, our journeying through it will clarify, correct, and deepen our reflections on fundamental issues. Despite his patient exposition of Hume’s writings, Orr seems persuaded that he

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was chronically tone deaf when it came to matters of religion. ‘[T]he poverty of Hume’s conception of religion generally is manifest in nearly every line he wrote about it’ (Orr 1903: 194). A similar reception of Hume can also be discerned at the opening of A. S. Pringle-Pattison’s Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, later published as The Idea of God (1920). Delivering his series shortly after the Hume bicentenary in 1911, he describes him as ‘the greatest Scotsman who ever applied himself to these subjects’, i.e. natural theology (Pringle-Pattison 1920: 1). Pringle-Pattison sets Hume in his historical context before making two important moves. The first is to identify Hume as a theist, in particular by making Cleanthes his mouthpiece in the Dialogues. His scepticism in matters of religion is thus mitigated, though Pringle-Pattison proceeds to argue that his theism lacks proper engagement with matters of existential significance, particularly our consciousness of ethical demands. The force of his revised design argument is to identify in the ‘Ground of things’ something akin to the dignity and worth of our own being (PringlePattison 1920: 24). Having noted this deficiency in Hume, he proceeds to use his thought merely as a point of departure for considering the more promising work of Kant and nineteenth-century German philosophy. So Hume is quickly left behind, as if a signpost pointing to a dead end. Despite the initial cap-doffing, Pringle-Pattison has little else to say of positive significance about Hume’s approach to religion. The route mapped out by Pringle-Pattison represents that favoured by several leading Scottish theologians in the early and mid-twentieth century, including H. R. Mackintosh and the Baillie brothers, all of whom had been his pupils. Their allegiance to German theology, which had long set its face against natural theology, resulted in a reluctance to engage in any sustained manner with their eighteenth-century compatriot. In Our Knowledge of God, John Baillie insists that religious faith is based upon the mediation of the divine presence in the natural and social worlds. Appealing to Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Herrmann, and Barth, he renounces the strategy of those inferential arguments criticized by Hume (Baillie 1939: 128–32). A more immediate religious awareness, closely associated with moral experience, is the preferred Kantian route adopted by Scottish scholars (Baillie 1927; Mackintosh 1929) in part under the influence of Wilhelm Herrmann.

Hume as Critical Friend If some were inclined to acknowledge Hume’s greatness as a catalyst, others viewed him more constructively as the perennial sceptic who saves us from an overblown religious dogmatism. This may be identified as a third set of reactions to Hume, though it is somewhat entangled with the second type and

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less easy to isolate. As a way of appropriating Hume, it is adumbrated in Blair’s aforementioned remark to Beattie about the abiding benefits of scepticism. On this reading, Hume is not so much a thinker through whose work theologians must move to more solid ground. Instead, he is someone to whom we must return again and again. As a writer whose work prevents us from believing too much in the wrong things, Hume enables us to face the questions and doubts that will inevitably arise in the lives of the faithful. His significance is thus enduring and constructive. One example of this approach is found in Henry Calderwood’s posthumously published study of Hume for the Famous Scots Series, a work which shows a surprising partiality for its subject. Holder of the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh (1868–97), Calderwood, like Orr, was ordained in the United Presbyterian Church. Hume’s critical questioning, he maintains, will resonate with our suppressed difficulties, and lead us to a deeper and chastened faith. Readers ‘may even be able to find in Hume a witness for Christianity whose testimony is in some respects the more valuable since beset with so many and such grave doubts’ (Calderwood 1898: 6). Here Calderwood somewhat overstates his case, though he is not alone in this respect. In identifying Hume as a modified theist, he fails to interpret the dramatic dissembling and tactical devices employed throughout Hume’s writings. As did Pringle-Pattison, he seems to have assumed that the authorial voice is most readily identified with Cleanthes throughout the Dialogues, as if he finally secures the case against Philo’s religious scepticism. Dating from Dugald Stewart, this view represents a strained and minority reading of Hume, which was decisively rebutted by the painstaking textual analysis of Norman Kemp Smith in his 1935 edition of the Dialogues. As Kemp Smith shows, the force of the arguments generally lies with Philo. Only when Cleanthes attacks Demea in terms that can be shared by Philo can we assume that he is the mouthpiece of the author. Elsewhere Cleanthes tends merely to repeat his position after Part III in such a way as to expose him to the further ripostes of Philo (Hume 1935: 57–75). The settled consensus is that it is Philo and not Cleanthes who speaks for Hume. In any case, his other writings can be enlisted in support of this reading. The force of his scepticism should not therefore be blunted by eisegesis of the texts resulting in an alignment of Hume with the Christian apologetics of Cleanthes. With this in mind, we should beware of attempting too readily to co-opt Hume, as if in the end he ceases to be a potent threat to substantive theological claims. In part, this may have been motivated by a justifiable national pride in his work. Le bon David may have been a sceptic, but at least he was our sceptic and we have been glad to claim as one of our own—an understandable attitude maybe, but probably one that would have elicited some devastating rejoinder from Hume. Yet, upon suitable restatement, the constructive thesis of Calderwood still stands. Hume’s enduring influence is not merely that of a salutary wrong turning, for his scepticism has undoubtedly resulted in a more deflationary post-Enlightenment

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theological apologetics. Reports of miracles cannot now be cited as a conclusive proof of revelation. The design argument hangs somewhere in the balance as a result of the array of criticisms levelled against it. Arguments for an evolution of human religion to its highest expression in the incarnation still meet the historical and social-scientific scruples advanced in The Natural History. And Hume’s ethical criticisms of Christianity and its representatives continue to make for sober reading. Above all, the anti-theodicy of Dialogues, Parts X–XI, ranks amongst the most significant texts in the philosophy of religion. Many theologians today are nervous around the entire project of theodicy for reasons similar to those advanced by Philo. Haunted by this passage from Philo, which Hume added to the text shortly before his death, we are perennially cautioned against any glib resolution of the problem of evil. ‘The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children’ (Hume 1935: 211). Students of theology have generally been alert to these arguments through an exposure to the work of Hume in the syllabus of the Divinity Faculties. In Edinburgh, John McIntyre, a former pupil of Kemp Smith, retained the Dialogues on the list of prescribed texts for thirty years, while a similar practice appears to have been followed in Glasgow. The most substantial recent work on the essay on miracles has been by a Scottish theologian (Houston 1994) which in many ways recalls the painstaking analysis of George Campbell. Hume was not merely someone to warn against or to move beyond, but a writer whose work would always provide a valuable spiritual ascesis. Not every awkward question can be batted away and not every difficulty resolved by a quick theological fix—these remain important lessons to be learned, both intellectually and pastorally. There is one further facet of Hume’s work that may serve us well in the present context—his commitment to a particular style of discourse. Here the dialogical form is important. As Harris’ recent biography shows, he was less concerned to secure agreement amongst his friends as to promote a civilized conversation free from personal rancour. He knew the offence caused by exclusion and not being considered ‘one of us’. The charge of being a morally dangerous infidel was one that he judged unfair and was deeply resented. Disagreements required to be ventilated and improved, rather than suppressed by censorious rulings or vituperative rhetoric. Hume’s friendship with the moderate Edinburgh clergy was not predicated upon agreement on matters philosophical and theological. As a society, they were unified not ideologically but in a shared commitment to civil conversation, patient disagreement, and a calm consideration of where the balance of probability rested. Nor was Hume ever indifferent to where the argument led. Religion mattered, and so its claims deserved the scrutiny of our critical faculties. The search for the most reasonable outcome may never cease, but it is always worth pursuing with others in a proper way. This provides a model for drawing

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together sceptics, atheists, and believers. No closure or final settlement of every issue should be sought; sufficient that there be some agreement on some issues in our time. In an age of binary divisions, 140-character denunciations, and populist resentment of diversity, Hume’s modus operandi continues to repay the attention of church, academy, and society.

Bibliography Primary Literature Beattie, James (1818). Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth; in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism. London: Wilson. Calderwood, Henry (1898). David Hume. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier. Campbell, George (1874). Dissertation on Miracles. London: Tegg. Carlyle, Alexander (1861). Autobiography. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Chalmers, Thomas (1940 [1841]). ‘Natural Theology’, in Works of Thomas Chalmers, vol. 1. New York: Carter. Flint, Robert (1886). Theism. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Hume, David (1993). Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, David (1935). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith. Edinburgh: Nelson. Hume, David (2000). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCosh, James (1875). The Scottish Philosophy: From Hutcheson to Hamilton. New York: Carter. Warburton, William (1778). ‘Remarks on Mr David Hume’s Essay on the Natural History of Religion (1778)’, in Stanley Tweyman (ed.), Hume on Natural Religion. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996, 237–48.

Secondary Literature Baillie, Donald (1927). Faith and Its Christian Consummation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Baillie, John (1939). Our Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fergusson, David (2013). ‘The Absence of God and its Contextual Significance in Hume’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 11/1: 69–85. Gaskin, J. C. A. (1988). Hume’s Philosophy of Religion. London: Macmillan. Garrett, Don (2012). ‘What’s True About Hume’s “True Religion”?’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 10/2: 199–220. Harris, James A. (2015). Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Houston, Joseph (1994). Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Israel, Jonathan (2011). The Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights 1750–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jordan, Will R. (2002). ‘Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration of David Hume and Religious Establishment’, Review of Politics 64/4: 687–713. Kemp Smith, Norman (1935). ‘Introduction’, in David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edinburgh: Nelson, 1–124. Mackintosh, H. R. (1929). The Christian Apprehension of God. London: SCM. Mossner, Ernest C. (1980). The Life of David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orr, James (1903). David Hume and His Influence on Philosophy and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Pringle-Pattison, A. S. (1920). The Idea of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, M. A. (2005). ‘The Early British Reception of Hume’s Writings’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The Reception of David Hume in Europe. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 30–42. Suderman, Jeffrey M. (2001). Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Taylor, A. E. (1927). David Hume and the Miraculous. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whelan, Fredrick G. (2014). Political Thought of David Hume and His Contemporaries: Enlightenment Projects Vol. 1. London: Routledge. Winegar, Reed (2015). ‘Kant’s Criticisms of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23/5: 888–910.

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22 The Borthwick Sisters Experiential Theology and Women’s Hymnody in the Nineteenth-Century Free Church Frances M. Henderson

The Edinburgh sisters, Jane Laurie Borthwick (1813–97), and Sarah Borthwick Findlater (1823–1907), can be counted alongside the English women Catherine Winkworth and Frances Cox as the foremost translators into English of German hymnody. Their volume, Hymns from the Land of Luther (1853, 1858, rev. 1884), introduced into the Free Church of Scotland the popular experiential theology of Lutheran and Moravian Pietists, from the earlier hymnody of Johann Hoefel (1600–83) and Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), through to the sisters’ own nineteenthcentury contemporaries, K. J. P. Spitta (1801–59) and J. P. Lange (1802–84). Jane and Sarah were two of the nine daughters of merchant James Borthwick and his wife Sarah Laurie Finlay, the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister. Born in 1782 at Inveresk, Midlothian, James Borthwick was a young man at the height of the Romantic movement. Before his marriage, he travelled extensively in mainland Europe, sketching the dramatic scenery and making friends across the continent. He was a fluent speaker of German, and legend has it that he was one of the first civilians on the field after the Battle of Waterloo, where he comforted a dying Prussian officer in his own language (Lee 2006: 84–5) Be that as it may: immediately thereafter, he gave up his wanderlust, returned to Scotland, and a mere two weeks after Waterloo married his wife at the church at Polmont, Stirling. James and Sarah’s fortunes and family grew simultaneously. James was a pioneer both in accountancy and in the insurance industry, with offices on prestigious Princes Street. Jane, their first child, was succeeded by eight sisters and one brother, only four of whom survived into adulthood. Of the siblings, Sarah was the only one to marry (at the age of 38) and have children of her own. James Borthwick made sure his children were educated, and the sisters were fluent in German. They were also encouraged to travel, and Jane is known to have visited friends in Switzerland and Germany. Indeed, it was while staying in Switzerland that she was inspired by Baron de Diesbach to study German hymns; a study that was encouraged by her father upon her return to Scotland (Moffatt 1927: 275).

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By 1830, the family was living in Claremont Crescent, a quietly prestigious Edinburgh address. On Sundays they attended St Mary’s Church of Scotland at Bellevue Crescent, just at the end of their street: a handsome Georgian building in the classical style recently erected by the town council to serve the expanding New Town. The minister was Dr Henry Grey, a principled and outspoken Evangelical who, after the Disruption of 1843, became the second Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, succeeding Thomas Chalmers in the role. The Disruption erupted into the Borthwicks’ social milieu with all the excitement of a revolution. This vigorous class of wealthy city-dwellers was precisely designed to resent the patronage system, where the minister was appointed not by the congregation but by a heritor or the town council. Under the leadership of Dr Grey, a large contingent of the membership of St Mary’s walked out of the church and up the hill to premises on Barony Street, where they named themselves Free St Mary’s. By 1862, the breakaway congregation had built themselves an imposing church on Albany Street, with a seating capacity of a thousand, and a towering spire to encapsulate the lofty aspirations of the Free Church. The Disruption, then, was a time of opportunity for those with the confidence to grasp it. The old rules were up for negotiation, and suddenly there was space for new styles of governance, new theologies, and new forms of worship. Space had also opened up for new voices to be heard, and these included the voices of women. Where hitherto they had had little role in the leadership of the church, now women stepped into respected roles, such as Sunday School teacher, missionary, and—crucially—writer. The Free Church instituted a magazine, The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading, to provide Sabbath Day reading materials and encourage family devotions. Its focus on home, family, and personal piety meant that The Family Treasury was by definition operating within the female sphere, so that a woman might respectably publish there, albeit anonymously. Alongside scholarly biblical commentary and exciting stories from the mission fields, The Family Treasury included devotional poetry and instructional tales for children. The Borthwick sisters, Jane in particular, were frequent contributors of original poems, short stories for children, and hymn translations. It is these translations that were gathered together and published in 1853 as Hymns from the Land of Luther. Thus it was in the new Free Church that the Borthwick sisters found their voice. It was a voice severely curtailed by religious and social convention, but it was a voice nevertheless.

Evangelicalism and the Free Church The Disruption was both the zenith and the test of the Evangelical movement in Scotland. The events of 1843 had been building for over a century, arguably ever

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since the Marrow Controversy of 1718, which had introduced a theology of conversion to Calvinist Scotland. The English evangelist George Whitefield preached in Church of Scotland churches in 1741, leading to the Cambuslang Revival of 1742, with mass meetings of 30,000 people (Drummond and Bulloch 1975: 55). Meanwhile, the Methodist cause was championed in Edinburgh by Willielma Campbell, Viscountess Glenorchy (1741–86), who maintained her admiration of John Wesley even while disagreeing with aspects of his Arminianism. For many years prior to the Disruption, the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland had provided a significant and increasing opposition to the Moderate party in the Kirk. Ultimately, they achieved a majority on the floor of the General Assembly, and the subsequent push-back by both church and state precipitated the Disruption itself. But although Evangelicalism was a significant movement in Scotland, Pietism was not—or at least, not directly. To start with, Pietism was very much an offshoot of the Lutheran tradition. It began in Germany in the latter half of the seventeenth century as a populist movement against a Lutheran Church that was perceived as being over-intellectualized, over-institutionalized, and over-friendly with state government. There is debate among historians as to the exact origins of the Pietist movement, but a key figure is undoubtedly the Lutheran pastor Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), who in 1675 published a pamphlet called Pia desideria, from which the term ‘Pietism’ is coined. Subtitled, Heartfelt Desire for a Reform of the True Evangelical Church, Spener taught that the Christian faith was not about external form, nor even about sound theology, but about an inner change of heart, leading to a transformation of life. In other words, he shifted the locus of faith from outside to inside; from the Church to the individual. Salvation had become a religious experience. The cerebral Federal Calvinism of the Church of Scotland had stood as a bulwark against the experiential appeal of Pietism, even within the Evangelical wing of the Church. However, almost two centuries after its Lutheran genesis, Pietism’s time had come. Spener’s grass-roots revolt against state control of the church, and church control of the conscience, had an obvious appeal to the rebels of the Scottish Free Church. Importantly, it also had a particular appeal to women. A faith which, in its purest form, is associated now with heart and home, is a faith that has moved into female territory.

The Problems of Female Writing Owing largely to the influence of the Methodists, there was already a strong tradition of popular hymns in England and Wales dating back to the first half of the eighteenth century. However, despite some enthusiastic (though not uncritical) patrons, early Methodism never quite took hold in Scotland; and by the same

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token, neither did its hymnody. From its founding, the Reformed tradition’s distrust of ‘human words’ meant that congregational singing had been limited to the metrical Psalms; and with the exception of some isolated experiments, this remained the case for over two hundred years. At last, in response to growing demand for a wider repertoire, the Kirk published its Scottish Paraphrases in 1781. Notably, this volume of versified biblical prose also added five ‘human’ hymns in its last pages: three by Joseph Addison, and one each by Isaac Watts and John Logan. Even prior to the Disruption, some Scottish evangelical women had already tried their hand at devotional poetry. Mary Lundie Duncan (1814–40) was the wife of the minister of Cleish in Fife, a sister-in-law of hymn writer Horatius Bonar, and the daughter of writer Mary Grey Lundie Duncan. The younger Lundie Duncan wrote hymns mainly for children, her most famous being ‘Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me’ and ‘There’s a friend for little children’. After her death in 1840, her mother published a fond hagiography, Memoir of Mrs Mary Lundie Duncan: Being Recollections of a Daughter by her Mother (1841). Here she includes her daughter’s hymns, but even while doing so, expresses her doubts as to the spiritual propriety of her daughter’s penchant for writing: The poetical efforts, which in early youth were numerous, became restrained during the first period of womanhood . . . Miss Isa. Gordon, who had observed the cast of her mind with intelligence and solicitude, far from uniting her voice to that of the friends who commended her poetry, and applauded her pursuit of it, ‘unstrung her lyre’ as she said by judicious criticism, and cautions against dwelling too much in the region of fancy, and consuming time and talents, which ought to be employed in more substantial acquirements. (Duncan 1841: 208)

This same sentiment is expressed in ‘The Best Remembrance’, an edifying short story by Jane Borthwick published in The Family Treasury (Borthwick 1859). While the hero of the story is ‘a fine boy’, nevertheless Borthwick gives her own name to the aspiring author: ‘Jane was older than her brothers, a girl of thought and feeling beyond her years. She looked up from her drawing and sighed. “I should like to be a good author very much, but do not expect it. But, oh! I would fain live so as not to be soon forgotten” ’. However, her Aunt Mary—Miss Isa. Gordon’s fictional counterpart—counsels her to concentrate on cultivating spiritual gifts that will ‘last’. Alongside her caution in the face of such spiritual danger, Grey Lundie Duncan recognizes the urgent need for new hymn writers in the Church of Scotland, describing a general dissatisfaction in Evangelical circles with the usual diet of psalms and paraphrases. Even the ‘new’ paraphrases of 1781 (now sixty years old) are deemed too limited: There exists, in the minds of many, a feeling of the deficiency in the collection of Paraphrases for the use of praise in our church, not in number and variety only,

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but in Christian love and doctrinal faithfulness. A missionary compartment, in particular, would form a valuable addition . . . (Duncan 1841: 314)

Here, then, was a ‘gap’ for women to occupy. Private devotional writing was already an approved activity for the nineteenth-century lady, and in wider society, women in Scotland were beginning to be celebrated as poets and song writers. Nevertheless, publishing remained a dubious activity for women, and doubly so for women of faith. The extracts above encapsulate the dilemma faced by women who would contribute their hymns. There is clearly a strongly felt need for new, engaging, missional hymns which accurately reflect Evangelical theology. Yet there are severe doubts as to whether publishing of any sort was a suitable activity for a woman, no matter that the verses were of unquestionable piety. Mary Lundie Duncan is dead by the time her hymns are published, yet even now her mother feels obliged to explain that her daughter’s poems were composed entirely for the purpose ‘of educating her offspring in the service of her Lord’ (Duncan 1841: 225). In other words, the suspect activity of writing had been safely contained within an entirely womanly sphere. Death, however, is humility’s trump card, and the ultimate protection against any accusation of pride. This was the fate also of Elizabeth Clephane (1830–69), whose hymns were published posthumously in The Family Treasury, under the softly feminine title of ‘Breathings from the Border’. One of her hymns achieved unexpected fame when ‘There were ninety and nine that safely lay’ (1874) was discovered by Ira D. Sankey and used to great evangelical effect in Moody and Sankey’s 1875 mission to Scotland. Clephane’s pious modesty was protected first of all by the tale that she composed it not out of frivolity or vanity, but when grieving for her brother who had only just returned to the faith before being killed in a horse-riding accident. Her humility is then doubly protected by her own death, which rendered her incapable of actively seeking fame. Then her lack of prideful motive is triply affirmed by the elaborate story that Sankey told around his unplanned and providential discovery of the hymn in a weekly paper, thus removing from the dead woman any possibly hint of agency (Sankey 1906: 247–51). The option of death was not immediately available to the remarkably long-lived Borthwick sisters. All they could do was publish anonymously, so that any thrill of pride was at least private. The fact that these were translations and not original works further mitigated the danger of claiming poetic credit. So Hymns from the Land of Luther (1854, 1855, 1858, 1862, and 1884 with additions) was published without attribution to their translators. The 1884 volume contains 114 hymns in English verse, with the original German composer indicated underneath. Some of these German composers were women; however, where this is the case, they are listed as ‘Unbekanntes’—‘Unknown’—even when they patently were not. Subsequent attribution has identified over half the hymns as translated by Jane Borthwick, and slightly less by her younger sister Sarah Borthwick Findlater. In

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addition, one of the hymns (and perhaps more) is not a translation but an original composition by Borthwick. Lest the reader should disapprove of such selfpromotion, Borthwick explains in her anonymous preface to the 1884 edition that this was ‘by mistake printed at first among the others; and having proved a favourite with most readers, it is retained “under protest” ’. This poem, ‘The Desired Haven’, is indicated simply by the initials of the title of the volume: ‘H. L. L.’—a pseudonym that Borthwick employed subsequently in almost all her published work, even when other women are credited by name. She was reportedly less than pleased when her real name was revealed in Lyra Britannica, a Collection of British Hymns (1867).

Hymns from the Land of Luther: Themes and Theology Hymns from the Land of Luther was a popular publication, running to five editions. The volume ranges widely and unsystematically across German hymnody, from early Pietists such as Spener himself, Gerhardt, and Ernst Lange (1650–1727); through the fruitful ‘middle years’ of Katharina von Schlegel (1697–c.1797), and Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–60); and finishing with the Borthwicks’ contemporaries, Karl J. P. Spitta (1801–59) and Johan Peter Lange (1802–84). It is not possible to recreate the selection process they employed, although it might be noted that there are no examples of the bloodier or more erotic of the genre: the sexualized imagery for the wounds of Christ employed by Zinzendorff would doubtless have been deemed too shocking for nineteenthcentury propriety. But the thrill of intense emotion remains, at times verging on the orgasmic. We might remember that von Schlegel’s hymn, Stille, mein Wille, rendered by Borthwick as ‘Be still my soul’ (100) might plausibly be rendered, ‘Be still, my desires’. Pietism arose in the seventeenth century in explicit opposition to a scholarly faith, and so eschewed systematic theology from the beginning. Likewise, the nineteenth-century brand promoted by the Borthwick sisters cannot easily be expressed as a system. This is not to say that their theology lacked logic; rather, that it might be better described as an experiential theology rather than a systematic one. The key components of this experiential theology can be extrapolated from the content of the Borthwicks’ oeuvre.

Experiential Immediacy This experiential theology is hugely Christocentric, and indeed, crucicentric. Conversion occurs when the believer is struck by an immediate and imaginative experience of the sufferings of Christ. This leads to an intense personal identification

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with these sufferings, so that from now on, the believer’s entire experience of suffering in this world is understood in the light of the suffering of Jesus. As Jesus carried the cross, so the believer must carry their suffering with the similar patience and meekness, even while knowing that their pain can never reach the exquisite (and sometimes fetishized) heights of Jesus’ own suffering. Part of the challenge faced by the Borthwick sisters was to tone down the intensity of their Pietist sources, and produce a hymnody that was both deeply experiential and yet suitable for respectable burghers. The hymns of the Pietists were designed not merely to describe the experience of faith, but actually to produce it. Take, for example, Sarah Borthwick Findlater’s translation of Fliesst, Ihr Augen (SBF, Laurentius Laurenti) which she entitled ‘Calvary’. As the translation is rather free, Findlater will be referenced throughout as the author. As is typical of early Pietist hymns, ‘Calvary’ is constructed around paradoxes. The hymn begins: Flow, my tears, flow still faster, Thus my guilt and sin bemoan; Mourn, my heart, in deeper anguish, Over sorrows not thine own! See, a spotless Lamb draw nigh To Jerusalem to die; For thy sins, the sinless One; Think! ah! think what thou hast done! (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 107)

From the first line, Findlater establishes the agony of the awareness of personal sin: an agony that has been provoked by the contrast offered by the ‘spotless Lamb’ that is about to die. With astonishing ease, the guilt of the spectator then is transferred across the years to the guilt of the spectator now, so that the spectator (who is also one’s own heart) cowers in shame under the repeated exhortation to ‘Think!’ The affecting antitheses continue in the following stanzas, and are joined to an assault on the senses. ‘See him stand’, Findlater demands, and proceeds to lead her reader through an immersive experience of the crucifixion, as if we were directly present—although she does tone down the scourges and nakedness of Laurenti’s original. Sound is added to sight, as the ‘loud and frenzied cry’ of the crowd is echoed in the frenzy of the metre with its plethora of exclamation marks. Jesus, by contrast, bears this assault ‘meekly’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 107). In witnessing the pain of Christ, the believer is struck by a horrified realization: that they themselves are personally responsible for that pain. As Jesus died for their sins, so it was the believer who, across the years, called for his crucifixion and nailed him to the cross. This realization ought to lead the believer to deep sorrow and repentance. To make sure it does, Findlater continues with the rhetorical questions, demanding whether it is possible that we can ‘see . . . view . . . hear’ the

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suffering of Jesus, and not ‘tremble for our sin’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 108). This is a heavy burden of guilt, but such guilt is an absolutely necessary component of this Evangelical experiential theology. For if our sins have caused Christ’s sufferings, then our sins must be real, felt, and significant. In the sixth stanza, the questions shift in focus. ‘Must I, Jesus, thus behold Thee?’, the hapless sinner asks, as they try to reconcile the extremity of Christ’s suffering that they have just experienced with the paucity of the best response available to them. The result is a collapse into tears—‘Lamb of God! I weep for Thee!’—followed by nothing less than total submission: Poor is all that I can offer, Soul and body while I live; Take them, O my Saviour, take them, I have nothing more to give.

At last, at this moment of absolute surrender of the will, the Christian’s reward is a vision of building rapture: Louder, louder, saints are singing, Glory! glory! Christ, to Thee!

Caught up into ecstatic union with Christ, in deliberate echo of the Song of Songs, the believer exclaims triumphantly of the moment of consummation, ‘I am Thine, and Thou are mine’; and in the last line, the imperative now is directed at Jesus: ‘Come! in glory, – come once more!’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 109). Heady stuff indeed for a church raised on a diet of Psalms and Paraphrases. Findlater’s version of Laurenti’s hymn does not merely describe a religious experience: it is a religious experience. Findlater had brought the language of desire, submission, and ecstatic consummation into the staid parlours of nineteenthcentury Scotland.

The Loss of Assurance ‘Calvary’ usefully typifies many of the features of the Borthwicks’ hymnody: the immediacy, the sensory detail, and the immersive religious experience, leading to a profound awareness of personal sin, total submission, and ultimate consummation. For the Scottish Free Church Evangelicals of the mid-nineteenth century, faith truly was an all-or-nothing affair. This is also a ‘feminized’ discourse, as the Borthwick sisters brought into the mainstream their own female perspective on the faith. The mild eroticizing of Jesus is part of that. But a more common theme in Hymns from the Land of Luther than glorious consummation, is loneliness, grief, and frustrated desire. In ‘The Two Journeys’ (JB, Moewes), Jane Borthwick departs from the federal Calvinist

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doctrine of election, and instead dramatizes the choice that the sinner must make, between torment and salvation. ‘Whither, oh, whither?’ the believer asks, and is answered first with a terrifying vision of a Christless eternity: With blindfolded eyes, Down a wild torrent under stormy skies, A gulf between two dark eternities, Drifting, we know not where! (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 144)

In alternate verses, the answer then offers a dream of bliss: ‘A home of loveliness serene and bright’. This is the binary facing the sinner, although one option is so horrific that it is scarcely a choice at all. Interestingly, the Borthwick sisters make virtually no mention of Satan or hell. If hell exists, then it is a personal space, not a metaphysical reality: it is a moment, a life, or an eternity without Jesus. However, even presuming the sinner makes the right choice, Jesus is still not personally present to her, not on this earth. This makes the world itself into a kind of hell, where even believers are condemned to wander lost and alone and longing for Jesus. Thus, in Jane Borthwick’s own composition, ‘The Desired Haven’, she depicts the journey through life as a perilous sea journey: Lord, the waves are breaking o’er me and around, Oft of coming tempests I hear the moaning sound. Here there is no safety, rocks on either hand, ’Tis a foreign roadstead, a strange and hostile land. (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 69)

This poem has its own erotic quality, but its bodily agonies of grief and longing are of quite a different order to the glorious consummation of ‘Calvary’. Here there is no release, no orgasm, but only tumultuous unrequited desire. The experience is of the absence of Christ, and it is as intense as the experience of his presence. By contrast, in ‘God is calling yet!’ (SBF, Tersteegen), it is not sorrow that torments the believer, but earth’s ‘passing joys’ which beguile and stupefy her (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 116–17). Here Findlater imagines the story of salvation as something akin to a fairy tale. The believer is a sleeping maiden, lying in ‘dreamy slumbers’ and under the spell of ‘earth’s witcheries’. This pleasurable, languorous semi-existence resists the call of God. However, as the hymn progresses, she becomes aware that she is testing the divine patience, and that the offer of salvation may yet be withdrawn: God ‘is waiting now, but ah! He soon may leave me’. Ultimately, in a submission of a different kind to her sister’s exhausted collapse in ‘The Desired Haven’, Findlater instructs her heart to ‘yield him all’, so that her spirit might ‘rise in soaring wonder’. The problem with such an experiential system of theology is that there is little room for objective doctrinal truths. If it is the experience of Christ that saves, then salvation becomes at least in part dependent upon our religious feelings.

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Moreover, intensity of feeling can be hard to maintain, which is one reason why such hymns seek to reproduce it over and over, whether in the form of terror or of ecstasy. When the intensity subsides, as it must, the result is the loss of another tenet of classical Calvinism, that of the ‘assurance of salvation’ or ‘the perseverance of the saints’. This doctrine has given way in the Borthwicks’ hymnody to a Wesleyan understanding that their salvation might actually be lost.

Perfectionism This very shaky sense of assurance is accompanied by a Pietistic emphasis on sanctification and union with Christ. The final stanza of ‘The Desired Haven’ portrays the trials of this world as a discipline, designed to grow the believer in patience. This is the theme also of ‘Jesus, still lead on’ (JB, Zinzendorf): When oppressed by new temptations, Lord, increase and perfect patience. (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 26)

The Wesley brothers had close connections with the Moravians, and were personal friends of Zinzendorff, so it is not surprising to find Arminian-style free will and perfectionism in an English Pietist hymn. The surprise is that such sentiments appear unremarked in the pages of the Free Church of Scotland’s family magazine. But where a systematic theology of perfectionism was rejected by the church divines, yet the concept could make its way into the Evangelical mind-set through devotional poetry. The title of the hymn ‘Shadow and Substance’ (SBF, Neander) contrasts this shadowy world ‘like a flying dream’ with the substantiality of God (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 146). However, the problem for the Borthwick sisters is that in a belief system which relies on experience, this world is felt as much more ‘real’ than any objective future hope, however sure the promises. To make matters worse, of the two earthly extremes of happiness and sorrow, it is happiness which is experienced as the more insubstantial. Grief, by contrast, is felt intensely and enduringly. (‘The Desired Haven’ is above all a poem about how lonely it is to live when others have died.) Several of the Borthwicks’ hymns deal with the death of a child. ‘Our Eliza’ (unattributed, Moewes) is a deeply personal account of grief, which only just manages to wrench itself round to hope of heaven in the final two stanzas. Meanwhile, ‘The Angel and the Infant’ (Unbekanntes, probably an original JB composition) reverses the flow, promising the dying child a life of peace and bliss, and only in the last line recalling bluntly the sorrow of those on earth: ‘Poor mother! thy son is dead!’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 66). Although they might have sidelined some of its doctrines, nevertheless the Borthwick sisters hold firmly to Calvinism’s most central precept: that of the

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sovereignty of God. Their experiential theology explains such grief as ordained by God in order to teach the believer not to hold the world too dear, so that their eyes might be set on heaven. So in ‘Submission’ (JB, Unbekanntes [von Schlegel]), Jane Borthwick enjoins her soul to ‘bear patiently the cross of grief or pain’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 100). This Calvinist doctrine of the sovereignty of God’s will is then allied to Wesleyan perfectionism as if there were no divide between them, so that the believer who seeks perfection must learn to detach herself from the pains and pleasures of the world. A contemporary Pietist hymn, ‘Light in Darkness’ (JB, Spitta), sets out this thesis, that suffering is sent by God to perfect us: And yet these days of dreariness are sent us from above . . . They come to lay us lowly and humbled in the dust, All self-deception swept away, all creature hope and trust; Our helplessness, our vileness, our guiltiness to own, And flee for hope and refuge to Christ, and Christ alone. (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 44)

The ultimate goal of detachment for the believer is to be ‘dead to the world before I die’ (‘Shadow and Substance’, Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 147). So the experiential theologian might conclude that if perfection can be achieved at all in this world, then it must look very much like the moment of death. There were plenty of opportunities to practise such perfection in the face of death. Mary Lundie Duncan died aged 28; Elizabeth Clephane mourned the estrangement and then accidental death of a beloved brother; the Borthwick sisters saw the young deaths of six of their siblings; and in society in general, the death of infants was heart-breakingly common. A pious Christian family might rejoice when a son became a missionary, and yet his mother and sisters mourned his departure to the further reaches of the Empire, knowing both that they could not follow him, and they were unlikely to see him again. A ‘good death’ (and sometimes a ‘good farewell’) is a frequent theme of this volume, in which the wrenching grief of the bereaved is challenged by the calm beauty of the dying one. So in ‘Grief and Consolation by a Mother’s Death Bed’ (JB, Moewes), her children engage in a dialogue with their dying parent, in which they contrast their own ‘bursting anguish’ with the ‘calm and cloudless’ brow of their saintly mother (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 48). They beg her not to forsake them, and she claims that ‘were it but our Father’s will, / Gladly had I tarried still’. But she has submitted entirely to the Father’s will, and so she gains the saint’s reward: a vision of ‘our heavenly home’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 49). In the religious milieu of the mid-nineteenth century, the bereaved or dying mother stands for a kind of ultimate suffering, akin to that of Jesus himself— although not to that of the mother of Jesus, who merits no mention whatsoever. Thus patient resignation, the highest of feminine virtues, becomes also the highest of Christian virtues, so that for this quite brief window of history, women were

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considered to be more instinctively Christ-like than men. By the late nineteenth century, in a backlash to Lundie Duncan’s femininely ‘tender’ Jesus, a new admiration of his soldierly masculine traits of courage and self-sacrifice would arise. But for the moment, Jesus belonged to the women.

Safe in the Arms of Jesus The repeated ‘little deaths’ of struggle and submission foreshadow the ultimate consummation, when the believer will achieve full ecstatic unity with Jesus, and then rest in his arms at last. However, there remains the possibility of a calm and restful place for the believer, even while still resident in this world. This restful place was the domain of the restful woman, ever resigned, patient, and ‘still’. In a noisy and dangerous industrial world, into which men ventured daily to the peril of their bodies and souls, the woman’s task was to create the ‘desired haven’ in the home itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the sacred calling of women was to be saviour to their menfolk. Thus in this experiential, ‘feminized’ theology, the desired haven of heaven is described in domesticated imagery, where God takes the female role of calling home the wandering husband or son (for only sons and husbands had the freedom to wander). It might also be noted that this image of heaven as a home—and home as a heaven—is thoroughly middle class. The idealization of the home distinguishes later-stage German Pietism from its earlier incarnations. It is a particularly strong theme in the hymns of Spitta, whose popular hymn, ‘The Christian Household’ (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 142–3) is representative: O happy house! whose little ones are given Early to Thee, in faith and prayer, – To Thee, their Friend, who from the heights of heaven Dost guide and guard with more than mother’s care! O happy house! Where little voices Their glad hosannas love to raise, And childhood’s lisping tongue rejoices To bring new songs of love and praise. (Borthwick and Findlater 1884: 143)

This very Germanic romanticizing of marriage and childhood is Pietist theology working its way out in popular sentiment. Note too how the hymn makes a direct link between the care of a mother and the care of Jesus, feminizing the male Saviour, deifying the good mother, and imagining heaven as a loving matriarchal home. There is no need to refer to the mother of Jesus when the female domestic role has been occupied entirely by her Son. The extraordinary conclusion of the Borthwick’s hymnody is that if a man wants to become more like Christ, then he should become more like a woman.

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In an urban, industrialized, and masculine public sphere, female hymn writers introduced to the Free Church a spirituality that was private, interiorized, and safe. For example, Elizabeth Clephane’s most enduring hymn begins: Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand, the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land. (Clephane 1872: 398)

Yet within a few lines, that cross, that mighty rock, has become ‘a home within the wilderness, / a rest upon the way’. The cross which is such agony in ‘Calvary’ has by the mid Victorian period been thoroughly domesticated.

Conclusion In the hymnody of the Borthwick sisters, of Lundie Duncan, and of Clephane, the ideal woman is the embodiment of all the most aspirational divine qualities. Like Jesus, she is meek, pure, and submissive; like Jesus, she loves with a mother’s gentleness; like Jesus, she does not murmur against her own cross, but bears her many griefs with patient resignation. In contrast to the energetic exterior world of the nineteenth century, the ideal Christian soul was indeed ‘still’, as Jane Borthwick would have it. Though they doubtless would have denied it, the exaltation of the domestic sphere amounts to a claim by these women hymn writers to spiritual authority. But even as women were being sanctified, they were also being imprisoned. The virtue of submission sought to render these women passive and powerless, ashamed even of the desire to be published, lest their spiritual authority be weakened at the exact same time that it was acknowledged. Their hymns are filled with the Arminian fear of losing their salvation, even as they became their only legitimate outlet for the expression of their desires, sexual and otherwise. Later in the nineteenth century came the predictable reaction against the perceived feminization of Christianity. The masculine world reared up once again in the form of Social Christianity, ‘muscular Christianity’, the Boy Scouts, and the beginning in Glasgow in 1883 of the Boys’ Brigade. Thus a new generation of young men were trained in the ‘masculine’ Christian virtues of courage and selfsacrifice, just in time for the First World War. This ‘masculinizing’ counter-movement likewise made its way into popular hymnody. The Scottish Hymnal of 1896 saw the introduction to the congregations of Scotland of more ‘manly’ hymns such as ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ (Baring-Gould 1864), and ‘Courage, brother, do not stumble’ (Macleod 1857). Then, with The Revised Church Hymnary of 1929, the congregational repertoire expanded to include ‘Rise up, O men of God’ (Merrill 1911) and ‘Soldiers of the cross, arise’ (Howe 1854).

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Of the Borthwick sisters’ many hymns, only ‘Be still my soul’ (‘Submission’) has made it into the most recent Church Hymnary (2005). Its enduring popularity is owing in no small part to its musical pairing with Sibelius’ Finlandia, although its powerful expression of loss means that it is sung but rarely in modern congregations who are perhaps more comfortable with cheerful praise than with anguished grief. But even with the rise of such tropes as Jesus the ‘captain of salvation’ and ‘royal master’, Evangelicalism has refused to let go the more personal, experiential imagery of Jesus as ‘lover’ and ‘friend’. The gentler feminine voice, which was so despised even before the long lives of Jane and Sarah Borthwick had ended, has survived beyond them to influence evangelical piety into the twenty-first century.

Bibliography Baring-Gould, Sabine (1864). ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, in The Church of Scotland, The Church Hymnary. Edinburgh: Henry Frowde, 1905, 272. Borthwick, Jane (1859). ‘The Best Remembrance’, in Andrew Cameron (ed.), The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 322–3. Borthwick, Jane Lawrie, and Sarah Borthwick Findlater (1884). Hymns from the Land of Luther, 5th edition. London: T. Nelson and Sons. See in particular the following items: ‘Calvary’, trans. SBF, of Laurentius Laurenti (1660–1722), Fliesst, Ihr Augen, 107–9. ‘God is calling yet!’, trans. SBF, of Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1768), Gott rufet noch!, 116–17. ‘Grief and Consolation by a Mother’s Death Bed’, trans. JB, of H. Moewes (dates unknown), Thatest sonst uns nicht zu Leide, 48–9. ‘Jesus, still lead on’, trans. JB, of Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–60), Jesu, geh voran, 26–7. ‘Light in Darkness’, trans. JB, of Carl Johann Philipp Spitta (1801–59), Das Leben wird oft truebe, 43–5. ‘Our Eliza’, trans. unattributed, of H. Moewes (dates unknown), Ich hatte der Kinder viere, 199–200. ‘Shadow and Substance’, trans. SBF, of Joachim Neander (1650–80), Das Leben ist gleich einem Traum, 146–7. ‘Submission’, trans. JB, of Katharina von Schlegel (1697–c.1797), Stille, mein Wille! dein Jesu hilft siegen, 100–1. ‘The Angel and the Infant’, Jane Borthwick (probably original composition), 65–6. ‘The Christian Household’, trans. SBF, of Carl Johann Philipp Spitta (1801–59), O selig Haus, 142–3. ‘The Desired Haven’, Jane Borthwick (original composition), 69–70. ‘The Two Journeys’, trans. JB, of H. Moewes (dates unknown), Wohin, Wohin?, 144–5.

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Clephane, Elizabeth (1872). ‘Beneath the Cross of Jesus’, in Thomas Arnot (ed.), The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 398. Clephane, Elizabeth (1874). ‘There were ninety and nine that safely lay’, in Thomas Arnot (ed.), The Family Treasury of Sunday Reading. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 595. Drummond, Andrew Landale and James Bulloch (1975). The Church in Victorian Scotland, 1843–1874. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Duncan, Mary Grey Lundie (1841). Memoir of Mrs Mary Lundie Duncan: Being Recollections of a Daughter by her Mother. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Son. Howe, William Walsham (1854). ‘Soldiers of the cross, arise’, in The Church of Scotland, The Church Hymnary, Revised Edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1928, 341. Lee, Thomas Alexander (2006). Seekers of Truth: The Scottish Founders of Modern Public Accountancy. Oxford: Elsevier, JAI Press. Macleod, Norman (1857). ‘Courage, brother, do not stumble’, in The Church of Scotland, The Church Hymnary. Edinburgh: Henry Frowde, 1905, 273. Merrill, William Pierson (1911). ‘Rise up, O men of God’, in The Church of Scotland, The Church Hymnary, Revised Edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1928, 344. Moffatt, James (ed.) (1927). Handbook to the Church Hymnary. London: Oxford University Press. Rogers, Charles (ed.) (1867). Lyra Britannica, a Collection of British Hymns, with Biographical Sketches of the Hymn Writers. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Sankey, Ira David (1906). My Life and Sacred Songs. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Spener, Philipp Jakob (1675). ‘Pia Desideria’, in Peter C. Erb (ed.), Pietists: Selected Writings. London: SPCK, 1983, 31–49.

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23 The Liturgical Revolution Prayers, Hymns, and Stained Glass Bryan D. Spinks

The Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, and the United Presbyterian Church all witnessed a liturgical revival in the nineteenth century. The revival—or revolution—is epitomized by Dr Robert Lee of Greyfriars, Edinburgh. In a sketch of his life published in Fraser’s Magazine in June 1870, it was stated: No one acquainted with Scotland needs to be told that public worship is now conducted in a far more becoming and reverent fashion. Kneeling at prayer is becoming general; carefully written prayers are used by many of the most distinguished clergymen; the organ has been introduced into not a few of the largest churches; the music, instrumental and vocal, is generally well executed and carefully chosen. An air of solemnity and impressiveness has been cast around the bald and uninviting service of the Puritans, and Scotsmen have at last consented to behave with decency in the sanctuary. To the resolute efforts of Dr. Lee, to his keen perception of what was indecorous and unbecoming, as well as to his fine taste, and cultivated feeling for the beautiful, the improvement is mainly to be attributed. (Anon. 1870: 101–2)

The sketch could have added that with Gothic revival architecture, stained glass too had reappeared in Scottish Presbyterianism. On 19 January 1846, a fire had destroyed Old Greyfriars. It reopened in 1857, and its restoration and decoration included some stained glass windows. Lee took the opportunity to begin to make changes in worship. This included standing to sing and kneeling for prayer, and conforming more to the order of service outlined in the Westminster Directory, which was not the general custom. He also drew up and printed a liturgy—Prayers for Public Worship (1857)—and so introduced read prayers from a printed book. He also introduced hymns into the worship of Greyfriars. Some fellow ministers took exception at what they regarded as innovations in Presbyterian worship, and took action against him in the judicatory bodies of the Kirk. The case went from there to the Synod and then to the General Assembly. The Assembly found only that the reading of prayers from a book was contrary to the laws and usage of the Church, and Lee undertook to refrain from this practice. Lee responded by reading from hand-written versions of his printed

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texts. In this he seems to have been following earlier precedents, for the first half of the nineteenth century witnesses to a number of ‘specimen’ collections of worship services printed for guidance of ministers, but which do seem to have been the forms used by the authors themselves. One of the complaints made by some nineteenth-century critics was the poor quality of the traditional worship and poor extemporary prayer, as well as the omission by some ministers of Bible readings, the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, though the Directory had only enjoined the Lord’s Prayer. Dr Robert Lee, in his magisterial prose, explained of the large number of ministers who prayed extempore that they plunge ‘into the great wilderness of thought and language—like Abraham who went forth not knowing whither he went, but who was safe under the promised guidance from above, which these men shew, by their dreary wanderings, that they do not enjoy’ (1864: 15–16). G. W. Sprott referred to ‘well-known scraps of bad taste and nonsensical misquotations of Scripture which second-rate men rhyme over’ (1863: 4–5). John Cumming felt that many ministers lacked both spiritual mindedness and the gifts with utterance, resulting in mediocrity and painful harangues (1840: ix, xxiv). The ‘specimens’ were published to attempt to rectify these complaints and give a guide to good practice. The first of these was The Scotch Minister’s Assistant (1802), reissued in 1822 under the title The Presbyterian Minister’s Assistant, the author being Harry Robertson of Kiltearn. It contained orders of service and prayers for marriage, baptism, for fencing the table, table addresses and postcommunion exhortations, prayers at communion and blessing the elements, as well as prayers before and after the sermon, and prayers for particular pastoral occasions. Other important exemplars were composed by Andrew Carstairs, minister of Anstruther West, William Liston of Redgorton, Alexander Brunton of New Greyfriars, and James Anderson, of Cults. Thanks to the rediscovery by James C. Stewart, to these may now be added William Logie’s Sermons and Services of the Church (1857). Logie was minister of St Magnus, Kirkwall, Orkney, and, upon his death in 1856, his sermons and services were published by his son. In 1859 Daniel Dewar of Marischal College, Aberdeen, published some sermons preached at communion, and a number of prayers that he had used after the sermon and at the communion table. It was during the Lee controversy that the General Assembly published Prayers for Social and Family Worship (1859). This was the work of a committee which had been appointed in 1849 to prepare forms of service, not for the use of ministers, but ‘as aids to the exercise of Social Worship, according to the manner of the Church of Scotland, by Soldiers, Sailors, Colonists, Sojourners in India or in foreign countries, who are deprived of the regular services of a Christian Ministry’ (Anon. 1859: v). The preface claimed that the morning and evening services had been compiled from the devotional writings of Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers, as well as the Westminster Directory. The recommended order as represented

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by the first morning service was prayer ending in the Lord’s Prayer, a prose psalm, Scripture readings from the Old and New Testaments, with a psalm sung between them, prayer with special petitions and thanksgivings, sung psalm, sermon or reading that would edify the worshippers, prayer, psalm or paraphrase, and blessing. What is significant is that this is set forth as ‘according to the manner of the Church of Scotland’ and was indirectly a recommendation of a particular order of public worship. The ad hoc committee which had prepared this was transformed into the Aids to Devotion Committee under the convenership of Professor Crawford (Franklin 1961: 10). Music had not been an item of controversy and in the spring of 1863 Lee introduced another innovation, namely a harmonium to accompany singing. It may have been this together with dissatisfaction with the mild condemnation made of Lee at the 1859 Assembly that prompted further agitation, with the result that in 1863 a committee was appointed by the General Assembly to investigate innovations in public worship. Meanwhile, Lee was engaged in writing an apologia and forceful justification of his liturgical programme, and May 1864 saw the publication both of his book, The Reform of the Church of Scotland, and the report of the General Assembly’s committee on innovations in public worship. The report itself left open whether the 1864 Assembly needed to take measures or not with regard to the reported use (at Greyfriars) of reading from a printed book, and two other churches which used a manuscript (Church of Scotland 1864: 21). It did, however, press on ministers the need to properly prepare public worship. The Committee felt there was no need to take any legislative measures concerning public worship, and noted that there was a high degree of uniformity in practice, and changes that had been made regarding the Lord’s Supper should be regarded less as innovations and more the result of need for convenience and edification of members of the Church (Church of Scotland 1864: 22–3). Lee meanwhile now urged the use of hymns in worship in addition to the metrical psalms, and referred to Geikie’s ‘Songs of the Sanctuary’ which was employed in Greyfriars (Church of Scotland 1864: 154–5). He also resumed use of his printed liturgy, arguing it was not the same one as had been condemned by the earlier General Assembly (indeed, it was a new edition with new prayers and some reordering of the previous material). At the General Assembly of 1865 the former Moderator, Dr Pirie, made plain his hostility to Lee’s liturgical innovations, and put forward a motion that worship should be regulated by the Presbytery. After much debate as to whether this was actually legal, the motion was passed and became known as the Pirie Act. The result was that Lee was once more the subject of the judicatory, though his death meant that the case against him was never resolved. In the meantime, however, in 1865 a number of ministers in the Church of Scotland founded the Church Service Society. The Church Service Society was officially founded on 31 January 1865, at

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a meeting held at the Religious Institution Rooms in Glasgow. The first page of the Minute Book 1865–99, reads: Mr. Wilson was called to the chair, and opened the meeting with prayer. Mr. Campbell was appointed Clerk to the meeting.

The Chairman stated the object of the meeting to be the formation of a Society for the study of the ancient and reformed liturgies, and the preparation of prayers and other services adapted for the worship of the Church of Scotland (Church Service Society Minutes 1865–99: 1). The founding of the society was planned by R. H. Story, Cameron Lees, and George Campbell. In a letter of 1904 George Campbell, who served for many years as the secretary of the society, explained: I think, the month of November 1864, I was assisting at the Communion in a country parish in the neighbourhood, where I spent several days with Dr. Cameron Lees, then of Paisley, and a co-Presbyter of my own. Our minds were full, as were those of many others at that time, of improvements in Church services. I had been taken with the idea of a Society for the purpose first propounded by Dr Sprott in a pamphlet shortly before published by him bearing the title of ‘The Worship, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Church of Scotland,’ or such like . . . Dr. Cameron Lees took it up eagerly, and he often dwells in conversation with me on a winter morning walk which we took together, and he identifies the very spot on the Eaglesham Road where we came to the resolution to proceed actively in the matter. It was agreed that I was to write to Dr. Story and inform him of what we had concluded, asking his co-operation . . . We three conspirators met in Glasgow and agreed to sound the views of various like-minded ministers, and to invite them to attend a meeting for the purpose. (Kerr 1910: 6–9)

As Campbell acknowledged in this letter, a major catalyst that led to the founding of the Church Service Society was a publication by George Washington Sprott, The Worship, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Church of Scotland (1863). This was both a review of the history of worship in the Church of Scotland and a guide for better and more reverend worship. It was in the introduction that he suggested that ‘there should be a self-constituted Society of the liturgical scholars in the Church, who would, after due time and full consideration of the whole subject, draw up a book of prayers for public worship and of forms for the administration of the sacraments and other special services, as a guide to the clergy’ (Sprott 1863: 5). It was this suggestion that the ‘three conspirators’ made a reality in 1865. The major contribution of the Church Service Society was the publication of the Euchologion, the first edition appearing in 1867. This provided ‘specimen’ services, but in such a manner as to invite use by the book, or with only minor emendations to the prayers. It went through several editions with expansions each time. The

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compilers drew not only on historic Scottish forms but also on the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church, the Mercersberg (American German Reformed) liturgy, as well as the Book of Common Prayer and classical Eastern rites. Its success spurred the Church of Scotland to issue guidelines for services, and eventually in the early twentieth century, an official denomination specimen. Millar Patrick wrote: The movement towards reform in the public worship of Scottish Presbyterianism, which began with the formation of the Church Service Society in 1865, was bound in time to affect other branches of the Church than the one to which that Society, unofficially, belonged. It was the nature of things that the first stirring of interest should appear in the United Presbyterian Church. (1930–1: 79)

One United Presbyterian (UP) minister who decided that improvement was necessary and desirable was Dr William Bruce Robertson, a poet and hymn writer. Robertson had been called to Cotton Row Church, Irvine in 1847, and his congregation built a new church, Trinity, in 1863. Of neo-Gothic style, the architect was Frederick Thomas Pilkington. Arthur Guthrie wrote of Robertson’s style of worship at Trinity: The three correlatives, as he called them – praise, prayer, and preaching – were built up by him on the principle of a progressive unity. The praise was perfectly rendered by a congregation that for many years had been taught that, of the three, praise stood highest with God. Standing statuesquely in the desk, as the singing proceeded, with countenance lit up, he would move to the rhythm of the music, while the choir, at the same time, seemed touched with a like feeling, – an electric spiritual current passing between them. The music thus took a deeper tone; and a meaning, never discerned before, unfolded itself in the hymn, to choir, singers, and congregation. The prayer which followed, naturally drew inspiration from the elevation and emotion begotten of the singing – hence his prayers can only be described as rapt utterances full of holy yearnings and aspirations, breathing as from golden censers the incense of a pure sacrifice; and, while fitting into the higher service of praise, they led up to the central thought of the discourse which, at such special times, was often a prose poem. Believing that souls were to be reached and lured heavenwards through the imagination, he waylaid and surprised his hearers with visions of beauty, and by thoughts which only a poet – and a poet inspired by the Divine Spirit – could suggest. (1890: 247–8)

Guthrie notes that Robertson encouraged the movement for an improved service of praise in the sanctuary, and ‘for years he had contemplated framing a liturgy which would be in harmony with Presbyterian forms, and in which praise, prayer, and preaching would each receive its proper place’ (1890: 255). Robertson caused some controversy when he held a service on Christmas Eve with Christmas

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themes in 1868. Some other United Presbyterian ministers took exception, and an article in the United Presbyterian Magazine condemned this attempt to revive Christmas as a religious festival. The Presbytery met and issued a rebuke to the publication, complaining that the writer had not himself communicated with Robertson. The editor replied that the magazine was private property, and had the right to animadvert on anything taking place. Newspaper correspondence followed showing considerable public support for Robertson’s endeavours, and arguing that UP members should show sympathy with the cry for improved psalmody, more devout devotional exercises, and a higher type of church service (Guthrie 1890: 264). Further impetus for change came with the founding of the United Presbyterian Devotional Service Association. Founded during the meeting of the UP Synod in 1882, the object of the Association included fostering interest in the history and literature of public worship, and three of its initial papers were published by the Provisional Committee in 1882 under the title Devotional Services of the Church. The Constitution with office bearers was published in 1883, with an introductory letter signed by the President, Andrew Henderson, and Secretary, William Dickie, asserting that the Association had been formed to stimulate attention and ‘promote in every respect the devout and orderly expression of the worship of the Church, by the brotherly interchange of opinion and by the publication of a Periodical or Occasional Paper’. The Constitution stated a remit not unlike that of the Church Service Society: That the object of the Association shall be to promote the Edifying Conduct of the Devotional Services of the Church. In pursuing this object the Association shall endeavour to foster an interest in the History and Literature of Public Worship, consider the Practice of other Denominations, indicate defects in existing usages, discuss proposals in the direction of improvement, and by such means to promote the devout and orderly expression of the Worship of the Church.

A short article commending the Association appeared in the United Presbyterian Magazine in August 1884, which also reported that at the first annual meeting in May a paper entitled ‘The Requirements for the Conduct of Public Devotions’ had been given by Professor Henry Calderwood (1884: 368; Calderwood and Woodside 1900).¹ The Association would later compile Presbyterian Forms of Worship (1891). The preface to the first edition drew attention to the importance of public worship, and, though certainly not imposing a liturgy, it noted that there was urgent need of a directory adapted ‘to present-day requirements’. The forms offered in the book were ‘offered merely as illustrations of the manner in which the various services may be appropriately conducted under the existing system of public worship in the United Presbyterian Church’ (United Presbyterian Devotional Service ¹ I have not been able to trace a copy of this address, and it is not listed in Calderwood’s publications.

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Association 1891: vi). Millar Patrick noted of the first edition that the ‘modest issue of 400 copies was sold out in a few weeks, in spite of the fact that the Church’s Publications Committee refused to allow it to be sold on the Synod’s premises’ (Patrick 1930–1: 80). The fact that further editions appeared proves the need. Some ministers of the Free Church also felt that an association was needed to guide and update worship, and they too produced a new worship manual. Concerns about innovations in worship in the Free Church of Scotland surfaced in the Presbytery of Hamilton, Lanarkshire in 1854. John Jaffray (1804–58) is thought to have been the author of a pamphlet entitled Remarks on the Innovations in the Public Worship of God, proposed by the Free Presbytery of Hamilton. Dr James Begg (1808–83), the stalwart defender of what he regarded as Reformation truth, published an attack on ‘false worship’ in 1875, under the title Anarchy in Worship, or Recent Innovations contrasted with the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church and the vows of her Office-Bearers. Begg argued that scriptural principles of pure worship were held by Presbyterians, and must be held now. Begg’s conservatism was not shared throughout the Free Church. In May 1891 the Public Worship Association was formed ‘to promote the ends of edification, order, and reverence in the public services of the Church, in accordance with Scripture principles, and in the light especially of the experience and practice of the reformed Churches holding the Presbyterian system’ (Patrick 1930–1: 80). Patrick listed the leaders as Dr Douglas Bannerman, Professor William Blaikie, A. B. Bruce, A. Orrock Johnston, John Laidlaw, Hugh MacMillan, George Reith, Ross Taylor, S. D. F. Salmond, Walter C. Smith, and George Steven. Blaikie’s The Work of the Ministry (1873) contained a chapter on leading Divine Service; A. B. Bruce was heavily involved in the Free Church Hymn Book (1882), Smith was a hymn writer, and Orrock Johnston, having originally been opposed to the introduction of the organ, changed his mind and was an advocate for its use. Douglas Bannerman wrote on the topic of liturgies, as well as on the sacraments, and also appealed to his father James Bannerman’s work, The Church of Christ (1869). In his The Worship of the Presbyterian Church, with Special Reference to the Question of Liturgies (1884), Bannerman took rather a different approach from that of Begg. Bannerman’s work set the stage for the Public Worship Association. Papers were issued annually for private circulation among the members. In 1898 the Association published A New Directory for the Public Worship of God. This book offered an outline of sixteen elements for the order of Sunday worship, comparing this with thirteen items and eleven items in the sixteenth-century Book of Common Order and the Westminster Directory respectively. Specimen prayers of invocation, thanksgiving, confession of sins, petitions and intercessions, and prayers of illumination were offered. This format, recommending outline and then specimen forms, was followed by with the other services—baptism of infants and adults, the Lord’s Supper, admission of baptized persons to full communion, marriage, burial of the dead, ordinations of ministers and elders, licensing of

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probationers, and dedication of a church. With the formation of the United Free Church of Scotland a new liturgy for the uniting churches was deemed necessary, and so the Book of Common Order was published in 1928. Another crucial change in worship was the adoption of hymns in addition to metrical psalms. The opposition from some quarters is typified by the overture made to the Free Church Presbytery of Hamilton by Buchan in 1853, which argued for the use of hymns. It was answered in an anonymous pamphlet in 1854, thought to be by John Jaffray, entitled Remarks on the Innovations in the Public worship of God, Proposed by the Free Presbytery of Hamilton. This author argued that the psalms and unauthorized paraphrases were quite sufficient; as for hymnbooks, which may be valued by some as pretty toys in peaceful and prating times, they will be found nothing but an encumbrance and a weariness in the day of battle and of suffering (Jaffray [?] 1854: 34). The author also suggested that to allow hymns would lead to chanting, intoning, and the introduction of instrumental music. The lead in the introduction of hymns was taken by the UP Church. Prior to union, the Relief Church had published a collection of 231 sacred songs and hymns in 1798, and the United Secession Church had printed a hymnal just as negotiations on union with the relief Synod had begun. After the formation of the UP Church, the Hymn Book of the United Presbyterian Church was published in 1851. Benson noted that the 460 hymns were arranged in order of the biblical passages on which each was based, and was not easy to use. The UP Church replaced it in 1877 with the Presbyterian Hymnal. This had 366 hymns which were collected under fifteen headings. The section ‘Church’ included four for baptismal services, and six for the Lord’s Supper. The section ‘Ancient hymns’ included the Te Deum and the Dies Irae. The Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland had the shared inheritance of the 1781 Translations and Paraphrases, some of which might be regarded as embryonic hymns. The Church of Scotland appointed committees to consider Psalms and Paraphrases in 1845 and 1847 respectively, but nothing substantial resulted. In 1860 a committee under Dr David Arnot produced a collection of hymns, which were revised and published in 1861, but was little used. Dr A. K. H. Boyd was responsible for overseeing a committee which produced a much improved book, finally adopted in 1870 as the Scottish Hymnal containing 200 hymns. It was expanded to 442 hymns in 1884. In this edition the hymns were placed in ten sections, similar to the Presbyterian Hymnal sections. The hymns for baptism and childhood, and the Lord’s Supper were grouped under the section ‘Natural and Sacred Seasons’ with four suitable for baptisms, and five provided for the Lord’s Supper. The Free Church of Scotland began a revision of Translations and Paraphrases in 1870, published Psalm-verses, Paraphrases and Hymns in 1873, and The Free Church Hymn Book in 1882. This hymnal had a preface by the committee in

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which was expressed the hope that the collection would fulfil its purpose—‘the advancement of God’s glory in the praise of the sanctuary’. Although there were differences in the hymnals of the three main denominations, there was considerable overlap. In 1891 the UP Church resolved to revise its hymnal, and decided to approach the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland to see if they might cooperate in a common venture. A joint committee was appointed, and drafts for a new joint hymnal appeared in 1895 and 1896. The Church of Scotland decided to withdraw, but did adopt the final book, The Church Hymnary (1898). Although some congregations, particularly in the islands, resisted the innovation, hymns now became a vital element in most Scottish Presbyterian worship. Some opposition was eroded by the visit of Moody and Sankey between 1873 and 1875, and the use of Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos. The visit and their popularity also led to a greater acceptance of the harmonium and organ to accompany worship. Looking back across the nineteenth century, Sir Archibald Geike regarded the use of instrumental music as the most remarkable change that had occurred in Scottish services. He wrote: Had any one in the earlier half of last century been audacious enough to predict that in a couple of generations the ‘kist o’ whistles’, which had long been banished as a sign and symbol of black popery, would be reintroduced and welcomed before the end of the century, he would have been laughed to scorn, or branded as himself a limb of the prelatic Satan. (Geike 1904: 94)

Not even James Begg’s 271-page diatribe against the use of organs could stop the instrument’s advance (1866). In the survey of church services in Dundee reported in the Piper o’Dundee newspaper between 1888 and 1890, nearly all had an organ or harmonium. In the rebuilt Greyfriars, Dr Robert Lee has installed some stained glass windows. The revival of the design and manufacture of stained glass was part of the Arts and Craft Movement. Of the latter Peter Cormack has written: The catalyst for regeneration was the Arts & Crafts Movement, which originated in the 1880s as a reforming campaign to unify the visual arts. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and the practical example of William Morris, the movement emphasized common aims and methods across all fields of artistic activity thereby seeking to abolish conventional distinctions between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts. Since stained glass is an art form that can only be articulated through craft means, it can be seen as occupying an especially important position – arguably a more illuminating one than any other – within Arts & Crafts discourse. (Cormack 2015: 1)

James Ballentine set up as a glass stainer in Edinburgh in 1837, but Scottish Presbyterianism at that point in time was still steadfastly against such ‘popish’ ornamentation (Donnelly 1997). Ballentine and Allan supplied the stained glass windows for Greyfriars in 1857. They were roundels telling the story of the Good

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Samaritan. Ballentine and Allen also installed the windows of Sandyford Church, Glasgow, the latter a ‘dense Gothic Revival of geometric and floral patterns in deep colours’ (Williamson et al. 1990: 295).² Stained glass windows were also installed in Glasgow Cathedral, but, although Ballentine had offered to draw up a general scheme for the entire building, Charles Haeth Wilson took control of a committee of superintendence and ensured that the windows were ordered from the Royal Bavarian Glassworks in Munich. This proved controversial—not so much over stained glass, but foreign stained glass. This became a catalyst for a wider revival of this art in Scotland (Fawcett 2003). William Morris and Phillip Webb began to attract commissions in Scotland, for example a large stained glass window for Old West Kirk, Greenock in 1865 (Carruthers 2013). Glasgow quickly became the centre of the renewed Scottish stained glass production. Firms founded by Daniel Cottier (1838–91) and Stephen Adam (1848–1910) and J. & W. Guthrie made significant contributions—Cottier the Jamieson Memorial window in St Machar’s, Aberdeen; Adam, the west window in Clark Memorial Church, Largs; and the Guthries (designed by Robert Anning Bell) for Crathie Church. The revival of stained glass went hand in hand with the revival of Gothic architecture, adopted by all of the Presbyterian bodies in nineteenth-century Scotland—many in outward form, and, as the example of Govan Old, the interior fittings too. Looking back across the century, we can see that worship of Scottish Presbyterianism had changed dramatically from the early 1800s. However, to find a succinct theology that accounts for the changes is another matter altogether. The theologies amongst members of the Church Service Society and the Devotional Services Association varied considerably, for what bound them together in these associations was more aesthetical than specifically theological. When arguments were made, as for example by George Sprott, the basis was historical, reaching back not only to the early days of the Scottish Reformation, but beyond that to a wider and broader non-Roman past. The revival was as much cultural as theological, being an expression of Romanticism and the Victorian interest in respectability and things medieval. Charles Dellheim characterized the latter as ‘a social language of myths, legends, rituals, and symbols that was appropriated by Victorians to criticize and to affirm their own times’ (1992: 39). Perhaps implicit was the conviction that a religion that believed God became human needed to reach out to the culture in which it founded itself—a culture that was for ever in flux and changing. Lee expressed it thus in his 1864 publication, The Reform of the Church of Scotland. ‘We cannot make yesterday to-day’, he wrote, ‘however we may cherish its memory or value its lessons’, and added: Change is the order of the universe, the normal condition of all things mundane and human. Man may modify, he cannot prevent or arrest it; he may use it to his

² I am also grateful for notes by Tom Davidson Kelly.

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own benefit, but he can no more abrogate this than any other of the laws of nature. The chariot of Divine Providence still moves on its glorious course, but it crushes those who stand in its way. (1864: 3)

Possibly with full awareness of the growing Darwinian debate, he wrote: If the world continually go forward, and the Church stand still or go backward, what can happen but an eternal separation between science and religion; they who study God’s works, and they who preach his Word regarding each other not as allies and friends, but rivals and enemies, and the multitude gradually imbibing the notion that He who inspired the Bible is not the same God who governs all things and made the world. (1864: 8)

As A. H. K. Boyd pointed out, Lee was regarded as a liberal theologian. More theologically articulate were those members of the Church Service Society who founded the Scottish Church Society, the so-called ‘Scoto-catholics’. The writings of Professor William Milligan played a crucial role in the theological convictions of this society, and James Cooper was a prominent member (Milligan 1881, 1892, 1894; Wotherspoon 1926). For these churchmen, the historic confessions and creeds of the church catholic, the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation and the doctrine of the Church were central. The latter was the body of Christ, and an extension of the incarnation. The Church of Scotland was regarded as the continuing branch of the early Catholic Church in Scotland, and its ministers were in historic succession in that church, regardless of whether there were bishops or not (Cooper 1895). In worship the church shares in the heavenly life and ministry of Christ by the Holy Spirit, and the Lord’s Supper was the service where the mediation of Christ was most clearly shown, and should thus be the normal act of worship on the Lord’s Day. In terms of Sunday worship services, richer music, and church furnishings, much was achieved; less successful was the drive to make the Eucharist the normal main Sunday service.

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (1859). Prayers for Social and Family Worship. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Anon. (1870). ‘Dr. Robert Lee of Edinburgh: A Sketch by Shirley’, Fraser’s Magazine, new series vol. 1. London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 86–106. Anon. (1882). Devotional Services of the Church. Edinburgh: David Douglas. Anderson, James (1856 and 1862). The Minister’s Directory. Edinburgh. Bannerman, Douglas (1884). The Worship of the Presbyterian Church, with Special Reference to the Question of Liturgies. Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot.

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Begg, James (1866). The Use of Organs and other Instruments of Music in Christian Worship Indefensible. Glasgow: McPhon. Brunton, Alexander (1848). Forms for Public Worship in the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: Myles MacPhail. Calderwood, W. L. and David Woodside (1900). The Life of Henry Calderwood, LL.D., FRSE. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Carstairs, Andrew (1829). The Scottish Communion Service: with the Public Services for the Fast Day, Saturday and Monday before and after Communion. Edinburgh: John Anderson. Church of Scotland (1864). Report of Committee Anent Innovations in Public Worship. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Church Service Society Minutes (1865–99). Cooper, James (1895). ‘The Celtic Inheritance of the Scottish Church’, in The Divine Life in the Church. Scottish Church Society Conferences vol. II. Edinburgh: J. Gardner Hitt, 1–47. Cumming, John (1840). The Liturgy of the Church of Scotland, or John Knox’s Book of Common Order. London: J. Leslie. Dewar, Daniel (1859). The Communion Services of the Church of Scotland. Glasgow: W. R. M’Phun. Geike, Archibald (1904). Scottish Reminiscences. Glasgow: James Maclehose. Guthrie, Arthur (1890). Robertson of Irvine: Poet Preacher. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Jaffray, John [?] (1854). Remarks on the Innovations in the Public worship of God, Proposed by the Free Presbytery of Hamilton. Edinburgh. Kerr, John (1910). The Renascence of Worship: The Origin, Aims, and Achievements of the Church Service Society. Edinburgh: J. Gardner Hitt. Lee, Robert (1864). The Reform of the Church of Scotland, Part 1, Worship. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Liston, William (1843). The Service of the House of God, according to the Practice of the Church of Scotland. Glasgow: Robert Forrester. Logie, William (1857). Sermons and Services of the Church. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons. Milligan, William (1881). The Resurrection of our Lord. London: Macmillan. Milligan, William (1892). The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord. London: Macmillan. Milligan, William (1894). The Scottish Church Society: Some Account of its Aims. Edinburgh: J. G. Hitt. Public Worship Association (1900). A New Directory for the Public Worship of God, 4th edition. Edinburgh: Macnivan & Wallace.

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Sprott, G. W. (1863). The Worship, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. United Presbyterian Devotional Service Association (1891). Presbyterian Forms of Service. Edinburgh: Robert R. Sutherland.

Secondary Literature Carruthers, Annette (2013). The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cormack, Peter (2015). Arts & Crafts: Stained Glass. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dellheim, Charles (1992). ‘Interpreting Victorian Medievalism’, in Florence S. Boos (ed.), History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism. New York: Garland Publishing, 39–58. Donnelly, Michael (1997). Scotland’s Stained Glass: Making the Colours Sing. Edinburgh: Mercat Cross. Fawcett, F. (2003). Glasgow’s Great Glass Experiment: The Munich Glass of Glasgow Cathedral. Edinburgh: Historic Scotland. Franklin, Foster (1961). ‘Phases of Order in Church of Scotland Worship’, The Church Service Society Annual 31: 3–12. Patrick, Millar (1930–1). ‘The Church Worship Association of the United Free Church’, The Church Service Society Annual 3: 79–82. Williamson, Elizabeth, Anne Riches, and Malcolm Higgs (1990). Glasgow. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Wotherspoon, H. J. (1926). James Cooper: A Memoir. London: Longmans, Green and Co.

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24 Biblical Criticism in the Nineteenth Century Alexander Geddes to William Robertson Smith William Johnstone

Among the pioneers and practitioners of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century there have been some notable Scots. Two in particular will be discussed below: Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) and William Robertson Smith (1846–94). Together, their lives span the period of intense cultural creativity from the middle of the eighteenth century, the high point of the Enlightenment, to almost the end of the Victorian age at the dawn of the twentieth. In biblical criticism terms, their works mark the development from predominantly ‘lower criticism’ (the quest to establish the best text by comparing the external evidence available in manuscripts, versions, and citations) to the more speculative but potentially insightful ‘higher criticism’ (analysing the text supplied by lower criticism to try to establish from internal evidence who originally composed what, when, where, and why). The introduction of the term ‘higher criticism’ and its distinction from ‘lower’ is attributed to J. G. Eichhorn (1752–1827), professor in Göttingen, in 1787 (Carpenter and Harford-Battersby 1900: vol. 1, 42). For a balanced picture of biblical criticism in nineteenth-century Scotland, however, the work of many other scholars, some of whom will be mentioned below, deserves attention.

‘Lower’ and ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible: First Stirrings in the Work of Alexander Geddes Geddes seems an unlikely forerunner in Scottish biblical criticism. He was born, schooled, and ministered for a long period in the tiny surviving Roman Catholic community in Banffshire, north-east Scotland. However, education in Paris 1758–64 afforded him opportunity to encounter ideas of leading philosophes in the French Enlightenment (Schwarzbach 2004) and to develop his many-sided genius (Carruthers 2004). The award of the degree of LL.D. by the University of Aberdeen (both King’s and Marischal Colleges) in 1780 for his translation of select satires of Horace helped to establish his position in the world of Enlightenment scholarship. From the 1780s Geddes was resident in London under the patronage

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of Lord Petre, one of the foremost Catholic peers in England, who was attracted to his ambition to provide British Catholics with ‘a tolerable version’ of the Bible (Geddes 1786: 143). Geddes conceived a wider apologetic purpose: to commend the Bible to an educated and cultivated audience on the grounds of its intrinsic merit, not of ecclesiastical authority. Geddes’ programme fits well with the Enlightenment motto ‘sapere aude’ (‘have the courage to use your reason’) applied from Horace by Kant in 1785 (Broadie 1997: 3; Bultmann 2004: 119–20). Geddes’ ambition to provide ‘the genuine grammatical meaning of a genuine text’ (1797: xiii) identifies his enterprise as primarily one of lower criticism: ‘I have throughout acted the critic . . . I have freely used mine own judgment . . . without the smallest deference to . . . domineering authority. The Hebrew writings I have examined and appretiated [sic], as I would any other writing of antiquity . . . reason . . . is the ultimate and only sure motive of credibility’ (1800: iv–vi). Geddes’ programme of Bible translation and the controversy it engendered foreshadowed issues that were to recur throughout the nineteenth century: chiefly, the encounter between the claim for freedom to apply critical methods in the study of the Bible and the forces of conservatism as represented and exercised by church authorities. It is not surprising that Geddes, who questioned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and interpreted the Bible like any other classical text, should have come under censure from leaders in his own church by the time of his death. The pioneer became the protomartyr. Geddes’ work was rescued from oblivion by above all J. S. Vater (1771–1826), professor at Halle. To Vater is attributed the ‘Fragment Hypothesis’ of the composition of the Pentateuch. He acknowledged his debt to Geddes in the subtitle of his commentary, ‘with the translation of the more notable of Dr Alexander Geddes’ critical and exegetical comments intercalated’ (and marked off in his text by square brackets and the initial ‘G’), a rare example of Scottish usefulness in continental scholarship. Vater used Geddes only in the first three of the five parts of his commentary, and only as a lower critic—his translation and notes on text and language. The question how far Geddes was, like Vater, a ‘fragmentist’ at the higher critical level when dealing with questions of date and authorship is tantalizing, given that his programme was very far from completion (Rogerson 2004). Of his projected translation, Geddes published only Bible I, the Pentateuch and Joshua (1792), and Bible II, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ruth, and the Prayer of Manasseh (1797); Psalms, incomplete, was published posthumously in 1807. Critical Remarks (1800) accompany only Bible I; the promised General Preface, which would have presented his reasoned case on questions of composition, remained unwritten. His general ‘higher critical’ position is, however, indicated in the Preface to Bible I: Who was the author of so admirable a work? . . . As the subject will necessarily occupy a considerable place in my General Preface, I shall now content myself with giving, in very few words, the result of my own investigation . . . from

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intrinsic evidence, three things to me seem indubitable, 1st, The Pentateuch, in its present form, was not written by Moses. 2dly, It was written in the land of Chanaan [sic], and most probably at Jerusalem. 3dly, It could not be written before the reign of David, nor after that of Hezekiah. The long pacific reign of Solomon (the Augustan age of Judæa) is the period to which I would refer it: yet I confess, there are some marks of a posterior date, or at least of posterior interpolation. (Bible I: xviii–xx)

Post-Mosaic though it be, Geddes believed that the Pentateuch is largely unitary, but composed from widely scattered sources. He continued: I am fully persuaded that it was compiled from ancient documents, some of which were coeval with Moses, and some even anterior to Moses. Whether all these were written records, or many of them only oral traditions, it would be rash to determine. It is my opinion that the Hebrews had no written documents before the days of Moses; and that all their history, prior to that period, is derived from monumental indexes, or traditional tales. Some remarkable tree, under which a patriarch had resided; some pillar . . . ; some heap . . . ; some ford . . . ; some field . . . ; the tomb in which he had been laid—all these served as so many links to hand his story down to posterity; and corroborated the oral testimony transmitted, from generation to generation, in simple narratives, or rustic songs . . . [The compiler of the Pentateuch] was the first collector . . . from such documents as he could find, either among his own people, or among the neighbouring nations. (Bible I: xx)

Geddes here exhibits remarkable prescience of questions regarding the history of traditions that would engage higher critics’ attention in the following generations: Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), for example, traces aetiological sagas back to remarkable features in the landscape, trees, streams, and stones, and so on, associated with sites such as Shechem, Penuel, and Bethel (1901: xv). The influence of Geddes’ work stretched far beyond the confines of his church. His mediation of the German mythological interpretation of Scripture developed by Eichhorn and others exerted influence on the creative imagination of contemporary British writers, not least Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Shaffer 1975: 24–7). Geddes’ experience of opposition from ecclesiastical authorities was paralleled in the predominantly Protestant Scottish communions. Drummond and Bulloch (D&B) comment: ‘Scotland distinguished itself during the eighteenth century in practically every field of intellectual life . . . the one exception . . . was theology; and the reason is plain . . . any explicit deviation from the accepted pattern of theology in the Westminster Confession [WCF] excluded a man from the ministry’ (1973: 193, 104). John Tulloch (b. 1823, Principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews 1854–86), ‘the leading spokesman for liberal thought within the Scottish Church’ (D&B 1978: 52), quoted Sir William Hamilton (b. 1788, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh 1836–56): ‘Theology had ceased to exist for two centuries, as a scientific study, in Scotland’ (1883: 10). Tulloch

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declared himself against ‘tests’ for appointments to theological chairs, in terms that Alexander Geddes would have approved: ‘I have no faith in protected knowledge of any kind. Free discussion is the life and breath of all science’ (1883: 4). A major recommendation of the 1831 report of the Royal Commission on the Universities of Scotland concerned the founding of chairs in Biblical Criticism (that is of ‘lower criticism’, especially of the New Testament). The avoidance of the negative-sounding and easily misunderstood term ‘criticism’ is notable in the titles of equivalent Chairs in the Free Church (FC) colleges set up after the Disruption of 1843 (they preferred such terms as ‘New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology’ or ‘New Testament Exegesis’). Ironically, FC scholarship was to be one of the principal channels for the introduction and pursuit of critical methods in biblical studies. Drummond and Bulloch observe: ‘Disruption Calvinism . . . had to come to terms with science and evolutionary thought, and probably Biblical Criticism had a greater share of responsibility than either of these for its disintegration’ (1978: 216).

The Culmination of Nineteenth-Century ‘Lower Criticism’ in the Revised Version, 1870–85 (–95, if the Apocrypha is Included) The production of the Revised Version (RV) of the Bible must count as one of the major collaborative enterprises in the field of biblical study in the nineteenth century. (Others would be the production of biblical encyclopædias and journals, in which Scots, e.g. William Robertson Nicoll [1851–1923] and James Hastings [1852–1922], and Scottish publishing houses were prominent; so too Encyclopædia Biblica, 1898–1903, originally William Robertson Smith’s project, which illhealth forced him to hand on to T. K. Cheyne and J. S. Black and was dedicated to his memory. For Smith and his joint-editorship of Encyclopædia Britannica see the next section, below.) In 1870, the Church of England Convocation of Canterbury resolved that, because of increasingly evident errors in text and obscurities in translation in the Authorized Version (AV)/King James Version (KJV) of 1611, the time had come for a revision. The Convocation of York declined to participate. Chadwick writes: ‘The churches did not want a new translation. They were afraid of losing sacred words as well as beautiful poetry’ (1972: 44), an issue of particular sensitivity in Scotland, one may interject: the Calvinist orthodoxy of WCF was buttressed by an array of proof-texts drawn from AV. The Revisers’ NT Preface (1880) explains how the work was carried out. The Convocation selected from their number two ‘Companies’, each to tackle one of the Testaments. But these companies were constituted in a commendably interdenominational manner (no doubt also with the ‘political’ motive of generating

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acceptance and sales among the participating denominations). Newth (1881: 109–13), himself one of the Revisers, gives totals of scholars involved: forty-one Church of England, two Episcopal Church of Ireland, one Episcopal Church of Scotland, four Baptists, three Congregationalists, five Church of Scotland, five Free Church of Scotland, one United Presbyterian (UP), one Unitarian, two Wesleyan Methodists (eventually some ninety-nine in all, including the Americans engaged in the parallel American Standard Version). No Roman Catholic participated— John Henry Newman was invited but declined. The list of the dozen Scots deemed of sufficient standing to be invited to join the RV enterprise gives a balanced picture of the biblical expertise available in Scotland at the time. Among the more notable were: in the OT Company, William Lindsay Alexander (1808–84), Professor of Theology, Congregational Theological Hall, Edinburgh; Andrew B. Davidson (1831–1902), Professor of Hebrew, FC College, Edinburgh; William Robertson Smith (1846–94), Professor of Hebrew, FC College, Aberdeen (afterwards, Smith continued on the Apocrypha Committee); in the NT Company, David Brown (1806–97), Professor of New Testament, FC College, Aberdeen; John Eadie (1810–76), Professor of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, UP Church, Glasgow; William Milligan (1821–93), Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism, Aberdeen; Alexander Roberts (1826–1901), Professor of Humanity, St Andrews (an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland). A Scot resident in England should be added: William Wright (1830–89), Professor of Arabic, Cambridge, arguably the foremost British Semitist of the day (see Maier 2011). Of the RV team as a whole A. B. Davidson, despite his participation, makes a qualified assessment: ‘a body of men who may be supposed fairly accomplished in modern scholarship’ (1903: 220). For present purposes, the Revisers’ Rule 4 is the most significant: ‘That the Text to be adopted be that for which the evidence is decidedly preponderating’. The RV’s NT Preface observes: ‘[Rule 4] was in effect an instruction to follow the authority of documentary evidence without deference to any printed text of modern times, and therefore to employ the best resources of criticism for estimating the value of evidence’ (cf. Geddes, above). Among the Revisers were the two leading English NT textual critics of the day, B. F. Westcott (1825–1901) and F. J. A. Hort (1828–92). They made available to the translators their critically established text of the NT (essentially a collation of Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) in advance of publication in 1881. Their Scottish counterparts on the RV Company were William Milligan and Alexander Roberts. Roberts provides a somewhat quaint theological justification for critical scholarship. Divine providence consists not in the miraculous preservation of an immaculate biblical text and line of transmission (as in WCF I.VIII, which would obviate any need for criticism) but in providing scholars with the necessary resources to recreate them: ‘the only way in which [God] could bestow upon us the means of discovering the true text was by furnishing us in His Providence with

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many different sources to which we might repair in seeking to ascertain it’ (Milligan and Roberts 1873: 22). The possibility of harmonious cooperation at the technical level of lower criticism among such scholars as the Revisers, no matter their ecclesiastical affiliation, may be illustrated from the work of John Eadie, the UP participant. Eadie’s identification with the RV enterprise is impressively marked by the dedication of his massive two-volume study of the English Bible (1876) to the NT Company of Revisers (and presentation of a complimentary copy to each member). Eadie wrote five volumes of Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, Galatians to Thessalonians (not in that sequence), amounting to some 2,110 pages of solid scholarship, between 1854 (Ephesians) and 1876 (Thessalonians). He claims academic objectivity: on Ephesians, for instance, he explains that his object has been ‘to exhibit . . . meaning . . . , by a scientific analysis of language, seeking in the process the objective assistance of the ancient versions, the Greek fathers, and the most recent German commentators’ (1854: iii–v). His view of Scripture is neatly summed up: ‘while [the Bible] is divine in the highest sense, [it] is also human in the truest sense . . . God’s thoughts in man’s words . . . the settlement of the text takes precedence of apologetics and theology’ (1876: Vol. 2, 337–8). In his Ephesians, he gives traditional answers to such ‘higher critical’ questions as title and destination (Ephesus, not Laodicea); genuineness (Pauline authorship affirmed); relationship to Colossians; place and date of composition (Rome, c.  62). Appropriately, as adopting an acceptable methodology, Eadie’s commentaries were republished in the 1880s by T&T Clark, the Edinburgh publishers of the premier series, the International Critical Commentary, soon to be launched (1895) with volumes on Deuteronomy, Judges, and Romans. On his death, his extensive library was acquired for the FC College in Glasgow (subsequently merged with Glasgow University holdings). Eadie’s achievement was all the more remarkable given that he was not only professor in his church (although conveniently during his tenure the ‘academic year’ lasted for only two months, August and September), but also minister of a busy city charge. The membership of his magnificent new church, Lansdowne (Urquhart 2011), opened in 1863 in the then fashionable west-end of Glasgow grew under his ministry in its first dozen years from sixty-eight to about 600 (Brown 1878: 392).

The Culmination of Nineteenth-Century ‘Higher Criticism’ in the Work of William Robertson Smith Smith’s works relate to issues raised above, not least the standing of WCF. He explains the purpose of his two popular lecture series The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882): ‘to expound . . . the

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problems and methods of modern criticism . . . to enable the laymen of Scotland to follow with intelligence the controversy then occupying the Courts of the Free Church as to the right of criticism to assert itself within the Churches of the Westminster Confession’ (1895: xlix). Whereas WCF I.VIII affirms God’s ‘singular care and providence’ keeping the biblical text ‘pure in all ages’, Smith writes: ‘the transmission of the Bible is not due to a continued miracle, but to a watchful Providence ruling the ordinary means by which all ancient books have been handed down’ (1894a: 18; cf. Roberts, in the previous section, above). William Robertson Smith (WRS) was born in November 1846 into the recently constituted Free Church of Scotland, his father having been ordained the previous year minister of an FC parish in rural Aberdeenshire. He received his early education at home in a small private school run by his father, originally a school-master, before going up aged not quite fifteen, first in the open bursary competition, to the University of Aberdeen. There and subsequently at New College, Edinburgh, WRS displayed astonishing virtuosity in a great range of subjects. His promise as a mathematician, for instance, shown in the Ferguson Scholarship competition open to Arts graduates Scotland-wide, so impressed one of the examiners, P. G. Tait (1831–1901), Professor of Natural Philosophy [Physics] in Edinburgh University, that, when Smith moved to Edinburgh for his theological studies, he employed him as his assistant 1868–70. Smith’s church early recognized his precocious ability: its General Assembly of May 1870 elected him, aged twenty-three, to the vacant Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the FC College in Aberdeen. Initially, all went well; but then Smith began to contribute articles to the newly appearing ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (EB⁹). His article ‘Bible’ in volume three (1875) attracted devastating notice in a review entitled ‘The New Encyclopædia Britannica on Theology’, in the Edinburgh Courant, 15 April 1876 (the Saturday before Easter, to judge from other items in the newspaper, no doubt chosen by the press as an appropriate occasion for a controversial religious topic). The unsigned review ‘was universally believed’ to be by A. H. Charteris, Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of Edinburgh (B&C 1912a: 189). Whereas the article ‘Apocrypha’ by A. B. Davidson, Smith’s Edinburgh Hebrew mentor (noted in the previous section), is given a mere eight lines appreciatively acknowledging his ‘well-known perspicuity and caution’, the review of Smith’s article, amounting to some 160 lines or two-fifths of the whole, is unrelievedly hostile. Smith is accused of peddling the negative views of the Dutch scholar Abraham Kuenen (1828–91) on the OT and of the Tübingen school of F. C. Baur (1792–1860) on the NT. ‘We might object to the article on the ground of orthodoxy, but that is no business of ours. We object to it on the ground of inaccuracy, and we say plainly that this article does not represent the present state of critical knowledge’ (fair enough, perhaps, so far as Baur was concerned [Neill and Wright 1988: 20–30]). The reviewer seeks to counter Smith by appeal to archaeology, Egyptology, and the topography of Sinai in ancient times

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(sources, one might interject, that to this day provide only uncertain support to the historicity of the biblical narrative), and continues: This article . . . is objectionable in itself; but our chief objection . . . is, that it should be sent far and wide over English-speaking countries as an impartial account of the present state of our knowledge of the Bible. We regret that a publication, which will be admitted without suspicion into many a religious household, and many a carefully-selected public library, should, upon so all-important a matter as the records of our faith, take a stand—a decided stand—on the wrong side. We hope the publishers . . . will . . . cease to pass off rationalistic speculations as ascertained facts.

Charteris’ review helped to provoke the charge of heresy against Smith that led to his trial in the FC courts. The case dragged on for five years and culminated in May 1881 in deposition from his Aberdeen chair: ‘the Assembly . . . declared . . . that Smith’s continued occupancy . . . was no longer safe or advantageous for the Church’ (B&C 1912a: 437). Smith found it impossible to compromise. Given his conviction of the soundness of his academic argument, he could not with scholarly integrity yield on a single issue unless there were compelling ‘scientific’ reasons to do so. Drummond and Bulloch stress the significance of the case: ‘at this point we have come to more than a sectarian dispute; we have come to a turning point for the mind of Victorian Scotland’ (1978: 52). The nub of the libel, which Smith demanded that the FC Presbytery of Aberdeen formally serve on him, was that his published opinions contradicted ‘the doctrine of the immediate inspiration, infallible truth, and divine authority of the Holy Scriptures . . . as set forth in the Scriptures themselves and in the Confession of Faith’ (B&C 1912a: 582). Of the eight charges in the libel, the issue that finally undid him was his argument that Moses could not have been the author of Deuteronomy (D). The following is a selection of Smith’s arguments in his article ‘Bible’ in EB⁹. Many features in D militate against attribution to Moses: the author writes of Moses in the third person and records his death and burial in an unknown grave (34:5–8); D is written from a West Bank perspective (1:5), but Moses never crossed the Jordan from the East; D contains material later than the period of Moses—it uses a name (‘Dan’, 34:1) introduced only later (Judg. 18:29); it ‘refers to the conquest as already accomplished (2:12), and presuppose[s] the existence of kingship in Israel’ (17:14–20); the book is ‘a prophetic legislative programme’, as is explicitly stated in Ezra 9:11–12, which cites Deut. 7 but attributes the legislation to the prophets; D is not, however, a ‘pious fraud’—‘the author put his work in the mouth of Moses . . . because his object was . . . to . . . develop Mosaic principles in relation to new needs . . . in dramatic form . . . facilitated by the habit of anonymous writing, and the accompanying lack of all notion of anything like copyright’.

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For good measure, one may add Smith’s views on the composite character of Isaiah: ‘There is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time . . . The anonymous chapters, [Isa.] xl.–lxvi., cannot be understood in a natural and living way except . . . from the stand-point of the Exile’. Smith’s interpretation of prophecy as address to contemporaries rather than foretelling a remote future scandalized some in his church as threatening the continuity between OT prophecy and NT fulfilment (see, especially, Isa. 53). For further exposition of his views see Smith (1878a: 27–63). In contrast to Kuenen, he claims to pursue ‘believing criticism’. He rejects conflict with WCF: ‘The whole case against me rests on the assumption that the doctrine of the infallibility and authority of Scripture . . . is capable of being pressed to preclude enquiry, by ordinary exegetical and historical methods, into . . . questions as to the origin, history, literary form, and literary character of the Biblical books’. (Already as a student at New College in session 1867–8, Smith complained that his professor of Systematic Theology, James Buchanan, was liable ‘to confuse the question of the Divine authority of the Pentateuch with that of its Mosaic authorship’ [B&C 1912a: 95].) He gives examples of errors acknowledged by Calvin: in Matt. 27:9 read Zechariah, not Jeremiah; in Acts 7:16 ‘Jacob’ should be read, not ‘Abraham’ (see Gen. 33:19); Acts 7:14 follows LXX ‘75’ in Gen. 46:27, not MT ‘70’. Further, ‘all ancient historians . . . were accustomed to insert in their narratives speeches of their own composition’. ‘I have acted on the conviction that loyalty to the Bible . . . is inseparable from loyalty to the approved laws of scholarly research . . . my condemnation cannot be for the edification of the Church unless . . . all the arguments I can advance have been patiently heard and conclusively rebutted on the open ground of philological and historical research’. In 1878b he makes the further observation that, as the Pentateuch presently stands, before some legislation can be implemented it is changed, making unitary authorship implausible; e.g. Exod. 13:11–13 is amended in Num. 18:15a. Smith’s later article ‘Hebrew Language and Literature’ in EB⁹ vol. XI, 1880, was no less trenchant. By unfortunate timing, it was published just after the FC General Assembly of 1880. In that article Smith appeared to be deliberately repudiating his undertaking just given at that Assembly to be more circumspect in the expression of his views; his apparent intransigence exhausted his church’s patience and sealed his fate. He was deposed by decision of General Assembly in May 1881 but, crucially, his higher criticism was not condemned (D&B 1978: 73). The revolution in biblical criticism in Scotland became no doubt inevitable as exposure to continental scholarship increased (Fleming 1927, 15: ‘The movement towards Germany began in 1834, when . . . Lindsay Alexander [see previous section, above] went as a student to Halle and Leipsic’); but in contrast to the cautious A. B. Davidson, who was himself threatened with a heresy trial in 1879 (B&C 1912a: 339–40), Smith sought ‘to force critical methods upon an unenlightened and unconvinced Church,

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attempting to convert a great Christian democracy with law, logic, libels, brilliant dialectic and splendid scorn’ (Strahan 1917: 240). Smith’s perception of himself as ‘believing critic’ continues to manifest itself in the chief work of the latter part of his career, the three series of Burnett Lectures on The Religion of the Semites, delivered in Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, 1888–9, 1890, and 1891 (Smith 1894b, 1995). The topic proposed by the Burnett trustees (who included Robert Flint [1838–1910], Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh University) closely suited Smith’s interests: ‘The primitive religions of the Semitic peoples, viewed in relation to other ancient religions, and to the spiritual religion of the Old Testament and of Christianity’. The first series, the only one published in Smith’s lifetime, dealt with the origin and meaning of sacrifice; the second, the history of religious feasts and priesthoods; the third, Semitic polytheism and cosmogony (Smith 1907 [1894b]: v, 26–7; Day 1995: 12). Smith’s Burnett lectures reflect a motive that runs consistently through his writings. From the outset, he saw his task not simply as an exercise in apologetics but also as strengthening Christian doctrine by the application of sound ‘scientific’ method to biblical interpretation. By ‘scientific’ Smith meant not only the recreation of the historical contexts in response to which the biblical writers articulated their message but also an exhaustive gathering of the evidence on human practice generally against which the biblical revelation is seen to possess an unparalleled spiritual character. ‘Sacrifice’, for instance, ‘is equally important among all early peoples in all parts of the world . . . To construct a theory of sacrifice exclusively on the Semitic evidence would be unscientific’ (Smith 1894b: 214). Smith sought to provide the ‘proof ’ that the spiritual religion of ancient Israel cannot be accounted for naturalistically—as merely the culmination of the religion of the Semites. It displays a qualitative difference. Already in the first series of Burnett lectures, Smith had essentially propounded his argument. The completion of his ‘proof ’ was not a matter of further linear development culminating in a final clinching argument; rather, in the subsequent series, the task was to round out the data by gathering similar observations on every possible relevant area. Thus, the press report of Series Two, Lecture Three recorded Smith’s words: ‘there was not the slightest historical evidence that anything the least like [Israel’s prophets] Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah was produced by any other Semitic nation’ (Day 1995: 22, 123). At the end of his final lecture he reiterates: Phoenician and Hebrew legends covered much the same general ground, but the similarity in material details only brings into more emphasis the entirely different spirit and meaning . . . Not merely are they [the Phoenician legends] destitute of ethical motives, but no one who believed them could rise to any spiritual conception of deity or any lofty conception of man’s chief end . . . all these material points of resemblance only make the contrast in spirit more remarkable. (Smith 1995: 112)

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Smith received widespread recognition for the breakthrough that his work represented. At the conclusion of the final Burnett lecture on 15 December 1891, it fell to A. R. S. Kennedy (b. 1859; Professor of Hebrew in the University of Aberdeen 1887–94; thereafter in the University of Edinburgh 1895–1937) to express thanks not merely for the lecture series but also for Smith’s hard-won vindication of critical methods in biblical studies now long taken for granted (Day 1995: 141). Beyond the limits of biblical scholarship, Smith has exerted an astonishing influence on practitioners in other fields: anthropology, sociology, history of religions, and psychology (perhaps most famously and unexpectedly on Sigmund Freud [Booth 2002]; see the section ‘William Robertson Smith as Social Anthropologist’ in Johnstone 1995: 273–350). A close associate was J. G. Frazer (1854–1941), the celebrated author of The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 1890 and innumerable editions since, whom Smith commissioned to contribute the articles ‘Taboo’ and ‘Totemism’ in EB⁹ (vol. XXIII, 1888). ‘Genuit Frazerum!’ is the accolade bestowed on Smith by the French historian of religion Salomon Reinach in 1911 (B&C 1912a: 566–7). Jones succinctly summarizes Smith’s career: he was ‘the victim of the last successful heresy trial in Great Britain’; his ‘views on biblical criticism (for which he was damned) are now regarded as true as his views on totemism and sacrifice (for which he would be praised) are now considered false’ (2002: vii). Of nineteenth-century Scottish New Testament criticism D&B (1978: 218–19) offer a modest assessment. They term the work of Marcus Dods (b. 1834; Professor of New Testament 1889–1909 and latterly also principal at New College, Edinburgh), An Introduction to the New Testament (1888), rather dismissively for a prolifically selling author, ‘a slight little book . . . [but] the best of its time in Scotland’. They comment, ‘Scottish New Testament scholarship of the time was entirely derivative [from German and English] and produced nothing original’. Robert Alun Jones (2002: vii) cites the rather similar opinion of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918; perhaps the greatest German biblical critic of his age) even on Robertson Smith. In a letter written on 3 August 1881 after a visit to Wellhausen, William Robertson Nicoll quotes Wellhausen’s view that Robertson Smith was merely ‘clever at presenting other men’s theories’ (not least his own and those of Kuenen [Darlow 1925: 41]). Nonetheless, as transmitters of the fruits of others’ originality, Scottish scholars must be commended for their immense competence, industry, and comprehensiveness, and for the desire of many of them to make the fruits of scholarship available to the church. Two in particular at the turn of the century, both with links to Robertson Smith, may be mentioned by way of illustration. George Adam Smith (1856–1942) was appointed temporary replacement for WRS in the FC College in Aberdeen in 1881. In 1899 he delivered his Yale lectures, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament. His argument is focused in his oft-quoted dictum: ‘Modern Criticism has won its war against Traditional Theories. It only remains to fix the

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amount of the indemnity’ (Smith 1901: 72). What Smith means he explains on the next page: ‘What do the results of criticism cost? . . . what does criticism leave to us in the Old Testament: how much true history and how much Divine Revelation?’ Criticism discloses the Bible as a human document; how then can it be a divine revelation? George Adam Smith identifies advantages of criticism: it frees biblical interpretation from the arbitrariness of allegory and typology and releases it to reconstruct genuine historical contexts; it frees prophecy from foretelling a remote future to offering critique of contemporary life. ‘[T]he revival of a sounder criticism was followed by the revival of a more practical preaching. The fidelity which sought to discover what the Prophets actually meant to the men of their own time was rewarded by the inspiration of their message to the men of all times’ (1901: 243–4); ‘modern criticism . . . has arranged the Old Testament upon historical lines and enabled the Church to trace the real history of Israel’s religious development’ (1901: 251). The fruits of Robertson Smith’s triumph also for New Testament scholarship were duly acknowledged. Allan Menzies (1845–1916), Professor of Biblical Criticism in St Andrews, may be taken as example. Menzies has been hailed as ‘unquestionably the greatest New Testament Scholar of his day in Scotland’ (N.A. 1946: 19). He had the advantage of education partly in Germany as a schoolboy. In his inaugural lecture in 1889 (Menzies 1890), he returns to Kant and endorses the necessity of examining a subject by human judgement to ‘find out what we positively and indisputably know’. He acknowledges the merit of the Tübingen School: he translated F. C. Baur Paul Vol. 2 [1845] in 1875 and Church History of the First Three Centuries [³1878] in 1878–9; also Otto Pfleiderer [1839–1908], Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of its History (four vols. 1886–88, original German ²1883–4; vol. 1 with his later colleague Alexander Stewart); and Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels with J. S. Black for which WRS wrote a Preface (v–x). (Earlier, Menzies and WRS had shared unproductive experience as successive tutors for two recalcitrant pupils on the Isle of Bute; WRS rather implies blame on Menzies for introducing them to David Friedrich Strauss [Das Leben Jesu, 1835, ET 1846 by Marian Evans/George Eliot] [B&C 1912a: 100; Maier 2009: 65, 225–6].) Menzies (1890: 36–7) writes that Wellhausen’s work marks ‘the beginning of our science in modern times’, just as Darwin stands ‘at the fountainhead of modern thought in the study of life’; English scholars for the most part have confined themselves to ‘lower criticism’ (Edwin Hatch [1835–89] is identified as a notable exception). ‘Scotland has taken little part in the endeavour to place the New Testament in its true light; and yet hopeful omens are not wanting . . . the Free Church has already done great things [in not proscribing criticism despite the WRS case]’. He expresses his hope ‘to make the true knowledge of the Bible prevail . . . which will prove the beginning of a new and better age in Scottish religion’ (1890: 39). In his book The Earliest Gospel (i.e. Mark, adopting ‘higher critical’ conclusions about the date and

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interrelationship of the synoptic gospels) published in 1901, Menzies outlines in exemplary fashion his procedure. He acknowledges his debt to German predecessors in the task, Bernhard Weiss (1872) and Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1889), but insists that ‘he has exercised throughout an independent judgment’ (1901: v–vi). His work stands thoroughly in line with Scottish practice of critical openness to international, particularly German, scholarship. In the context of WRS’s heresy trial, Tulloch noted the challenge which Smith’s biblical criticism presented for traditional dogma: Changes of all kinds must come with a changed view of Scripture . . . [that regards it] as an uncertain and progressive Literature rather than a literal code or transcript of the Divine mind. The beginning of theological reconstruction within the Christian Church lies in the new idea of Revelation which connects itself immediately with this advanced view of the Bible. (Tulloch 1877: 548)

Such sentiments were warmly rejected by Smith, but hailed by B&C as ‘wise, weighty, and prophetic’ (1912a: 221–2). In matters of biblical criticism William Robertson Smith’s work continues to provide stimulus. For example, in the revised edition of the Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1894a), one of his last pieces of writing, in a rare admission of bafflement Smith acknowledges: ‘The perplexities of Exod. xix.–xxxiv. have made these chapters the locus desperatus [OED: “A corrupt manuscript reading that defies interpretation”] of criticism’ (337 n., pp. 333–7 do not appear in the first edition of 1881). The problem arises from the fact that Exod. 20:2–17 and 34:10–28 appear to present two diverging accounts of the contents of the Decalogue: ‘for my own part’, writes Smith, ‘I confess that I have struggled as long as I could to explain the discrepancy away’ (335). These sixteen chapters perhaps illustrate the limitations of the historical critical method so brilliantly championed by Smith and its need to be complemented by more recently developed literary approaches. All too often, however, these approaches privilege the ‘final form’ of the text and turn out to be a veiled form of fundamentalism, which, seeking to do the Bible honour, result in its impoverishment. Literary criticism remains a valid instrument in exposing the composite nature of the text and in enabling it to be appreciated in the full complexity of its texture (in this case as a dialogue between two valid but complementary theological interpretations—the covenantal and the cosmic [Johnstone 2017]).¹

¹ I dedicate this essay to the memory of my Victorian grandfathers, David Johnstone (1843–1903), sometime parish minister of Hallin-in-Waternish, Skye, and latterly of St Columba’s Gaelic Church, Paisley, whose well-thumbed copy of the Westminster Confession, published in Edinburgh, 1865, I use, and George Murray (1852–1920), sometime parish minister of Sauchie, and latterly of Balmaclellan, whose study was dominated by the twenty-five massive volumes of EB⁹ in its custombuilt bookcase and on whose bookshelves Allan Menzies’ Earliest Gospel stood prominent.

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Bibliography Primary Literature Black, John Sutherland and George Chrystal [abbreviated B&C] (1912a). The Life of William Robertson Smith. London: Adam and Charles Black. Black, John Sutherland and George Chrystal [B&C] (eds.) (1912b). Lectures & Essays of William Robertson Smith. London: Adam and Charles Black. Brown, James (1878). Life of John Eadie, D.D., LL.D. London: Macmillan. Carpenter, J. Estlin and George Harford-Battersby (eds.) (1900). The Hexateuch according to the Revised Version. Arranged in its Constituent Documents by Members of the Society of Historical Theology, Oxford, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Darlow, Thomas H. (1925). William Robertson Nicoll: Life and Letters. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Davidson, Andrew B. (1903). Biblical and Literary Essays, ed. J. A. Paterson, 2nd edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Day, John (ed.) (1995). Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: Second and Third Series, William Robertson Smith. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Eadie, John (1854). Ephesians. Glasgow: Richard Griffin (3rd edition 1883; Edinburgh: T&T Clark). Eadie, John (1876). English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture, with Remarks on the Need of Revising the English New Testament, 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–89). 9th edition, ed. T. Spencer Baynes (1875–87), (joint-) ed. W. Robertson Smith (1881–9). Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Geddes, Alexander (1786). Prospectus of a new translation of the Holy Bible from corrected texts of the originals, compared with the ancient versions. London: R. Faulder. Geddes, Alexander (1797). The Holy Bible, or the books accounted sacred by Jews and Christians . . . II. Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ruth, Prayer of Manasseh. London: J. Davis. Geddes, Alexander (1800). Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures: Corresponding with a new translation of the Bible. I. Containing remarks on the Pentateuch. London: J. Davis. Gunkel, Hermann (1901). Genesis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Introduction, trans. W. H. Carruth; introduction by W. F. Albright. New York: Schocken Books, 1964). Menzies, Allan (1890). The Critical Study of the New Testament. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Menzies, Allan (1901). The Earliest Gospel: A Historical Study of the Gospel according to Mark. London: Macmillan.

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Milligan, William and Alexander Roberts (1873). The Words of the New Testament, As Altered by Transmission and Ascertained by Modern Criticism. For Popular Use. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. N.A. (1946). Handbook of St Mary’s College, St Andrews. St Andrews University Press. Newth, Samuel (1881). Lectures on Bible Revision. Lecture IX: The Revision of 1881. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Roberts, Alexander (1881). Companion to the Revised Version of the English New Testament. London: Cassell. Royal Commission of Inquiry into the State of the Universities of Scotland (1831). https:// archive.org/stream/cu31924030553790#page/n29/mode/1up, accessed 12 January 2018. Smith, George Adam (1901). Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Smith, William Robertson (1875). ‘Bible’. Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, Vol. III, ed. T. Spencer Baynes. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 634–48. Smith, William Robertson (1876). ‘The Progress of Old Testament Studies’, British and Foreign Evangelical Review 25: 471–93. Smith, William Robertson (1878a). Answer to the Form of Libel now before the Free Church Presbytery of Aberdeen. Edinburgh: David Douglas. Smith, William Robertson (1878b). Additional Answer to the Libel with Some Account of the Evidence that Parts of the Pentateuchal Law are Later than the Time of Moses. Edinburgh: David Douglas. Smith, William Robertson (1880). ‘Hebrew Language and Literature’. Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, Vol. XI, ed. T. Spencer Baynes. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 594–602. Smith, William Robertson (1894a). The Old Testament in the Jewish Church: A Course of Lectures on Biblical Criticism, 2nd edition. London: Adam and Charles Black (1st edition 1881). Smith, William Robertson (1894b) (Reissued 1907; 1st edition 1889). Lectures on the Religion of the Semites First Series: The Fundamental Institutions. New Edition. London: Adam and Charles Black. Reissued with new introduction by Robert A. Segal, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Smith, William Robertson (1895). The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History to the Close of the Eighth Century , 2nd edition, ed. T. K. Cheyne. London: Adam and Charles Black (1st edition 1882). Smith, William Robertson (1995). Lectures on the Religion of the Semites Second and Third Series. Edited with an Introduction and Appendix by John Day. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Tulloch, John (1877). ‘Progress of Religious Thought in Scotland’, Contemporary Review 29: 535–51. Tulloch, John (1883). The Theological Faculties of the Scottish Universities in Connection with University Reform. Edinburgh: Blackwood.

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Urquhart, Gordon R. (2011). A Notable Ornament: Lansdowne Church: An Icon of Victorian Glasgow: A Study of the Historic Context of a West End Church. Glasgow: Four Acres Charitable Trust: Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Vater, Johann Severin (1802–5). Commentar über den Pentateuch, mit . . . der eingeschaltete Uebersetzung von Dr Alexander Geddes’s merkwürdigeren critischen und exegetischen Anmerkungen, 3 vols. Halle: Waisenhaus-Buchhandlung. Wellhausen, Julius (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Translated by J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies, with a Preface by William Robertson Smith. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Westcott, Brooke Foss and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1881). The New Testament in the Original Greek, 2 vols. Cambridge and London: Macmillan.

Secondary Literature Booth, Gordon (2002). ‘The Fruits of Sacrifice: Sigmund Freud and William Robertson Smith’, Expository Times 113: 258–64. Broadie, Alexander (ed.) (1997). The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canongate. Broadie, Alexander (2007). The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Bultmann, Christoph (2004). ‘What do we Mean when we Talk about “(Late) Enlightenment Biblical Criticism”?’, in William Johnstone (ed.), The Bible and the Enlightenment—A Case Study: Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802. London: T&T Clark International, 119–34. Cadwallader, Alan H. (2019). The Politics of the Revised Version. London: T&T Clark. Carruthers, Gerard (2004). ‘Scattered Remains: The Literary Career of Alexander Geddes’, in William Johnstone (ed.), The Bible and the Enlightenment—A Case Study: Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802. London: T&T Clark International, 61–77. Chadwick, Owen (1972). The Victorian Church: Part II, 2nd edition. London: Adam & Charles Black. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch [abbreviated D&B] (1973). The Scottish Church 1688–1843. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch [D&B] (1975). The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch [D&B] (1978). The Church in Late Victorian Scotland 1874–1900. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Fleming, John R. (1927). A History of the Church in Scotland, vol. 1: 1843–74. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Fleming, John R. (1933). A History of the Church in Scotland, vol. 2: 1875–1929. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Fuller, Reginald C. (1984). Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802: Pioneer of Biblical Criticism. Sheffield: The Almond Press. Reissued 2015, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Johnstone, William (ed.) (1995). William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Johnstone, William (ed.) (2004). The Bible and the Enlightenment—A Case Study: Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802. London: T&T Clark International. Johnstone, William (2017). ‘The Influence of the Decalogue on the Shape of Exodus’, in Klaas Spronk and Hans Barstad (eds.), Torah and Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 150–75. Jones, Robert Alun (2002). New Introduction to William Robertson Smith, The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers. Maier, Bernhard (2009). William Robertson Smith: His Life, his Work, his Times. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Maier, Bernhard (2011). Semitic Studies in Victorian Britain: A Portrait of William Wright and his World through his Letters. Würzburg: Ergon. Neill, Stephen and Tom Wright (1988). The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riesen, Richard A. (1985). Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland: A. B. Davidson, William Robertson Smith and George Adam Smith. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Rogerson, John W. (2004). ‘Was Geddes a “Fragmentist”?’, in William Johnstone (ed.), The Bible and the Enlightenment—A Case Study: Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802. London: T&T Clark International, 157–67. Schwarzbach, Bertram Eugene (2004). ‘Geddes in France’, in William Johnstone (ed.), The Bible and the Enlightenment—A Case Study: Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802. London: T&T Clark International, 78–118. Shaffer, Elinor S. (1975). ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strahan, James (1917). Andrew Bruce Davidson. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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25 As Open as Possible Presbyterian Modernity in Scotland’s Long Nineteenth Century William Storrar

‘Thomson’s theology and architecture were inseparable.’ With this bold statement about the mid-Victorian architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson (1817–75), the architectural historian Gavin Stamp directs us to the theological significance of church membership in the history of Scottish theology: the ways in which a particular denomination and its distinctive theological milieu formed the public as well as personal lives of its lay members in identifiable ways. As Stamp goes on to write of Thomson, ‘He was, it must be remembered, an elder of the UP Church, “a denomination renowned for its devout evangelism, which he wholeheartedly espoused” ’ (Stamp 1999a: 3). Thomson was not alone in seeing his professional vocation through the lens of his theological convictions as a lay church member. This chapter will consider the theological milieu of the dissenting Presbyterian churches in the Victorian and Edwardian era, Scotland’s long nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It will ask how this quotidian theological culture of Presbyterian churchgoing outside the established Church of Scotland—sermons, talks and discussions in church literary societies, books, pamphlets, and letters on religious themes, denominational magazines, and Synod and General Assembly debates and reports—influenced in traceable ways the public life and work of prominent lay members: primarily the architect Alexander Thomson in the United Presbyterian Church (UP) of 1847, and by way of briefer concluding comparison, the pioneering ecologist Patrick Geddes in the Free Church (FC) of 1843, and the Young Scots, a progressive political society within the Scottish Liberal Party, many of whose members were active in the United Free Church (UFC) of 1900. In doing so, this chapter will argue for the public intellectual significance of churchgoing in these dissenting Presbyterian denominations, just as Robin Gill has made the case for the moral significance of churchgoing for our understanding of virtue ethics (Gill 1999).

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Thesis: A Presbyterian Modernity? The historian of modern France Rod Kedward has written, ‘History as pattern-making is as subjective as any art form, but the patterns are not arbitrary. They are constructed from written and oral sources and the interpretations of others, as the past has always been’ (2005: 2). This account of the theological effects of churchgoing on public life raises such a historiographical question; can we discern what may be called a Presbyterian pattern of modernity in this nexus of ecclesial institutions and lay theological biographies in Victorian and Edwardian Scotland? The sociologist Anthony Giddens gives a definition of modernity that provides the criteria for testing this thesis: At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of ideas towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society – more technically, a complex of institutions – which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than in the past. (Giddens and Pierson 1998: 94)

Giddens sees modernity in terms of institutions and ideas. Considering first the institutional character of modernity, it is uncontestable that Scotland was such a modern society and complex of institutions in the period under consideration. It was at the forefront of industrial production and the global market economy, as a distinct but integral part of the British Empire (Edgerton 2018: 78–91). In the historian T. M. Devine’s arresting phrase, it was the world’s workshop: ‘The later nineteenth century . . . was the era of triumphant advance in the heavy industries in which Scotland developed a position of global dominance in several key sectors’ (Devine 2012: 249). Scotland was also developing a distinctive political relationship to the British nation-state and mass democracy by the later nineteenth century, with organized movements for administrative and legislative Home Rule within the United Kingdom, women’s suffrage, and parliamentary representation for the working class and trade unions (Morton and Morris 2001). The dissenting Presbyterian denominations under consideration were not only socially situated within this modern society. As the sociologist James Kennedy has argued, one unintended consequence of the Disruption of the national church in 1843 was that it bequeathed a further defining characteristic of modernity to nineteenthcentury Scottish society, institutional pluralism (Kennedy 2015: 55). With three Presbyterian denominations of comparable size and a growing immigrant Catholic population in a time when religion remained socially significant in national

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life (Brown 2010: 142), the dissenting Presbyterian churches were institutional shapers of a pluralist modernity in Scotland, as well as socially determined by its industrial economy and class politics (Gill 2012).¹ Giddens thinks this industrial civilization is inseparable from certain novel ideas and attitudes: seeing the world as open to transformation by human intervention and looking to the future rather than the past. It is in the historical context of this dynamic complex of modern economic, social, political, and religious institutions in Victorian and Edwardian Scotland that we shall focus on Giddens’ two cultural characteristics of modernity: a strong sense of human agency to transform the world and an orientation towards society’s future. It is reasonable to ask if those lay members formed in this modern ecclesial milieu carried anything of its theological account of human agency and concern for the future into their approach to the public concerns of modern Scotland: the transfiguration of the industrial city of Glasgow in Thomson’s architecture; the integration of the natural environment and human culture in the interdisciplinary thinking of Patrick Geddes; and the reinvigoration of Scottish electoral politics by the Liberal Young Scots. The thesis of a Presbyterian modernity in which theology and public life are inseparable will now be tested in the following biographical essays in applied theology.²

Architecture: Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson and the UP Church Alexander Thomson was born in 1817 into a large family of siblings in the Stirlingshire village of Balfron. The children were orphaned by the early deaths of their devout parents of modest means and dissenting Presbyterian loyalties, and had largely to fend for one another. However, his parents’ religious influence stayed with the young Alexander as he took up work as a draughtsman in a Glasgow architect’s office and began a self-taught career as designer and theorist

¹ I am indebted to my teachers Robin Gill and Peter Matheson for introducing me to the porous border between applied theology and church history where this interactionist account of theology and society is located. See Gill’s trilogy on Sociological Theology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012–13); Peter Matheson and Heinke Sommer Matheson, Love and Death in the Third Reich (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019). ² Precedents for these historical essays in applied theology can be found in the literary scholar Ian Campbell’s chapter, ‘Carlyle and the Secession’ in Scottish Christianity in the Modern World (2000); and the political writer Stephen Maxwell’s article, ‘The Secular Pulpit: Presbyterian Democracy in the Twentieth Century’ in the Scottish Government Yearbook (1982). Maxwell argues that the polity of the Presbyterian churches in which they were raised became for John Reith, John Grierson, and A. D. Lindsay the model for the self-governing public bodies they each developed for public broadcasting, documentary filmmaking, and adult education respectively; radio, cinema, and classroom became the ‘secular pulpits’ for the moral formation of a mass democratic society where the churches were losing influence.

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of the built environment, especially in his adopted city. He established his own architectural firms and was responsible for a range of domestic, commercial, and church buildings, all bearing the hallmark of the distinctive personal style he developed, which has earned him the epithet, ‘Greek’ Thomson. Gavin Stamp has assessed his achievements as an architect of the modern city: Thomson was a truly urban architect, who understood how to enhance and enliven the grain of a city. He showed how rationality and repetition need not be boring or oppressive, how conventional motifs may be given novel and fresh expression, how a historical style can encompass and celebrate new materials and new inventions, and – above all – how a traditional architectural language may yet be spoken with life and real purpose, whether in blocks of tenements or grand terraces, commercial warehouses or monumental churches. That is true originality. The extraordinary, resonant buildings of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, haunting in their strangeness and thrilling in their happy invention, still retain the power to astonish and delight. (Stamp 1999b: 27)

At the time of his own premature death in 1875, Thomson’s most productive years as an innovative practitioner may have passed but he was still in his prime as a theorist of architecture, having just delivered the Haldane Lectures on this theme to students at the Glasgow School of Art the year before. These 1874 lectures and his other public addresses are our window into his theological imagination and help us to see its ecclesial location in the UP Church. Before turning to these texts, we must locate their author within this dissenting Presbyterian tradition. Alexander Thomson was thirty years old when the UP denomination was formed in 1847 out of two older dissenting Presbyterian traditions from the eighteenth century, the strictly Calvinist United Secession Church to which his Balfron family adhered and the relatively liberal and ecumenical Relief Church. Both traditions had in common opposition to the British state’s constitutional relationship with the established national Church of Scotland. During the course of the nineteenth century the UP Church became a vocal advocate of voluntary church funding and disestablishment. More directly relevant in understanding the ecclesial milieu that formed Thomson’s theological world-view are the class profile and social aspirations of the church’s membership and the educational background of its ministers and seminary professors. In her biography of the Reverend George Gilfillan (1813–78), a prominent UP minister in Dundee, the historian Aileen Black has provided an informative account of the social background and aspirations of UP church members: Working-class membership of the United Presbyterian and other dissenting churches remained strong up to the 1890s . . . This vigorous religious culture had originated in the industrialized villages and small towns of the Scottish lowlands in the later eighteenth century, where the Secession Church made its

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greatest impact. Resistance to patronage and independence in church affairs encouraged the belief among its members that self-help and hard work were the way to get on in the world. When translated to the Victorian city, these virtues were readily incorporated into the pursuit of self-improvement characteristic of the ‘better sort’ of working people, who attended church and were committed to a serious and moral way of life. (Black 2006: 4–5)

The UP Church also had a growing presence and influence in urban and middleclass Scotland, according to Black: ‘In their wealthier congregations in Edinburgh and Glasgow and as their membership became more middle-class, United Presbyterians exercised considerable influence on Liberal politics as town councillors and members of parliament’ (Black 2006: 5). This is borne out by the life of Duncan McLaren, a staunch advocate of voluntaryism as an active UP layman, and a successful businessman, civic leader, and Member of Parliament for Edinburgh (Pickard 2011). Alexander Thomson’s own life story exactly fits the social trajectory of the typical UP church member plotted by Black. He had a respectable working-class childhood in the industrial village of Balfron, where his father John Thomson was bookkeeper at Kirkman & Findlay’s cotton spinning mill. From there, his own talents and his family’s ethos of self-improvement took him into middle-class life as a professional architect in Glasgow, eldership in the prosperous Caledonia Road UP church, and suburban residency at Number 1 Moray Place, both of which buildings he designed (McFadzean 1979). Alexander Thomson may be unique in his creative genius as an architect, but his life story is typical of the upwardly mobile migration into the middle classes of many UP church members in the mid-nineteenth century. His wide-ranging intellectual interests are also typical of his ecclesial and cultural milieu in the UP Church, according to Gavin Stamp: Thomson was not a native Glaswegian. But he was a Scot; perhaps an archetypal Scot; largely self-educated, widely read, intellectual, steeped in the Scriptures and the learning encouraged by the traditions and discipline of Presbyterianism. Thomson came from a large and devout Presbyterian family; brothers and uncles were ministers and missionaries. But there was nothing narrow about him and he was remarkably open to new ideas, whether scientific, philosophical or artistic. (Stamp 1999b: 20)

This openness to new ideas was typical of the ministers and divinity hall professors of the UP Church in his day. It is a matter for further research to establish the exact nature of the religious and philosophical influences on the clerical intelligentsia of the UP Church that may have led to this ethos of openness among lay members like Thomson. One conjecture as to such sources has been put forward by the architectural historian Sam McKinstry and the German studies scholar Jane Plenderleith. They have argued for the possible influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology on ‘Thomson’s intellectual and theoretical

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perspectives and hence his design’ (McKinstry and Plenderleith 1994). They write of ‘the progressive tone and high intellectual quality of the best United Presbyterian thought from Thomson’s period, with which he was undoubtedly familiar’. In support of that claim, they cite ‘two outstanding examples of that United Presbyterian thought’ whose writings and ideas Thomson may well have read and encountered. John Ker (1819–86) was a UP minister and later Professor of Practical Training in the UP Divinity Hall who had studied at Halle in Germany. There he attended lectures by Neander, who had been ‘converted to Christianity under the preaching of Schleiermacher in Berlin’ (McKinstry and Plenderleith 1994: 77). For McKinstry and Plenderleith, Ker ‘is an outstanding example of the intellectual calibre of the best UP divines, a direct link with the school of Schleiermacher, and evidently known to and respected by Thomson’ (McKinstry and Plenderleith 1994: 78). An even more significant UP thinker for understanding Thomson’s religious and intellectual background, according to McKinstry and Plenderleith, is John Cairns (1818–92), another UP minister who spent time as a student in Germany. Cairns was in Berlin in the winter and spring of 1843–4 ‘ardently studying the German language, philosophy, and theology’. After a long congregational ministry, he became Professor of Apologetics and later Principal of the UP Divinity Hall. McKinstry and Plenderleith make the case for the influence of Scheiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers (1799) on Cairns’ own writings, comparing and contrasting other religions with Christianity, and ultimately on the understanding of religion that Thomson expounds in his Haldane Lectures on Architecture: These observations of Cairns offer a clear link from Thomson’s religious background to a milieu which both illuminates and legitimises the theological perspectives of the Haldane Lectures, and which points back to Schleiermacher. Indeed, Cairns knew the works of the German theologian very well. In his Outlines of Apologetic Theology (1867), he speaks approvingly of Schleiermacher as having refuted in anticipation the demythologised Christ of [David Friedrich Strauss]. Whether Thomson read Schleiermacher or even knew his name is really irrelevant. Schleiermacher’s theology greatly influenced the world of ideas, and directly or indirectly, Thomson fed on those ideas as the tradition in which he operated also fed on them. The two men were linked in any case in mining the gold of post-Enlightenment Romanticism. That the one influenced the other is especially intriguing. (McKinstry and Plenderleith 1994: 78)

The claim of McKinstry and Plenderleith to see a chain of influence from Schleiermacher to Thomson is not without challenge and invites further investigation of the major intellectual influences on UP theologians like Ker and Cairns. Other possible sources have to be considered for their more expansive theological mind in the early to mid-nineteenth-century period, including the philosophies of

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Kant and Hegel on the continent, and the Common Sense ideas of a philosopher like Thomas Reid nearer to home. What can be confirmed with some confidence is that those who knew and respected the UP tradition from within recognized and affirmed its more liberal theological turn by Thomson’s day. David Woodside, a United Free Church minister writing in 1917 in his book, The Soul of a Scottish Church, or the Contribution of the UP Church to Scottish Life and Religion, observed in a chapter on what he termed ‘theological progress’: . . . the remarkable thing is that since the Seceders began where they did, their descendants were able to reach so fully the enlightened standpoint of later times. No doubt this was partly due to the trend of the age. Every one became mellower; the supreme gift of charity was more widely diffused. In this advance the UP Church occupied a conspicuous place. (Woodside 1917: 252–3)

Nowhere was this enlightened standpoint more conspicuous than in the buildings of Alexander Thomson, a UP elder who transposed his denomination’s liberal evangelical theological milieu into what may be called a Presbyterian theory and practice of architecture for the modern city. As Gavin Stamp has noted, ‘This was an environment which conditioned his thought, for behind all his arguments about architecture and reason there was an immanent sense of the Divine, of a Creator who was responsible for all that was worthwhile and beautiful’ (Stamp 1999a: 2). It can be fairly asked in passing if Thomson’s sense of the divine might owe more to the religious rites of Freemasonry in Victorian Scotland than the more orthodox Christian teachings of the UP Church. Thomson’s partner in his first architectural practice was indeed a Freemason but there is no documentary evidence to date of his own affiliation to this fraternity or its deist world-view, although it will be noted below that Thomson drew on temple imagery in his church designs.

Industrial Glasgow: Modern City and Holy City Having established his social background and theological milieu in the UP Church, we can now turn to Thomson’s Haldane Lectures and other addresses to consider whether their explicit theological content and distinctive theory of architecture allow us to see him as a lay exemplar of a Presbyterian modernity in shaping the built environment of the industrial city of Glasgow in the Victorian era. Thomson can certainly be seen as ‘a profound thinker as well as an inspired designer’, according to Gavin Stamp: ‘Addressing himself to the problems of a technologically advanced society with new needs, and which was yet more steeped in history than any previous generation, he arrived at highly original solutions for the building types required by the dynamic expanding “Second City of the

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Empire” ’ (Stamp 1999b: 9). There are two reasons why Thomson’s highly original architectural solutions for an industrial civilization like Glasgow may be seen as inseparable from his lay Presbyterian theology of modernity: a theology which sees the world as open to human transformation and which looks to society’s future rather than its past. First, Thomson makes it clear in the introductory address of his four Haldane Lectures on Art and Architecture that he sees architectural design and practice as an original human creative act, and not as a mere copying of nature, and that for theological reasons. In an extended critique of the prevailing view of art as the imitation of nature, expounded by the influential contemporary critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), Thomson distinguishes between objective theories of art which are concerned with the representation of what we can see with our eyes, and subjective theories which seek the harmonious expression of what we feel in our hearts or conceive in our imaginations (Stamp 1999a: 108). He challenges the theology undergirding such objective theories of art, which claim a perfect Creator has made a perfect creation for us to imitate, with a classic Reformed questioning of the limits of the book of nature to reveal God’s purposes, worthy of Calvin: ‘The poet speaks of the outward creation as “the Elder Scriptures writ by God’s own hand,” but to the casual observer these Scriptures are more or less obscure’ (Stamp 1999a: 115). While recognizing the importance of careful observation with the eye in the training of the artist or architect, Thomson favours a subjective theory of art and architecture which seeks the truth beneath contingent facts. It requires the exercise of our aesthetic faculty, which serves three purposes—the perceptive, the selective, and the creative. Having considered the first two purposes, he concludes his first Haldane Lecture with his theological basis for human creativity in art: But there is yet a third function of the aesthetic faculty – creativity. Some say that man can never get beyond his experience. Whence then come music and architecture? There is nothing in Nature like either; for, although they may have been slow of growth, the fact is before us that they are something that by man or through his agency has been added to the work of God, and that not presumptuously or sinfully, as some would tell us, but by destiny and duty; for, being made in the image of God, man was made partaker of the divine nature so far as to become a fellow-worker with God – in however humble a sense, a coCreator. (Stamp 1999a: 123)

Here we have Alexander Thomson’s lay theological anthropology, which sees humanity as a collaborator with God, exercising powers of human agency to transform the world in ways that are pleasing and not abhorrent to the Creator through the exercise of a God-given aesthetic faculty. This theological conviction is consonant with Giddens’ first cultural mark of modernity, ‘the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention’ but in ways that Thomson saw as worshipful and not idolatrous. It is the theological basis for a Presbyterian

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modernity in which Thomson the architect imagined the industrial city of Glasgow as the Holy City come down from Heaven, while astutely using the most modern technologies to design suitable structures for its domestic, commercial, and religious needs. For example, in defiance of nature’s weather in the West of Scotland, Thomson proposed roofing a new development of tenement streets with glass canopies as his original submission to the 1866 Glasgow Improvement Scheme’s competition for designs to replace the worst slums from the Cathedral to the Clyde: ‘Thomson’s justification for residential courts roofed in glass was that they would provide shelter for children, but more than that, “the warmth which would result from this method of building would be conducive to the health and comfort of all” ’ (Edwards 1994: 143). We might add, his theological justification for such an innovative urban design was that architects should transpose the biblical vision of the New Jerusalem and a Protestant sensibility into visionary modern buildings for both slum dwellers and the rising middle-class of Glasgow, as humble co-creators with God. This is well expressed by Robert Crawford in writing about Thomson’s relationship to Glasgow: ‘he loved the passage from the Book of Revelation where “John saw ‘the Holy City, new Jerusalem coming down from God out of Heaven.’ ” In Glasgow . . . planning churches based on the Temple of Solomon, Alexander Thomson sought to build such a city’ (Crawford 2013: 285). Crawford also identifies the religious dimension of his architectural principles and practice as a co-creator with God, Thomson’s term for the human agency typical of modernity: The Presbyterian Thomson hated arches . . . Horizontality, for Thomson, had a religious allure. Invoking the art of Turner and of the Edinburgh-born David Roberts, who painted architectural scenes from ancient Egypt, he hymned “the mysterious power of the horizontal element in carrying the mind away into space, and into speculations upon infinity.” Such rhetoric suggests that Thomson’s Moray Place (where the architect lived, at Number 1) or his lengthy and imposing Great Western Terrace – along with other extended tenement perspectives on Great Western Road – are not there just to provide housing for the welloff: they are there to inspire religious experience. (Crawford 2013: 286–7)

Second, despite his ‘Greek’ epithet, Thomson looked to the future and not the past as an architect, again for theological reasons. Although Thomson’s originality lies in his use of forms and patterns from the buildings of ancient Egypt and Greece (but not Rome), he is clear that the rationale for doing so lay not in what he called the archaeology or revival of the past, but in the recognition that these antiquities reveal eternal laws which are the only sound basis of modern architectural design. It is the eternal laws of architecture that orientate it to the future. As Thomson declared in the introduction to his address on ‘Obstacles and Aids to Architectural Progress’: There is a very remarkable fact in connection with Architecture, that although it is quite distinct from the works of Creation . . . the laws by which it is governed

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were established by the Councils of Eternity . . . is it to be supposed, that in the comparatively brief space of three or four Thousand Years, the full force of these laws can have been expended or that man’s labours in the field of Architecture can have reached the extreme limits of possible accomplishment? I propose to make this the subject of inquiry – To consider the obstacles that lie in the way, and to lay before you some reasons in consideration of which, I am persuaded that, there yet remains a glorious future for Architecture. (Stamp 1999a: 89)

Again, Gavin Stamp sees this orientation to the future, Giddens’ second marker of modernity, as inseparable from Thomson’s formation in the intellectual environment of the UP Church: He may have been a devout Presbyterian – a sometime elder of the Caledonia Road Church – but he was no fundamentalist; besides, the UP Church was profoundly interested in metaphysical ideas and in modern German philosophy. So Thomson’s lectures displayed a wide understanding of current ideas about evolution and development (which were discussed at meetings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow). He was certainly not enslaved to a particular vision of the past, and had no patience with an architecture dominated by archaeology; rather he wanted his contemporaries ‘to value the suggestions of progress, leading upward into the light of the future, as highly as they do associations that lead backwards into the darkness of the past, esteeming the pleasures of hope at least equal to the pleasures of memory’. (Stamp 1999a: 6)

Thomson believed the eternal laws of design established by the Creator were the light of the future, which the architect discerned beneath the ancient forms of Egyptian and Greek construction: ‘Thomson sought to understand those laws, which to him, were an aspect of the Divine. He talked constantly of those “eternal laws” but also of “divine harmonies,” that is, of ideal proportions which, he believed could be found in Greek buildings and which seem to have governed his approach to design . . .’ (Stamp 1999a: 7). As Thomson himself stated, ‘We do not contrive rules; we discover laws. There is such a thing as architectural truth’ (Stamp 1999a: 9). For Thomson, ‘Greek architecture was a timeless ideal, an image of perfection beyond history, at once ancient and modern, because it attended to those eternal, God-given laws’ (Stamp 1999a: 10). Those eternal laws should also determine a suitable architecture for the industrial city of Glasgow. In Thomson’s disputes with the proponents of the Gothic revival, we see the explicitly Presbyterian cast of his theological imagination as an architect. When the University of Glasgow chose the London architect Sir Gilbert Scott and his Gothic design for its new buildings on Gilmorehill, Thomson set out his case for ‘the unsuitableness of Gothic architecture to modern circumstances’, including his criticism of Pugin’s claim that such medievalism was the only authentically Christian style: Then, as to its being a Christian style, this might have some weight with the Romish Church, but to Protestants of any sort, and more particularly

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Presbyterians, and still more particularly Presbyterian dissenters, the argument seems very absurd, for what has the philosophic Christianity of the Reformation to do with the sensuous ritual of the middle ages? The architecture that was consistent of the latter, is diametrically opposed to the former. (Stamp 1999a: 54)

We find in Thomson an explicitly Protestant reading of the eternal laws and divine harmonies of architecture. In his lectures and in his practice, he preferred the horizontal line suggestive of infinity, and the open space in the sanctuary made possible by modern iron beams, as in the three UP churches he designed in Glasgow on monumental, temple-like platforms, rather than the vertical, perpendicular lines and obscuring forest of internal arches in the Gothic churches that were so much in fashion in his day. His argument is both theologically Presbyterian and technologically modern. He first extols the architectural virtues of trabeation, enhanced by new industrial techniques: ‘Our modern engineers use girders to span spaces where formally arches would have been resorted to, and that with an economy of means and stability of structure which puts the arch to shame’ (Stamp 1999a: 55). He then compares worship in the medieval Gothic style to the liturgical requirements of the contemporary Protestant church: The difference between the Roman ritual of the thirteenth century and the Protestant Presbyterian form of worship of the nineteenth century is wide and essential. The Romish church sought to impress the minds of the people by means of imposing ceremonials and splendid pageantries . . . The Presbyterian Protestant Church of the present day . . . professes rather to inform their minds by truth; and to this end the principal part of the service consists in sermons addressed by the minister of the congregation, and the church should be designed and arranged in harmony with the spirit and form of the worship. Instead of being crowded with stone pillars, it should be as open as possible. (Stamp 1999a: 58)

As with his views on a suitable design for a Protestant, Presbyterian, and Dissenting church, Thomson thought that our view of religion should be as open as possible, recognizing its universal character and many historical forms, while remaining true to the conviction shared with the UP theologian John Cairns that the Christianity of the Protestant Reformation represented the highest and final form of humanity’s religious development. McKinstry and Plenderleith see the theological influence of Schleiermacher behind Cairns and Thomson (Crouter 1996: xxxv–xxxvi): Clearly, Thomson’s sense of the validity of certain elements of the so-called ‘pagan’ religions, and his conception of progressive revelation through time and historical manifestation – which he stated plainly in his Haldane Lectures, and on which his architectural interpretation of history so much depended – bear a strong resemblance to the theology expounded by Schleiermacher. (McKinstry and Plenderleith 1994: 76)

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Whatever the source, his Protestant theological convictions did not stop Thomson from appreciating the architectural accomplishments of other religions. He could speak admiringly in ‘The Sources and Elements of Art’ of the contribution of Islamic art and architecture, and note how it preserved the art, science, and literature of ancient Greece and cultivated it with zeal and success: Previous to the development of the Christian style, there arose one of marvellous beauty among the Arabs . . . in so far as consistent with the doctrines of the Koran, these forbade the representation of any living thing, and consequently that share of attention which might otherwise have been bestowed upon painting and sculpture was concentrated on architecture and the decorative arts: hence the great and rapid progress of the Arabs in these departments. (Stamp 1999a: 34–5)

Thomson was only acquainted with the architectural style of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Arabs through drawings, illustrations, and photographs because he never crossed the Channel to the continent or Near East. Suffering from asthma, his hope was to survive the harsh Glasgow winter of 1874–5 and then travel abroad for his health and to see these ancient wonders. Instead, he died in March of 1875 in the Greek terraced home he had designed in his adopted city. The long horizontal line of Moray Place still stands today as testimony to his longing for the infinite and eternal as a dissenting Presbyterian churchman and as an architect of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke. But does the thesis with which this chapter began still stand, after this essay in the applied theology of an elder of the Caledonia Road UP Church?

Anarchism and Liberalism: The Presbyterian Modernity of Geddes and the Young Scots Thomson’s international reputation as a modern architect is no longer in doubt. He has left a celebrated legacy in the cityscape of Glasgow. The question is whether his theology and architecture are not only inseparable but also umbilically linked to his churchgoing in the dissenting UP Church, such that we can sustain the thesis of a discernible Presbyterian modernity in Scotland’s long nineteenth century. Is Thomson unique in that regard, and therefore idiosyncratic, or is he rather typical of lay Presbyterians whose churchgoing in the theological milieu of the dissenting churches informed their contribution to public life in Victorian and Edwardian Scotland? Recent scholarship by Murdo MacDonald on the intellectual influence of the 1843 Free Church on the pioneering ecologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), and by James Kennedy on the association of the Liberal Young Scots Society with the 1900 United Free Church, give grounds for arguing that ‘Greek’ Thomson was not alone but an exemplar of a

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wider Presbyterian modernity in this period, which extended into Scottish intellectual life and politics.³ Anarchy is an unlikely idea to associate with the Free Church of Scotland of 1843. Thomas Chalmers proudly declared that the established political order had nothing to fear from the new Free Kirk. Yet MacDonald has shown how indebted the ecologist Patrick Geddes was to the theological convictions of the Free Church home in which he was raised in Perth for his sympathy if not full alignment with the anarchism of his friend Peter Kropotkin. Geddes said that his belief in a society without state compulsion was due to his adherence to the Disruption principle of spiritual independence and his admiration for Thomas Chalmers’ social vision of a self-organizing moral community. Defending this view in a letter to a correspondent who took issue with his positive use of the term ‘anarchy’, Geddes cited Thomas Chalmers as an anarchist economist besides whom Kropotkin was a mere amateur and declared that the Free Church was the organization to which he was ‘proudest of all’ to belong. MacDonald sees Geddes, a botanist, geographer, community-led town planning pioneer, arts activist, and international educator, as first and foremost ‘ “a moralist, deeply concerned with bettering man and his lot” and Geddes’ Free Church background as a crucial factor in this’ (MacDonald 2015: 78–9). MacDonald notes the presence of the scientist David Brewster, artist Octavius Hill, geologist Hugh Miller, Greek scholar and Celtic revivalist John Stuart Blackie, and biblical scholar-cum-social anthropologist William Robertson Smith as prominent intellectuals in Free Church circles: ‘The Free Church was thus not only important to Geddes as a model of a minimal institutional structure, it was also a cultural guide. The Free Church at its foundation had attracted a strong group of intellectuals and artists and this has great relevance for an understanding of Geddes the thinker.’ The 1843 Free Kirk was also involved in the modern civic life of Scotland through its distinguished lay members, with Brewster serving as a leading member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and Octavius Hill acting as secretary to the Scottish Academy of professional artists (MacDonald 2015: 79). This ‘conjunction of morality, spirituality, science and art, set the agenda for the young Patrick Geddes’, born just eleven years after the Disruption, and enjoying friendships with leading FC and UFC ministers like Alexander Whyte and John Kelman in later life. In the judgement of MacDonald, Geddes found in the FC not the stern Calvinism of popular caricature but a church that was as intellectually open as possible to his concern to integrate the natural environment and human culture in his ecology of the future. As with Alexander Thomson, Geddes’ international reputation is now well established, in his case as an original thinker and early practitioner of modern ³ See the chapter on the Free Church intellectual influences on Patrick Geddes in Murdo MacDonald’s forthcoming life of the pioneering ecologist, which the author was grateful to read in draft.

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ecological ideas. What is only now coming to the fore is the scholarship to show his theological and intellectual debt to the dissenting Presbyterian tradition of the Free Church of 1843 ‘as an institution which facilitated a network of wide ranging debates’ on the issues of modernity in Scotland (MacDonald 2015: 80). Similarly, the political impact of the Young Scots Society (YSS) within the Scottish Liberal Party in the years before 1914 has been noted by historians like T. M. Devine, especially its influential advocacy of Scottish Home Rule (Devine 2012: 306–8). Formed after the party’s electoral defeat in 1900 ‘for the purpose of educating young men in the fundamental principles of Liberalism and of encouraging them in the study of social science and economics’, it grew into a society with some fifty branches and ten thousand members by 1914, thirty of whom were elected to Parliament in this period. Again, the link between leading members of the Young Scots and the theological milieu of the 1900 United Free Church of Scotland has only recently been examined in depth by the political sociologist James Kennedy in his comparative study of liberal nationalisms in Quebec and Scotland: Ian MacLeod argues that “Presbyterianism was the single greatest driving-force of nineteenth-century Scottish Liberalism, playing little direct role in political life, but providing a silent and powerful impulse towards democracy.” Its influence continued to be felt at the turn of the century . . . Therefore, in the early part of the twentieth century, social salvation continued to be linked to religious salvation to a large extent. The Young Scots exemplified this. (Kennedy 2015: 180)

Kennedy’s research shows that ‘[a] preponderance of early YSS members were members of the United Free Church . . . a reflection of the close ties between the Liberal Party and religious nonconformity’. This relationship between liberalism and Protestantism was seen as mutually reinforcing among the Young Scots, with their publications and speakers oscillating between the two topics. Kennedy concludes that ‘religion had a diffuse influence’ on the society’s members: It fostered a sense of moral duty. This can be seen in their roles as campaigning journalists and social investigators, and in the causes that they championed. It helps explain the devotion of many to the causes of temperance, pacifism, antigambling legislation, and the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, but also to social reform more generally . . . Religion mattered to the Young Scots. In particular, the way in which it intertwined with liberalism is crucial to an understanding of their politics. (Kennedy 2015: 181)

The question for our thesis on the theological significance of churchgoing is whether the theological milieu of the United Free Church of Scotland was itself an environment that fostered such liberal political commitments and causes. This is certainly the conclusion of Donald C. Smith in his detailed study of the UF Church’s official position on social questions between 1900 and 1914. Smith sees it

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as the first Scottish denomination to name and challenge the structural inequities of Scotland’s industrial society as the root cause of the problems of poverty and hardship: . . . this period preceding the First World War is of great importance in that it witnessed in the Scottish Church the first significant break from traditional 19th century Christian social concern based on an acceptance of the existing social order, and which expressed itself in charitable and reclamation work, and a new Christian social concern based on a suspicion or rejection of the existing order, and which expressed itself in social criticism and in more dynamic and radical forms of social action. (Smith 1987: 356)

It is this ecclesial engagement with social problems at the systemic and not just the charitable level that helps us to understand the connection of so many members of the Young Scots Society with the theological life of the United Free Church in this period. Their interest in debating and advocating the progressive social policies of the New Liberalism resonated with the preaching and advocacy of their ministers on economic and political questions. As Smith notes of a UF committee statement on ‘The Social ideals of our Lord’, it ‘clearly displayed the influence of the new social and theological liberalism’ (Smith 1987: 343). This is the theological milieu which at least some UF lay members found compatible with Giddens’ modern politics of mass democracy and reform of the nation-state, as practised by the Young Scots in their effective political campaigning up to 1914. Again, both the UFC and YSS were as open as possible to the economic and political problems of modernity in the opening years of the twentieth century before the First World War and its aftermath crushed Presbyterian social criticism and the Liberal hegemony in Scotland.

Conclusion This chapter has drawn on recent scholarship on Alexander Thomson, Patrick Geddes, and the Young Scots Society to argue for the public significance of churchgoing in the modern history of Scottish theology and society. What links Thomson, Geddes, and the Young Scots is their theological formation in dissenting Presbyterian churches and its seminal influence on their transformation of the urban, environmental, and political landscape of modern Scotland. By considering the public lives of these lay members in the Victorian and Edwardian era, who transposed the theological ideas of their ecclesial milieu into the urban buildings, environmental planning, and liberal politics of a modern industrial society, we have asked whether it is possible to speak of a Presbyterian modernity during Scotland’s long nineteenth century. The verdict may still be not proven but at least the thesis merits further consideration in future scholarship. As with Greek

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Thomson’s Presbyterian ideal for modern church design, it is as open as possible. In the modern history of Scottish theology, lay lives matter. They are ripe for research.

Bibliography Black, Aileen (2006). Gilfillan of Dundee, 1813–1878. Dundee: Dundee University Press. Brown, Stewart J. (2010). ‘Beliefs and Religions’, in Trevor Griffiths and Graeme Morton (eds.), A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 to 1900. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 116–46. Campbell, Ian (2000). ‘Carlyle and the Secession’, in Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands (eds.), Scottish Christianity in the Modern World: In Honour of A. C. Cheyne. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 17–36. Crawford, Robert (2013). On Glasgow and Edinburgh. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Crouter, Richard (ed.) (1996). Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devine, T. M. (2012). The Scottish Nation: A Modern History. London: Penguin Books. Edgerton, David (2018). The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History. London: Allen Lane. Edwards, Brian (1994). ‘Alexander Thomson and the Glasgow Improvement Scheme’, in Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry (eds.), ‘Greek’ Thomson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 135–50. Giddens, Anthony and Christopher Pierson (1998). Conversations with Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gill, Robin (1999). Churchgoing and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, Robin (2012). Theology in a Social Context: Sociological Theology, vol. 1. Farnham: Ashgate. Kedward, Rod (2005). France and the French: A Modern History. New York: Overlook Press. Kennedy, James (2015). Liberal Nationalisms: Empire, State, and Civil Society in Scotland and Quebec. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. MacDonald, Murdo (2015). ‘Patrick Geddes: Environment and Culture’, in Walter Stephen (ed.), Think Global, Act Local: The Life and Legacy of Patrick Geddes. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 70–84. McFadzean, Ronald (1979). The Life and Work of Alexander Thomson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McKinstry, Sam and Jane Plenderleith (1994). ‘Thomson and Schleiermacher’, in Gavin Stamp and Sam Mckinstry (eds.), ‘Greek’ Thomson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 73–9.

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Maxwell, Stephen (1982). ‘The Secular Pulpit: Presbyterian Democracy in the Twentieth Century’, in H. M. Drucker and N. L. Drucker (eds.), Scottish Government Yearbook. Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 181–98. Morton, Graham and R. J. Morris (2001). ‘Civil Society, Governance and Nation 1832–1914’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox (eds.), The New Penguin History of Scotland: From Earliest Times to the Present Day. London: Penguin Press, 355–416. Pickard, Willis (2011). The Member for Scotland: A Life of Duncan McLaren. Edinburgh: John Donald. Smith, Donald C. (1987). Passive Obedience and Prophetic Witness: Social Criticism in the Scottish Church 1830–1945. New York: Peter Lang. Stamp, Gavin (ed.) (1999a). The Light of Truth and Beauty: The Lectures of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson Architect 1817–1875. Glasgow: Alexander Thomson Society. Stamp, Gavin (1999b). Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. London: Laurence King Publications. Stamp, Gavin and Sam McKinstry (eds.) (1994). ‘Greek’ Thomson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woodside, David (1917). The Soul of a Scottish Church, or the Contribution of the UP Church to Scottish Life and Religion. Edinburgh: United Free Church of Scotland.

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26 The Secession and United Presbyterian Churches Eric G. McKimmon

Introduction: Between Calvinism and Modernity The United Presbyterian Church was instituted on 13 May 1847, through the coming together of the United Secession Church and the Relief Church. The merger formed a major component in the fabric of Presbyterianism in Victorian Scotland. The Church, known colloquially as the UP, was a denomination of 518 congregations. It was strongest in the Lowlands, with almost no presence in the Highlands; although it did have a strong representation in Orkney and was the largest denomination on the archipelago. The United Presbyterian Church continued until the formation of a long-negotiated union with the Free Church in 1900. The new body, the United Free Church, became part of a reconstituted Church of Scotland in 1929. For the first time the national Church was both established and spiritually independent; an accommodation to principles that had sparked the original Secession of 1733. Why the Secession Churches of the eighteenth century—movements of radical protest and federal Calvinism—should, in the nineteenth century, become the agents of conciliation, tolerance, and liberal evangelicalism is a question still to be fully researched. The answer, in part, lies in the nature of the tradition itself. The ideal of spiritual independence was the soul of the Secession; but praxis in church and in civil society proved challenging and divisive. The formation of the United Secession Church in 1820 was, in effect, an exercise in repair and renewal in the changed political circumstances of a new century. Unity, however, was a work in progress. The relation of conscience to confessional standards and the larger question of the theological adequacy of the standards themselves were difficult issues, liable to create schism. But, remarkably, the United Presbyterian Church coalesced around greater liberty of conscience and significant doctrinal reform. The Declaratory Act of the United Presbyterian Synod (1879) modified the teaching of the Westminster Confession of Faith in seven key areas; this, in effect, marked the end of subscription to the ‘whole’ doctrine of the

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Confession.¹ It was a doctrinal adjustment that impacted Scottish Presbyterianism for the next half-century. The Free Church passed a similarly worded declaration in 1892, though concessions were made to conservative sensitivities in a follow-up act in 1894. In the Basis of Union (1929) these historical ‘articles declaratory’ were incorporated into the doctrinal standards of the Established Church (Cox 1964). The Westminster Confession of Faith remained the ‘principal standard’ of the Church of Scotland, but its theological wings had been clipped. Today the Confession is more of a shibboleth than a doctrinal reference point in a liberal and diverse Church of Scotland. In the interim, internal debate in the Secession Churches seemed to fuel rather than deplete energy; they exhibited a remarkable record in social activism, overseas missionary work, and apologetics. Advances in science and the theory of evolution stretched the minds of the Secession theologians. In an age when it may have been tempting to seek security, a static confessionalism, or an obscurantist pietism, the Secession tradition was intellectually alive. The United Presbyterian response to challenge found creative expression in the work of Henry Calderwood and John Cairns. Calderwood (1830–97) is today a hardly known figure. Yet, he was an ardent campaigner for reform in both church and society. Calderwood left his imprint on politics, social action, religion and philosophy. John Cairns (1818–92) is a better-known personality; ecclesiastically, he was a mediating figure and has been described as a ‘liberal conservative’ (McKimmon 2014). Cairns stands as an example of confessional loyalty that has latitudinarian horizons; he prefigures the inclusive ethos of the Church of Scotland in the twentieth century. Not everyone, however, found a via media desirable or satisfactory. In 1841, the United Secession Church faced a major crisis when James Morison (1816–63) probed the nature and extent of the atonement. At issue was whether the Calvinistic doctrine of election can accurately express the fullness of God’s love. The ‘Atonement Controversy’ led to Morison’s dismissal from the United Secession ministry; however, his theology and missionary enthusiasm prompted the formation of the Evangelical Union. When, in 1900, the United Presbyterian Church merged with the Free Church of Scotland, the most prominent theologian in the United Presbyterian Church was James Orr (1844–1913). Orr continued and adapted the traditions he inherited; his work was prolific in theological, biblical, and apologetic spheres. Orr lectured widely in America and influenced evangelical theology throughout the English-speaking world. ¹ The qualifications made to the teaching of the Westminster Confession modified the doctrines of redemption, eternal decrees, total depravity, and the salvation of the non-Christians. The Act also disavowed ‘all compulsory or persecuting or intolerant principles in religion’, affirmed the voluntary principle in polity and endorsed ‘liberty of opinion on such points, in the Standards, not entering the substance of the faith’ (Cox 1964: 411–12).

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Henry Calderwood Henry Calderwood was born in Peebles, in the Scottish Borders. Ill health prevented him from completing undergraduate studies at Edinburgh University. He did, however, attend the metaphysics classes held in the evenings in the home of Sir William Hamilton. This was to be significant in his philosophical development. Calderwood studied for the United Presbyterian ministry and was called to the large congregation of Greyfriars, Glasgow, in 1856. He ministered there until his appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1868. Calderwood devoted himself to social activism, denominational leadership, and philosophical debate. The far reach of his concern for justice was illustrated in his strong opposition to slavery in the Southern states. At home, the denial of women’s suffrage and the right of women to university education were issues on which Calderwood agitated for reform. Like many members of the United Presbyterian Church, he was liberal in politics. However, he split with Gladstone over the matter of Home Rule for Ireland. Thereafter, he campaigned as a liberal unionist from the Borders to Orkney until death from overwork and the onset of angina. Calderwood was an opinion former, debater, and administrator in his denomination. He was elected Moderator of the United Presbyterian Synod (equivalent of the General Assembly) in 1880 and was editor of the United Presbyterian Magazine from 1884 to 1891. He served on the Revision Committee that formulated the Declaratory Act of 1879 and his motion at Synod in 1872 allowed instrumental music in worship. He gave enthusiastic support to Moody and Sankey when they first came to Edinburgh in 1873. A philosophical optimism touched upon every aspect of Calderwood’s life and action. Addressing a meeting of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Liverpool, he urged that faith keep abreast of cultural change. ‘Ours is an unsettling age, because it is an age of progress. But a wider knowledge must lead to a wider faith’ (Woodside and Calderwood 1900: 260). In his oration at the United Presbyterian Church Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Calderwood spoke of the Secession of 1733 as a necessary break with the past and prophetic of a progressive future. ‘Further service to the nation was rendered by development of religious thought within the seceding Churches. By this people escaped from the narrowness which clung to them in the earlier stages of their history, thereby making a deep impression on the religious thought of Scotland.’ He informed the gathered ministers and elders that the issue at stake ‘was the expansion of the old Calvinist creed’ out of which ‘slowly emerged a fuller sense of divine love’; such emergence brought ‘rejoicing’ to ‘thoughtful men in all Churches, and others beyond Churches’ (Calderwood 1897: 102). Ian Hamilton has accused the Secession Churches of being largely responsible for the erosion of Calvinistic orthodoxy in Scottish Presbyterianism (Hamilton 1990). Calderwood, of course, was proud that the Secession tradition was reformist. Calvinism, in its scholastic forms, was not

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an end in itself; rather, it contained the kernel of a generous love still to be realized. Calderwood would have rejected the pejorative implication of Hamilton’s thesis. The groundwork for Calderwood’s optimism is found in his philosophical work. His widely distributed Handbook of Moral Philosophy (Calderwood 1872) concentrated on the ethical possibilities inherent in personality. It was an emphasis far removed from the anthropological pessimism of Calvinism. As his biographers remarked, he ‘held somewhat broad views, contending for a certain innate goodness in man’ (Woodside and Calderwood 1900: 262). In fact, ontological resonance of the human with the divine was for Calderwood fundamental. In his first monograph, The Philosophy of the Infinite (Calderwood 1854), penned as a student, he responded critically to the work of his erstwhile teacher, Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton had somewhat muddied the ‘pure stream’ of Scottish realism through his study of European philosophy, of Kant in particular. He argued that the Absolute, by definition, is above or apart from all relation and, therefore, cannot be known. Hamilton was aware of the implications of this assertion for religion; but considered with Kant that limitation in knowledge makes way for faith. Calderwood challenged this denial of human capacity for knowledge of God. Consciousness, he argued, is a common ground for both faith and knowledge. Whilst knowledge of the Infinite cannot be complete, nevertheless, the mind’s acquaintance with the transcendent is real. Later, in his Handbook—in a short chapter: ‘Morality and its relation to Religion’—Calderwood argued that ‘the religious life and the moral life are thus essentially one’ (Calderwood 1872: 317). Human spiritual capacity, religious development, cultural advance—all these aspects of Calderwood’s thought—were predicated on an evolutionary paradigm. The last twenty years of his academic pursuits were given over to the investigation of the relation of science to religion. He acquired knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and general biology and published three books on the issues involved: The Relations of Mind and Brain (Calderwood 1879); The Relations of Science and Religion, the Morse Lectures in Union Theological Seminary in New York (Calderwood 1881); and Evolution and Man’s Place in Nature (Calderwood 1896). Calderwood accepted Darwin’s theory of descent in the organic world but found it inadequate to explain the rational and spiritual life of human beings. Similarly, in his earlier study, he was agnostic as to the exact nature of the link between brain activity and rational intelligence. Faced with the incongruity between the forces of nature and the ethical ideals of humanity, Calderwood sought to reconcile the irreconcilable in a transcendent teleology. He wrote: ‘the ethical process can be harmonised with the cosmic process only as we trace both to a common Cause – a Transcendent Intelligence – working out His will by the whole range of progressive action, so including in one scheme the forces of nature, the movements of animal life, and the intelligent activity of responsible agents’ (Pringle-Pattison 1900: 435). Calderwood configured the relation between religion and science in almost apocalyptic terms: science will shine an ever-increasing light

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on the cosmic mystery and ‘religion will become greater as knowledge becomes larger’; at the heart of evolution, cosmic and ethical, lie ‘the cherished hopes of humanity’ (Calderwood 1896: 310–11). In Calderwood’s teleological perspective, all of creation moves to an ever-fuller realization in the mystery of Divine love. This spiritual vision was the driving force in his social optimism and inspired his view of religion as inevitably progressive. Discontinuities were eddies in the stream, but the flow was certain and the direction assured. Even the ‘irreligious’ may have a part in the flow. In his Life of Hume, published posthumously, Calderwood wrote in the preface: A renewed study of Hume’s writings may lead us to a fairer interpretation of the attitude of those, in our own day, whose avowed doubts have induced earnest men to classify themselves amongst the irreligious. (Pringle-Pattison 1900: 439)

Before moving on, it is apt to correct a misrepresentation of Calderwood in George E. Davie’s The Democratic Intellect. Davie devoted his professional life to the study of the changing shape and fortunes of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century. It was part of his thesis that, after the Disruption of 1843, university chairs fell into the hands of ‘dull evangelicals’ and philosophy was ‘provincialized’.² Davie numbers Calderwood amongst the malign influences: ‘a narrow-minded extremist’ of ‘the sectarian stamp’ (Davie 1964: 319). It is an unfortunate personalizing of the issues of the time. Given Calderwood’s contribution to theological latitude in the United Presbyterian Church, his impressive record of support for social justice, sustained engagement with the scientific challenges, and recognition of agnostic integrity, Davie’s evaluation is inaccurate and unfair.

John Cairns The most significant theologian of the Secession and United Presbyterian Churches was John Cairns. He was a man of such largesse, intellectually and spiritually, that he is difficult to summarize. His deep ecclesial roots meant he fully trusted the politics of his denomination; and generosity of spirit gave him influence far beyond his confessional loyalty. Every manifestation of religious life engaged his interest, as when he travelled to Co Monaghan, in Ulster, to see the effects of the 1859 Revival at first hand; or when, on another visit to Ireland in 1864, he climbed Croagh Patrick, Co Mayo, in the company of Catholic pilgrims engaging in discussion. In 1880, he visited Utah and attended a Mormon service at which Orson Pratt, the last surviving companion of Joseph Smith, officiated. His Calvinist mind was aghast, though his presence spoke of magnanimity of soul.

² For critical discussion see Paterson (2015).

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As with many students, a Wanderjahr was part of Cairns’ theological education; it included ten months’ study at the University of Berlin and travel on foot throughout France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. He was licensed for ministry in the United Secession Church in 1845 and spent the first thirty years of his life as minister of Golden Square Church in Berwick-on-Tweed. This quiet phase of life followed his part in the public controversy over the appointment—in the event, the non-appointment—of James Frederick Ferrier to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Edinburgh. Cairns was one of the aforementioned ‘dull evangelicals’ whom Davie considered to have hijacked university appointments. However, Ferrier’s biographer, Elizabeth Haldane, takes a measured view of his culpability. Cairns had acted ‘unjustly’, though unintentionally, and she considered him ‘an honourable and able scholar’ (Haldane 1899: 75). In the aftermath, Cairns turned his talents and passions to pastoral ministry, theology, and the politics of Church reunion. In 1867, he took on the added responsibility of Professor of Apologetics in the United Presbyterian Theological Hall. In 1875, Cairns became full-time Professor of Dogmatics and Apologetics and was Principal until his death in 1892. Cairns wrote only one monograph, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century (Cairns 1881), the Cunningham Lectures, a work of apologetics in which he highlighted the inconsistencies of atheism over the centuries and defended the supernatural grounds of Christian faith. His substantive theology is articulated in letters, speeches, and extensive pamphlet literature (MacEwen 1896: 789–90). The theology of federal Calvinism was, for Cairns, not a narrow place but a vantage-point for clearer views of the spiritual landscape. He defended the tenets of Calvinist doctrine—divine decrees, penal substitution, and eternal punishment—with conviction. Cairns believed that a theology of divine decree best probes the mystery of Christ. God’s eternal decree takes the form of covenant in history and transcendence is disclosed in Bethlehem and at Golgotha. In effect, the action of God in the incarnation and atonement reclaims the world and makes it a habitable place for faith. In the incarnation and its correlate atonement, faith finds relief from the agonizing questions of the heart. ‘Has Christ lifted up the whole mystery or solved it? It is true – it is a blessed truth – that in Christ we can not only have escape from evil but also relief to thought’ (Cairns 1883: 407). Cairns was always at pains to link the dark side of doctrine with the even darker side of life; in the round, he considered divine decrees as the human articulation of what loving redemption looks like in an evil world and hurting creation. Abandonment of divine decrees would, he protested, leave a vacuum at the heart of Christian theology: Christ ‘is our practical Theodicée’ (Cairns 1883: 407). And so, he regarded penal suffering as the price love pays to maintain moral order, to allow forgiveness and to promote holiness. Without directly affirming a governmental theory of atonement, Cairns, in effect, embraced its spiritual perspective. The balance, or ‘equilibrium’, of orthodox doctrine was something to which Cairns frequently appealed. Thus, he regarded hell as being as essential to the

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proclamation of the gospel as heaven. And, though large-hearted, when David Macrae sought the permission of Synod to preach about the subjects of conditional immortality and universal restoration, Cairns ‘regretfully’ declined to offer his support. I fear these doctrines will not draw more souls to Christ, the divine centre of salvation. We shall endorse a greater multitude; but our net will break in our abortive efforts to mend it and we shall enclose fewer. (Cairns 1883: 405)

Cairns saw also a perilous danger to faith in the diminution of the authority of the Bible. Loss of belief in the authority of Scripture ‘must end as a sting in the hearts of the great body of Christians’ and the loss to humanity is even greater because the Bible ‘is felt and feared by all the rulers of darkness in this world’ (Cairns 1852: 185).³ It was not that Cairns considered the Bible as the Word of God simpliciter; but, rather, in its canonical form, the Bible is divine revelation. He made a distinction between the Scriptures as a record and the Scriptures as an authority. ‘The mind of the Spirit is maintained by no orthodox theologian worth naming to be identical with what is recorded in Scripture’ (Cairns 1852: 176). This distinction was a well-established principle of biblical interpretation in the Secession Churches, going back at least to John Dick.⁴ Interestingly, the Secession and United Presbyterian Churches were spared the conflicts over biblical criticism that caused angst in the Free Church.⁵ In summary, Cairns’ work shows a consistent ability to hold to the confessional centre whilst respecting latitude, though with care to protect ‘equilibrium’. He described himself as a fixed Calvinist, but the self-appellation must be weighed in context. It was 1892 and Cairns was writing to a friend on the death of Spurgeon. ‘I have been one of his warmest admirers . . . like him I am a fixed Calvinist; but I can, perhaps censurably, strive to extract some good out of the otherwise minded-ness of those who “hold the Head” ’ (MacEwen 1896: 779). The ability to see Christ as bigger than any system of doctrine, or any particular ecclesial body, was a gift Cairns brought to theological dialogue. He affirmed and defended the Calvinism in which he was nurtured; but spiritual maturity and intellectual breadth enabled him to anticipate and recognize grace in other communions. It may be argued that Cairns prized evangelical catholicity more than Reformed confessionalism; but Cairns would not have seen evangelical catholicity as at variance with his confessional commitment. In many ways, he ³ Cairns’ name is not attached to this wide-ranging review; however, his biographer ascribes Cairns as the author (MacEwen 1896: 789). ⁴ ‘We do not apply inspiration in the same sense to the whole of scripture . . . in some parts, if I may say so, there is more of God than others’ (Dick 1834: 200). John Dick (1764–1833) was Professor of Theology in the United Secession Church (1820–33). ⁵ The most distinguished New Testament scholar was John Eadie (1810–76), successively Professor of Biblical Literature in the United Secession and United Presbyterian divinity halls. He served on the Committee for Revision of the New Testament until his death (Milne 1993: 270).

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anticipated ecumenical pluralism. He expressed admiration for Methodists; he attended weekly lectures given by the Anglican minister in Berwick; he was totally committed to the search for unity amongst Scottish Presbyterians. To that end, Cairns considered the adjustments to subscription to the Westminster Confession, prescribed in the Declaratory Act of 1879, as rectifying, rather than a departure from, tradition. The United Presbyterian Church arrived at a fresh alignment of conscience, confession, and revelation. Cairns’ personal gravitas ensured Synod passed the measure ‘without acrimony, party feeling or schism’ and ‘with the outcome of an increase in loyalty and unity’ throughout the whole Church (MacEwen 1896: 675). William Graham, a life-long friend, was not beside the mark when he referred to Cairns as the ‘embodied conscience of liberal evangelicalism’ (MacEwen 1896: 387).

James Morison Calderwood and Cairns were managers of change. They were aided in their endeavours by two prevailing impulses which they successfully harnessed. The first of these was a desire for a reunited Kirk. Factional interests had not erased the dream of one Church of Scotland. Secondly, the predominance of reformed theology, as found in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, provided a common theological allegiance that ran deep in Scottish Presbyterian consciousness. Henry Calderwood remarked that, though Highland and Lowland cultures were markedly different, ‘we are two peoples with one heart’ (Calderwood 1886: 225). The issues raised by James Morison placed him at variance with this Zeitgeist. In medieval times, salvation was in the hands of the Church; the sixteenth-century reformers considered salvation the prerogative of an electing God; Morison sought to ground salvation in human decision. At his initiative, a new evangelicalism, relational and personal, in measure imported from America, became for a minority of Scots an alternative to Calvinism. James Morison was born on 14 February 1816 in the manse of the Secession (Anti-Burgher) Church in Bathgate. Education was first at Bathgate Academy and afterwards at Edinburgh University. He distinguished himself in languages, modern and ancient; a gift that later facilitated his widely read Bible commentaries. Morison began study at the United Secession Theological Hall in 1834. John Brown, tertius, the grandson of John Brown of Haddington, had just commenced in the Chair of Exegetical Theology and Robert Balmer was teaching Systematic Theology. These teachers were to be significant influences. Both professors would face charges that they taught an Amyraldian doctrine of the atonement. Balmer died before the issue was resolved and Synod, in the end, absolved both. Nevertheless, a reforming passion pervaded the United Secession Church. Balmer’s last address to students captures the mood of the time.

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The religious tradition to which we belong was long characterised by an ardent, perhaps extravagant and idolatrous, veneration for the wisdom of the first Seceders and Scottish Covenanters. Their opinions and arrangements and proceedings were almost considered as faultless. [Break] Many were disposed to hold their religion not as a gift from Jesus Christ, but as a legacy bequeathed from their ancestors, which like any other inheritance may be forfeited by violating any of the conditions of entail . . . it is no longer regarded as insufferable to dissent from the sentiments of our forefathers. (Balmer 1845a: 125)

This intellectual atmosphere was congenial to Morison. In a student essay, written for Balmer on the ‘Sonship of Christ’, Morison argued cogently that, though Christ the Redeemer was divine eternally, he became the Son of God only through the incarnation. Sonship, therefore, entailed a temporal, economic relationship rather than an eternal attribute. Morison was still in his teens and the essay raised eyebrows in the Presbytery of Edinburgh. Morison suffered from congenital heart disease which became especially debilitating in his second year of study. Convalescing, he experienced a religious conversion brought on by anxiety about the fate of his soul. At length, certainty of salvation—not a tenet of Calvinism—assuaged Morison’s fears; and from that point spiritual assurance for all believers became fundamental to his theology (Smeaton 1902: 38). A separate and confirming impetus came from Charles Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Finney 1850). Morison read these when a probationer in Morayshire; his enthusiasm is obvious in a letter to his father. ‘I do strenuously advise you to get Finney’s Lectures on Revivals and preach like him . . . It has its faults but its excellencies are extraordinary’ (Adamson 1898: 53). On 8 June 1841, the Synod of the United Secession Church met to pronounce on what was popularly known as the ‘Atonement Controversy’ (Hamilton 1993: 43–4). Morison was arrayed on nine charges, the outcome of which was suspension from the ministry. The action had been brought to a head by the publication of his tract The Nature of the Atonement.⁶ Morison defined atonement ‘as an expedient introduced into the divine moral government, consisting of obedience unto death of Christ, which has completely removed all legal obstacles standing between man and the attainability of salvation’ (Morison 1890: 75). The offending detail was not the governmental theory but the universal availability of the benefits of atonement. A follow-up tract, The Extent of the Atonement (Morison 1841), reiterated this point. At his trial,

⁶ The more famous work, The Nature of the Atonement, by John McLeod Campbell (1800–72) overlaps with Morison in affirming a universal atonement and assurance as concomitant with faith. Otherwise the works are radically different in orientation. Morison’s judicial and governmental categories are alien to Campbell’s filial, penitential, perspective. There appears to have been no written correspondence between the two theologians.

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Morison made no defence to the charge that he taught an atonement effectual for all believers, or that this is not the teaching of the Westminster Confession. However, he repudiated the charge of Arminianism. ‘I am not an Arminian, call me a low Calvinist, or a no Calvinist, if you like but not an Arminian’ (Smeaton 1902: 114). It was a strange denial; but to have admitted to Arminianism would have made his exclusion axiomatic. Such an admission would have also created difficulty for Brown who defended Morison. It was a decade later, whilst convalescing on the continent, that he acknowledged the Arminian basis of his teaching (Smeaton 1902: 184). In extending the possibility of salvation to all, it was Arminianism, not Calvinism, that followed the logic of divine love.⁷ As his early biographer noted, even allowing for the latitude of his denomination, ‘by the time of his expulsion from the Secession Church his position was unsatisfactory and illogical’ (Adamson 1898: 234). The exclusion of Morison illustrates that ever increasing union was not, in the mid-nineteenth century, an inevitable development in Scottish Presbyterianism. Morison and three ministerial colleagues, a lay preacher and eight elders formed a fellowship which expanded rapidly through evangelistic missions. Formally instituted as the Evangelical Union, it became an association of Arminian congregational churches, predominantly industrial urban. Morison maintained the idea of an educated ministry and established a theological Academy. Of the nine charges of doctrinal error brought against Morison, he is remembered for his insistence on the universality of the atonement. But the other charges are also significant. For example, he taught that ‘the prayers of unbelieving people are unacceptable to God’ (Davie 1841: 11). By this he meant there is nothing a person can do prior to belief to gain divine favour or acceptance. Morison was circumventing both the medieval practice of seeking God penitently and the reformed practice of ‘repentance unto life’, as in the spirituality of the Shorter Catechism, Question 87. Another charge was that Morison taught that repentance is simply a ‘change of mind’, nothing more. Therefore, change of conduct is not part and parcel of repentance; it is a consequence and fruit (Davie 1841: 13). Further, he insisted the Spirit did not impart ‘power to believe’; rather, the Spirit’s ‘operation’ is to ‘open the heart’ and make room for human accountability (Davie 1841: 10). The heirs to Morison’s innovations—that is his shift from divine election to human choice, from a spirituality of ‘waiting’ to fast-track salvation—were not only the gathered congregations of the Evangelical Union; interdenominational evangelical bodies were part of the continuum; for example, the Faith Mission, formed in Glasgow in 1886 to evangelize rural areas of Scotland and Ireland. Heirs, too, were ⁷ Morison’s deep concern over the logical incompatibility of universal love with particular redemption contrasted sharply Cairns’ reverent agnosticism. The latter wrote: ‘I hold both together; I hold one as firmly as the other; I hold that they are perfectly consistent. I am not called up to explain their consistency. I shall be sorry to give up every truth that I cannot show to be consistent with every other truth’ (Cairns 1878: 8).

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the Billy Graham campaigns of the twentieth century, as are varied charismatic fellowships in the twenty-first. Paradoxically, the doctrine of election opposed by Morison has found rehabilitation in liberal theology, as election to universal salvation.

Last of the Tradition: James Orr The broad evangelical traditions of the United Presbyterian Church continued after formal union with the Free Church in 1900. The United Presbyterian Theological Hall closed and the Free Church Colleges in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen provided continuity in scholarship and training for the ministry. Amongst those who made the transition to the new arrangements was James Orr. Born in Glasgow, Orr was a ‘cradle’ United Presbyterian and, after John Cairns, became the denomination’s leading theologian. There is a consensus that Orr was an able and learned theologian. However, judgements vary as to his position on the theological spectrum. For example, Alan Sell reads Orr as a bearer of tradition and a praiseworthy ‘defender of the faith’ (Sell 1987: 137–71). Glen G. Scorgie also considers Orr a conservative theologian; but has a sharper critique of his work. Determination to ‘defend’ hampered Orr’s appreciation of developments in liberal theology: ‘his principal concern, apparently, was always to identify change as weakness as opposed to the positive gains and strengths that inhere in such developments’ (Scorgie 1988: 157). Donald MacLeod, from a confessional reformed position, praises The Christian View of God and the World (Orr 1897a) as being ‘a work of massive erudition, not least in the field of continental theology’. MacLeod considered that Orr ‘borrowed, debated, re-phrased and synthesized, but never moved far from the evangelical orthodoxy of his roots’. However, with somewhat sweeping judgement, he concludes it is ‘difficult to think of a single original idea attributable to James Orr’ (MacLeod 1993). Looked at through the lens of Secession and United Church theology, one can appreciate both the traditional and innovative side of Orr. Orr was intent on advancing and modifying what he considered best in his tradition, whilst distancing himself from the merely nostalgic. His treatment of Calvinism is an example of distance. In an article written for the Hastings Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, Orr was of the view that the primary defect of Calvinism is the inversion of the essential attributes of God. ‘Sovereignty must be interpreted in terms of God’s character as love, rather than love in terms of sovereignty.’ Also, love dictates that election must never be purely for individual self-interest: election must be ‘removed from its purely individual basis and treated organically’ (Orr 1910: 152). Orr, writing three years before the end of his life, felt that philosophy, science, and enlarged biblical knowledge would ‘largely transform all doctrinal schemes.

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The perennial elements of truth in Calvinism would survive, but it may be questioned whether it will ever occupy so dominant and exclusive a place in the future as it has in many periods of the past’ (Orr 1910: 155). Here are echoes of the progressive sensibilities of Calderwood, as of the radical reformism going all the way back to Balmer. Orr had travelled some distance from Cairns’ appeal to God’s eternal decree as a modus operandi in theology. So, too, had theology in Scotland: he remarked, ‘little, comparatively, is heard of limited atonement, for so long the touchstone of the purity of Calvinistic faith and little disposition is shown on any side to deny the love of God to the whole world in the gift of His Son . . . (Orr 1910: 153). And, reflecting on the fate of James Morison, he considered that ‘the Church of today would have known better how to utilise’ his ‘scholarship’ (Orr 1897b: 94). With regard to the scientific challenges to faith and theology, Orr was much less accommodating to the theory of evolution than Calderwood. The latter allowed for an evolutionary continuum from animal to human anatomy but stopped short of allowing for an evolutionary explanation of human consciousness and mental capacities. Orr, in contrast, believed there is a total disjunction between evolution in the animal kingdom and everything that distinguishes humanity: mind and body are a special, divine creation. More generally, evolution for Calderwood had an almost revelatory quality about it. He approached the matter with the excitement of a philosopher. Orr addressed the subject with the caution of a theologian; more tentative as to convergence between biblical and scientific ways of thought. In terms of the movement towards a reunited Kirk, Orr was at one with sentiments traceable to the earliest days of the movement. ‘Communion in the things about which Christians agree and toleration in those about which they differ’, had been the pastoral vision of Robert Balmer (Balmer 1845b: 55). With similar passion, John Brown wrote to Cairns in 1852: ‘to promote unity among Christians, without compromise of principle, has been one of the first wishes of my heart, one of the leading objects of my life’ (Cairns 1860: 312). Perhaps it is within this context of conservative inclusivity that the paradoxes of Orr are best understood. Orr was the last of the United Presbyterian tradition and also part of a wider movement towards an inclusive national Church of Scotland. The Secession and United Presbyterian Churches were not the sole custodians of this encompassing vision;⁸ but they were its firm and consistent advocates.

⁸ It was the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that issued the invitation to talks on reunion in 1879; commissioners stated ‘their deep sense of the manifold evils arising from ecclesiastical division in Scotland’ (Woodside and Calderwood 1900: 275). The process was protracted; but Principal Robert Rainy promised that the Free Church was fully committed to the task ‘according to our best light’; and the ‘unity of Christ’s Church’ would, he believed, be ‘a service to the Christianity of Scotland’ (Rainy 1897: 111). Rainy was speaking in 1897: three years later the United Free Church was formed.

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Bibliography Primary Literature Adamson, William (1898). The Life of the Rev James Morison: Principal of the Evangelical Union Theological Hall. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Balmer, Robert (1845a). Academic Lectures and Pulpit Discourses. Edinburgh: William Oliphant & Sons. Balmer, Robert (1845b). ‘The Scripture Principles of Unity’, in Essays on Christian Union, by various contributors. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 21–104. Cairns, John (1852). ‘Infallibility of the Bible and Recent Theories of Inspiration’, North British Review 18/35: 139–85. Cairns, John (1860). Memoir of John Brown, DD. Edinburgh: T. Constable. Cairns, John (1878). Speech on Subordinate Standards. Edinburgh: William Oliphant. Cairns, John (1881). Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century. Edinburgh: A & C Black. Cairns, John (1883). ‘Progress in Theology’, The Catholic Presbyterian 54/6: 401–13. Calderwood, Henry (1854). The Philosophy of the Infinite. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co. Calderwood, Henry (1872). Hand-Book of Moral Philosophy. London: Macmillan. Calderwood, Henry (1879). The Relations of Mind and Brain. London: Macmillan & Co. Calderwood, Henry (1881). The Relations of Science and Religion. London: Macmillan & Co. Calderwood, Henry (1886). ‘The Scottish Exhibition and National Sentiment’, United Presbyterian Magazine 3/12: 552. Calderwood, Henry (1896). Evolution and Man’s Place in Nature. London: Macmillan & Co. Calderwood, Henry (1897). ‘The Contribution of the United Presbyterian Church to Social and National Progress’, in Memorial of the Jubilee Synod of the United Presbyterian Church. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 98–104. Cox, J. T. (ed.) (1964). Appendix III, in The Practice and Procedure of the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 410–19. Davie, J. (1841). Charges brought against the Rev James Morison with an account of his defence. Kilmarnock: J. Davie. Dick, John (1834). Lectures in Theology. Edinburgh: W. Oliphant & Sons. Finney, Charles G. (1850). Lectures on Revivals of Religion. London: John Snow. MacEwen, Alexander (1896). Life and Letters of John Cairns. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Morison, James (1841). The Extent of the Atonement. Kilmarnock: J. Davie. Morison, James (1890). The Nature of the Atonement, or the Question What is the Atonement? Answered. London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co.

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Orr, James (1897a). The Christian View of the God and the World as centering in the Incarnation. Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot. Orr, James (1897b). ‘The Contribution of the United Presbyterian Church to Religious Thought’, in Memorial of the Jubilee Synod of the United Presbyterian Church. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 88–98. Orr, James (1910). ‘Calvinism’, in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, vol. 3, 146–55. Rainy, Robert (1897). ‘The Relation and Duty of the Presbyterian Free Churches to Each Other’, in Memorial of the Jubilee Synod of the United Presbyterian Church. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 105–13.

Secondary Literature Davie, George Elder (1964). The Democratic Intellect: Scottish Universities in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Haldane, E. S. (1899). James Frederick Ferrier. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier. Hamilton, Ian (1990). The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy: Seceders and Subscription in Scottish Presbyterianism. Edinburgh: Rutherford House. Hamilton, Ian (1993). ‘Atonement Controversy’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 43–4. Hood, Adam (ed.) (2012). John Oman: New Perspectives. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. McKimmon, Eric G. (2014). ‘John Cairns: A Liberal Conservative’, Scottish Church History Society Records 43: 51–72. MacLeod, Donald (1993). ‘Systematic Theology’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 811–12. Milne, J. W. D. (1993). ‘Eadie, John (1810–1876)’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 270. Oman, John (1925). Grace and Personality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paterson, Lindsay (2015). ‘George Davie and the Democratic Intellect’, in Gordon Graham (ed.), Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 236–69. Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth (1900). ‘The Philosophical Works’, in David Woodside and W. L. Calderwood, The Life of Henry Calderwood. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 421–39. Scorgie, Glen G. (1988). A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Sell, Alan P. F. (1987). Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples 1860–1920. Exeter: Paternoster Press. Smeaton, Oliphant (1902). Principal James Morison: The Man and his Work. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Woodside, David and W. L. Calderwood (1900). The Life of Henry Calderwood. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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27 Extra-Terrestrials and the Heavens in Nineteenth-Century Theology Colin Kidd

Theology is not only a matter of grappling with standard themes and enduring problems which are centuries old and deep-woven into the fabric of Christianity, but also with new issues which emerge in the surrounding culture and in adjacent areas of intellectual enquiry. In nineteenth-century Scotland, theology and astronomy were surprisingly close, and each, arguably, bore something of the imprint of the other. Scotland played a leading role in the physical sciences, which inevitably had an impact on the intellectual life of Presbyterians. Arguments from design were integral to contemporary apologetics, and this meant in turn that theologians needed to be alert to the reconciliation of theological imperatives with the new insights the physical sciences yielded into the properties of the universe. Presbyterian ministers typically followed the university arts curriculum, which included classes in ‘natural philosophy’, prior to undertaking vocational training in theology. During the century the discoveries of astronomers impinged directly on the very core of Scottish theology, and not only on questions of the universe’s design. The issues to be investigated, discussed, and debated were not always framed, as might be expected now, in terms of the vexed relationship between the claims of science and religion. Rather, the question which struck some of Scotland’s most eminent theologians was how to interpret Christ’s role in the scheme of salvation, a plan which, it now seemed, was not necessarily confined to this planet. It was repugnant to contemporary understanding of the divine economy to suppose that God had created a universe of barren, uninhabitable planets. Benign omnipotence sat uneasily, after all, with apparent wastefulness. Moreover, as Scots knew, the plurality of worlds carried the imprimatur of scientists at the cutting edge of German astronomy. In 1826, the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, a scientific periodical, carried the views of Franz von Gruithuisen (1774–1852) and Heinrich Olbers (1758–1840)—after whom Olbers’ Paradox, on the surprising nonluminosity of the limitless starry heavens, is named—that the moon and other regions of space were inhabited (Olbers 1826: 389–90; Anon. 1826). By the mid nineteenth century the notion of a plurality of inhabited worlds had become a recognizable feature of Scottish intellectual life, indeed within British debates of the time, distinctively Scottish (Crowe 1999: 341; Jenkins 2015).

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However, the very likelihood of a universe of populated worlds immediately threw up some uncomfortable questions for theologians, with multiple ramifications. Did Christ’s sacrifice extend only to the people of planet Earth? Did his atoning remit then extend further to other habitable worlds? Or did other planets have their own special moments within the divine dispensation, experiencing special visitations from Christ? Or perhaps not every extra-terrestrial people had lapsed, as Adam and Eve had done, and therefore did not suffer the consequences of a Fall. Such problems were not easily wished away. Astronomy was an insistent presence for theologians. According to The Scottish Presbyterian, the magazine of the Reformed Presbyterians, the discovery of Uranus presented ‘the enlarged providence of God’ (Anon. 1847: 111), and could not be conveniently ignored or bracketed off from the central themes of theological discussion. No longer could soteriology—the study of the doctrine of salvation—operate in isolation from the domain of the astronomer. Strange as questions of astro-soteriology may seem now to a post-modern generation which feels more alone in the universe than its Victorian predecessors, these proved to be a central and defining feature of nineteenth-century Scottish theology. Astronomy in particular, and the physical sciences more generally, were ingeniously interwoven with Scottish divinity throughout the century. Indeed, the theology of extra-terrestrial life would leave a vivid imprint on twentieth-century Scottish literature. * The question of the heavens came into focus towards the end of the eighteenth century. The discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the Hanoverian-born astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738–1822) from his telescope at Bath raised—for late Enlightenment sceptics and deists especially—the question of the habitability of the solar system and the purported theological significance of the family of planets to which Earth belonged. Most notoriously, the English radical Tom Paine (1737–1809) pounced on the subversive possibilities of a plurality of worlds. If a universe of habitable planets made Earth look puny and insignificant, then did it not also have similar consequences for the Christian Church? In The Age of Reason (1794) Paine posited a mischievously pointed question, asking how ‘the solitary and strange conceit’ had arisen ‘that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple?’ Were we then to suppose, Paine wondered, ‘that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ An anti-Trinitarian, Paine speculated, subversively and blasphemously, that Christ in such a universe, were he indeed part of the Godhead, ‘would have nothing else to do than travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death’ (Paine 1989: 248). Notwithstanding the satirical register of Paine’s barbed questions, they demanded orthodox rebuttal.

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The most celebrated response came from early nineteenth-century Kirk’s commanding intellectual colossus, Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847). In his six celebrated discourses on astronomy, delivered in Glasgow’s Tron Church between November 1815 and October 1816, Chalmers attempted to disarm the destructive deistic implications of planetary science. Chalmers’ marriage of astronomy and apologetics clearly answered a need. The Glasgow public thrilled to Chalmers’ lectures, and in January 1817 they were published. Within ten weeks six thousand copies had been sold; within a year nine editions had appeared (Brown 1982: 107–8). Chalmers’ Astronomical Discourses was a bestseller, but more important perhaps than the numbers of copies sold was the contemporary perception that Chalmers’ lectures were a major talking point. Chalmers directly addressed the infidel argument against the Earth-centred presumption of Christians, ‘that God would not lavish such a quantity of affection on so insignificant a field’ (1817: 6) as this small planet. Chalmers counter-posed questions designed to confound the deists’ own assumptions: ‘How do infidels know that Christianity is set up for the single benefit of this earth and its inhabitants? How are they able to tell us, that if you go to other planets, the person and the religion of Jesus are unknown to them?’ (1817: 77). Indeed, Chalmers deployed the notion of a plurality of worlds to push critics of Christianity into the category of Earth-centred solipsists. It was the critics of Christianity who took the line that Christianity ‘professes to be designed for the single benefit of our world’ (1817: 6). Chalmers denied the imputation. ‘What reason,’ Chalmers asked, have we ‘to think that those mightier globes which roll in other parts of creation, and which we have discovered to be worlds in magnitude, are not also worlds in use and in dignity? Why should we think that the great Architect of nature, supreme in wisdom as he is in power, would call these stately mansions into existence and leave them unoccupied?’ (1817: 26). Chalmers thought it more likely that Earth was ‘only one of the many mansions which the Supreme Being has created for the accommodation of his worshippers’ (1817: 34). There was nothing unreasonable about such speculation. After all, many hitherto invisible worlds had only recently been vouchsafed to humankind. The microscope enabled humans to see minute life-forms of which they had been oblivious. Why should the telescope pointed at the planets and stars not reveal as many new worlds as the microscope pointed at fragments of the Earth? In this way, Chalmers, a deft natural theologian, appropriated scientific developments for the cause of Christian apologetics. He was loud, indeed, in his praise of Newton’s achievements. Christians had nothing to fear from recent astronomical discoveries. Chalmers confidently tackled the soteriological implications of a plurality of inhabited worlds. He was unfazed by the idea of sin or ‘moral rebellion’ (1817: 81) on other worlds. Such a state of affairs left open various possibilities which Chalmers explored. Possibly Christ’s atonement had a wider remit than had previously been appreciated: ‘the Eternal Son . . . may have had the government

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of many sinful worlds laid upon his shoulders’ (1817: 81). Alternatively, there was the possibility that ‘many a visit’ had been made to other planets ‘on the subject of our common Christianity, by commissioned messengers from the throne of the Eternal’, such as angels (1817: 79). While Chalmers admitted that the Bible ‘does not speak clearly or decisively as to the proper effect of redemption being extended to other worlds’, it did nonetheless articulate very clearly that knowledge of salvation was ‘disseminated amongst other orders of created intelligence than our own’ (1817: 144). Chalmers took this to mean ‘the history of our redemption is known in other and distant places of creation’ (1817: 145). The deists and sceptics ought to be more circumspect when using astronomy to assault Christian truth. For all they knew, ‘the redemption proclaimed to us is not one solitary instance, or not the whole of that redemption which is by the Son of God’ (1817: 80). Alongside Chalmers nobody did more to popularize astronomy among nineteenth-century Scots Presbyterians than Thomas Dick (1774–1857), who had been ordained a minister of the Anti-Burgher Secession church in 1803, but lost his position in 1805 after being found guilty of adultery with a maidservant. Defrocked, Dick turned both to school teaching and to popular science writing. He published a range of books, most of which blended astronomical and theological themes, including The Christian Philosopher: or the connexion of Science and Religion with Philosophy (1823), which had gone through eight editions by 1842, Philosophy of a Future State (1829), Celestial Scenery (1837), Sidereal Heavens (1840), and the Practical Astronomer (1845) (Astore 2001). Dick found it hard to accept the notion of a universe devoid of life, except on Earth. Why should God go to the trouble of creating large empty planets? It was inconceivable ‘that the vast extent of surface on such magnificent globes is a scene of barrenness and desolation’ (1838: 485). To think in this way was to flirt with theological as well as astronomical error. An empty universe suggested a ‘distorted view of the character and attributes of the Creator’ (1838: 485). It was anomalous for God to exert ‘his creating power to no purpose’. There was no divine glory, Dick reasoned, where moral life was absent. The planets must be the ‘abodes of intelligent beings’ (1838: 515). Indeed, Dick contended that ‘matter was evidently framed for the purposes of mind’ (1838: 523). Earth was not the only scene of moral life. Surely God had not created intelligent, moral life on only one planet, and a relatively small planet at that: ‘Shall one small planet be thus crowded with a population of percipient beings of all descriptions, and shall regions four hundred times more expansive be left without one living inhabitant?’ (1838: 522). Indeed, Dick speculated on the scale of the planets of the solar system and their moons as well as the rings of Saturn, and estimated that the population of the solar system was in the region of 21.9 trillion inhabitants (1838: 405; Crowe 1999: 199). A trickier question was the relationship of these hypothesized intelligent, moral extra-terrestrial beings to the scheme of divine redemption. Dick reckoned it ‘probable that the greater part of the inhabitants of all worlds are in a state of

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innocence, or, in other words, that they remain in that state of moral rectitude in which they were created’ (1840: 407). To suggest otherwise was again to be drawn into a heretical train of logic. After all, Dick contended, it was a reliable assumption to make that ‘every rational being, when first ushered into existence, is placed in a state of innocence or moral rectitude, without any natural bias to moral evil’ (1840: 407). Indeed, to ‘suppose the contrary would be to admit that the Divine Being . . . infuses into rational beings at their creation a principle of sin’ (1840: 407). To assume the universality of extra-terrestrial lapses from primitive innocence was to make God the Father of sin; quite manifestly a nonsensical, indeed heretical, line of reasoning. Therefore, it was very safe to assume that there was no inherent tendency in God’s creatures towards sin, and that, in keeping with that train of logic, most planets had not witnessed descents into sinfulness of the sort that had plagued humanity on earth. It was a not unreasonable terminus of such theological speculation to conclude that most inhabitants of the populated universe had ‘retained their primeval rectitude and innocence’ (1840: 413). Of course, as Dick knew all too well, immoral slips did happen. So it was possible that ‘the inhabitants of several other worlds [had] been permitted to fall into a similar calamity’ (1847: 222). Notwithstanding the reasonable conjecture that a Fall had occurred ‘in some other worlds besides our own’, Dick estimated that such departures from natural innocence were ‘not very extensive’ (1840: 408). Within the academic establishment the major scientific figure in the midnineteenth century was Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), who won particular renown in the field of optics, not least for his invention of the kaleidoscope. In 1838 Brewster became the Principal of St Andrews. Nevertheless, as a keen evangelical the Disruption posed a problem for Brewster. He left the establishment to become an Elder in the Free Kirk. As a result, there were attempts to dismiss him as Principal of St Andrews, because technically he was now a religious dissenter. Nevertheless, Brewster held on to his post, and in 1859 was translated to the Principalship of the University of Edinburgh. Brewster’s main contribution to the debates over astronomy and the implications of extra-terrestrial life came in 1854 in response to the controversial treatise, Of the Plurality of Worlds (1853), by the distinguished English scientist and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, William Whewell (1794–1866). This work provoked a major intellectual furore, with around twenty books and fifty articles and reviews engaging with Whewell’s view that the Earth was a solitary oasis of life in the vast desert of celestial creation (Brooke 1977). The debate was a scientific one, but there was considerable emphasis too on the theological implications of Whewell’s arguments. Understandably, Scots Presbyterians—brought up on Chalmers and Dick, and their intellectual culture closely intertwined with developments in physics and astronomy—were active participants in the debate, and none more so than Brewster, who was a robust critic of Whewell’s views of human cosmic uniqueness. This position sat very uneasily, as Brewster interpreted it, with biblical

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orthodoxy. Indeed, he carefully aligned Scripture with the notion of a plurality of worlds. Neither in the Old nor in the New Testament, he asserted, was ‘there a single expression incompatible with the great truth, that there are other worlds than our own which are the seats of life and intelligence’ (Brewster 1874: 11). How else was one to make sense of Isaiah, 45:18? ‘For this saith the Lord, that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited’ (Brewster 1874: 15). It was hard to believe, a slight against divine omnipotence perhaps, that the planets were mere ‘chiselled spheres teeming with inorganic beauty’ (Brewster 1874: 207). A planet without inhabitants was a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, like a city without citizens or a house without residents (Brewster 1874: 206). Notwithstanding his status as contemporary Scotland’s leading scientist, Brewster did not shirk the theological consequences of extra-terrestrial beings. If Jupiter, say, was indeed inhabited, then did its inhabitants need redeeming? That the Fall of Man had been unique to Earth seemed unlikely. Brewster was sceptical of the idea of ‘intellectual creatures occupying a world of matter, and subject to material laws, and yet exempt from sin, and consequently from suffering and death’ (1874: 159). It seemed an ‘extravagant conclusion, that the inhabitants of all the planets but our own are sinless and immortal beings that never broke the divine law’ (1874: 159). Nevertheless, Brewster saw that a plurality of fallen worlds posed particularly acute problems for orthodox Athanasian Christianity. The dilemmas it threw up were tricky to circumvent by those who believed that Christ was an integral part of the Godhead (1874: 166). Yet, Brewster saw that Christ’s atoning sacrifice on Earth had not been narrowly limited in its efficacy, either geographically to the peoples of the Holy Land or chronologically to people of His own era: ‘When our Saviour died, the influence of His death extended backwards, in the past, to millions who never heard His name, or forwards, in the future, to millions’ (1874: 166). Given that ‘distance in time and distance in place did not diminish [Christ’s] healing virtue’, Brewster argued, then there should be no reason why the efficacy of atonement ‘emanating from the middle planet’ of the solar system should be limited in its planetary reach (1874: 167). Brewster also tackled a subject which would become a significant theme in late nineteenth-century theology, the question of immortality and its relationship with the wider cosmos. Brewster contended that if humankind in the afterlife were to consist ‘as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame. He must live therefore upon a material planet’. However, this posed a problem, for the Earth would inevitably become grossly overpopulated with multiple generations of humans, past, present, and future, coexisting on the same small planet. The obvious solution, Brewster recognized, was extra-terrestrial: the ‘future abode’ of the dead would be other planets. There were other Scots responses to Whewell. James Morison (1816–93), who had been expelled from the Secession for his universalist views on the atonement and

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had founded the Evangelical Union, provided a firm and scientifically sophisticated rebuttal to Whewell, one indebted to a developmental view of the universe. Of course, Morison conceded, for much of its own history Earth had not been the ‘abode of beings capable of science, morals and religion’ (1854: 22–3); nor were astronomical phenomena such as nebulae habitable. Many celestial bodies of this kind were not in ‘their final condition’; nevertheless they pointed forward to ‘ulterior peculiarities of development, which may fit them to be, in a greater or less degree, the theatres on which life, sensation, intelligence, morality and religion, should be realized’ (Morison 1854: 26). Another leading Scottish scientist, J. D. Forbes (1809–68), the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh who later became Principal of St Andrews in 1860, produced an equivocal review of Whewell’s work in Fraser’s Magazine. Eminent for his work on glaciers and seismology, Forbes admired the scientific brilliance of Whewell’s investigations of planetary geology. Nevertheless, Forbes was reluctant to sound a full retreat from the pluralism that was now such an entrenched feature of Scottish intellectual life. While Forbes was fully persuaded by Whewell’s arguments that Jupiter was uninhabitable, he was more sceptical of Whewell’s general conclusions with respect to the remainder of the solar system (Forbes 1854). Nevertheless, Whewell’s scepticism did inhibit grandiose speculation about the vastness of the extra-terrestrial population, and in turn about the scale of Christ’s atonement. Although the Free Churchman the Reverend James Gall (1808–95) in The Stars and the Angels (1858) proclaimed that there was ‘not an inhabitant of the most distant nebula, that [was] not in some mysterious manner interested in the mediation of Christ’, he reckoned that many planets were uninhabited, that others were inhabited only by beings without a moral capacity, and others still were populated by moral and intelligent beings who were ‘unfallen’. Thus, he concluded, only a tiny minority of the minority of were ‘inhabited by fallen intelligences, to whom alone the incarnation would be necessary or desirable’ (1858: 35, 185). Nevertheless, that still left hanging the question of why God might have created such an abundance of planets. One of the most ingenious explanations came in Isabelle Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man; or The Story of our Old Planet and its Inhabitants told by Scripture and Science (1860), which went through five editions by 1866. Duncan (1812–78), who was born in Dumfries, was the daughter-in-law of the Reverend Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, preserver of the Ruthwell Cross and founder of the parish savings banks movement. Her husband was a Free Church minister, who had left the Kirk in 1843 and joined the English Presbyterians in 1844 (Snobelen 2001). In Pre-Adamite Man Duncan confronted some of the more perplexing passages in the early chapters of Genesis, namely those which appeared to discuss two quite separate creations. Duncan attempted to use a biblical history of two successive creations as a means of accommodating to Scripture the rather different challenge of the geological record. A first creation—of human-like

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pre-Adamite angels—had been succeeded, she contended, by the first fall, that of rebellious demons, then by an interval of glaciation, and eventually by the second creation, that of the race of Adam. In the course of her main arguments, Duncan also addressed astronomical and soteriological issues. Earth, she argued, in an echo of Brewster, was too small to cope with a general resurrection of the dead; it was ‘incapable of offering a home to all the generations of saints who have inhabited it’ (1861: 282). Where, then, Duncan asked, were ‘the future abodes’ which God’s ‘risen saints are to occupy?’ (1861: 272). The ‘many mansions’ of ‘the starry universe’ offered an obvious solution to the problem (1861: 272). Other planets offered, moreover, a home for angels and ‘a temporary abode’ for ‘the waiting souls of saints’ (1861: 278). * Such boundaries as existed in the nineteenth century between today’s categories of science and religion were porous. The huge timescales envisaged by the uniformitarian approach to geology inaugurated by the eighteenth-century Scottish scientist James Hutton (1726–97) posed obvious difficulties for theologians who wished to preserve the core substance of Genesis. Chalmers resorted to the theory of a lengthy gap between the initial divine creation of matter and the subsequent sixday creation of life (1814). On the other hand, Hugh Miller (1802–56), the geologist and Free Church journalist, reckoned the ‘days’ mentioned in Genesis to be merely symbolic, an allegorical portrayal of distinct geological epochs (1856). Nor was there a gulf between hard science and the study of biblical antiquities. Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was as obsessed with biblical units of measurement, in particular the cubit, as he was with astronomical observation. Piazzi Smyth was a pyramidologist as well as astronomer, who believe that certain ‘glorious cosmical coincidences’ (1874: 475), such as pi and the proportions of the solar system, were encoded in the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh. However, these harmonies were evident only by way of the ‘sacred cubit’, whose scale was retained in imperial measures, but threatened by the Metric Weights and Measures Act (1864), which introduced godless French units of measurement. Piazzi Smyth’s anxieties were rebuked by a fellow Scots scientist, Professor Sir James Young Simpson (1811–70), the discoverer of chloroform, in his pamphlet Is the Great Pyramid of Gizeh a metrological monument? (1868). The Scots-led revolution in energy physics and electro-magnetics wrought, respectively, by the Belfast-born William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), which did so much to shape modern science, occurred within a scientific milieu whose possibilities and parameters, while not restricted by religious orthodoxies, displayed—without embarrassment—pronounced theological tints. Kelvin and his contemporaries were keenly aware of the theological consequences of their arguments, insights, and achievements. Although a staunch

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believer who admired Paley’s arguments for design, Kelvin was of a latitudinarian cast and unwedded to any particular denominational stance. While he did not let his religious commitments interfere with his scrupulous adherence to the methods of the physical sciences, he was prepared to break a lance with uniformitarian geologists and evolutionary biologists. Kelvin argued, on physical grounds, that conditions on Earth had been far from uniform in the history of a planet which had for aeons of its early physical history been a red hot fireball. Moreover, Kelvin’s calculations for the cooling of the Earth suggested that it had not been habitable long enough for the full scheme of Darwinian evolution to take place. Indeed, his geochronological calculations grew more restrictive over time, with his estimates varying dramatically from a 400 million year old Earth in 1862 to a 20 to 40 million year old planet in 1897. However, it is important to stress that it was the regularity of physical laws as he then understood them, not religious dogma, which underpinned Kelvin’s abiding career-long interest in the age of the Earth (Burchfield 1990: 43–8). While Kelvin did allow himself to be drawn into apologetic controversy, Maxwell was, generally, more diffident. Brought up conventionally, albeit in a mixed Presbyterian-Episcopalian family, he underwent an evangelical experience in 1853 whose effects remained with him for the rest of his scientific career (Theerman 1986). Notwithstanding his beliefs, Maxwell eschewed any vulgar theory of design, and steered clear of apologetics, declining an invitation to join the Victoria Institute, a Londonbased organization which sought to harness the discoveries of the natural and social sciences to the refutation of unbelief. Nevertheless, he perceived a theologically significant unity which underlay the seeming diversity of physical phenomena, such as—in his own case—electricity, magnetism, and optics. Maxwell’s work in reconciling these branches of physics bore unobtrusive testimony to his deeply-held faith (Stanley 2012). The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which posited that entropy was the irreversible fate of any closed system, such as a finite universe, was potentially troubling, for it appeared to tie visible creation to a mortal end. Was, then, immortality in the afterlife, a central tenet of Christian theology, a physical impossibility? The freethinking Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820–93) had used his Presidential Address at the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 to draw out the materialist implications of the new science of energy physics (Smith 1998: 253). This prompted a retort from two distinguished Scottish scientists, Balfour Stewart (1828–87) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901). Stewart had been educated at St Andrews and then Edinburgh, where he had become an assistant to Forbes. Later, Stewart had become the director of the Kew Observatory, and eventually a Professor at Owens College, Manchester. Tait was educated at Edinburgh, before becoming Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s Belfast. In 1860 Tait had succeeded Forbes in the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. In 1862 Tait had been junior co-author with

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the future Lord Kelvin of an article on ‘Energy’ in the Reverend Norman MacLeod’s magazine Good Words. Here Thomson and Tait had turned the cosmic pessimism induced by energy physics to Christian ends. The laws of physics affirmed ‘the sober scientific certainty that heavens and earth shall “wax old as doth a garment” ’, which meant that ‘dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unillumined by that light which reveals “new heavens and a new earth” ’ (Thomson and Tait 1862: 607). Christian redemption alone served to restore hope to humankind. However, by 1875 Tyndall’s provocative intervention had pushed Tait in a different direction, an attempt to plot a route from the apparent cul-de-sac of entropy theory to the central truth of Christian metaphysics, the promise of an afterlife. In The Unseen Universe (1875) Tait and Stewart collaborated on a daring attempt to combine the new science of energy physics with a defence of immortality (Heimann 1972). The authors made no effort to evade the findings of science: ‘that the visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy, and probably in matter, come to an end. We cannot escape from the conclusion’ (Tait and Stewart 1875: 64). Moreover, in such a universe immortality was impossible. Nevertheless, they argued that there was another layer of existence, ‘something beyond that which is visible’ (1875: 64). There must, they insisted ‘be an invisible order of things, which will remain and possess energy when the present system has passed away’ (1875: 157). They reached this solution by way of surmising a necessary ‘law of continuity’. Indeed, they argued that this law of continuity provided the unacknowledged underpinnings of physics itself. By logical inference they were led to posit ‘a continuance of the universe’ (1875: 64), and by a further step to propose ‘a fully conditioned intelligent universe, existing prior to the production of the visible’ (1875: 199). The ‘unseen universe’ encompassed both the visible universe and—as a physical inevitability— something beyond. The principle of continuity within the whole—the seen and unseen universe understood together—was the hinge which united physical and Christian truths. It also provided a compelling physical solution, as they saw it, both to the problem of immortality and to the perplexing miracle of Christ’s resurrection. As it happens, Tait and Stewart also subscribed to the existence of extra-terrestrial life: ‘Astronomers and physicists agree that life is possible in the planet Mars, and it is quite likely that intelligent beings analogous to ourselves exist at the present moment on the surface of that planet’ (1875: 203). However, their musings on extra-terrestrial life were mere obiter dicta in a more comprehensive system of cosmology. Nevertheless, the giants of Scottish science, Kelvin and Maxwell, were very sceptical of the arguments of The Unseen Universe. Tait and Stewart’s intervention weakened the binding principles of energy physics, and also subverted their belief in God’s absolute creation ex nihilo of all matter and energy. The embarrassing tangle produced by The Unseen Universe was theological as well as scientific; the eternity of the universe was an affront both to thermodynamics and to divine omnipotence (Smith 1998: 254–5).

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Arguing along a parallel track, though with strikingly less scientific authority, Thomas Stevenson (1818–87), the lighthouse engineer and father of the author Robert Louis Stevenson, noted the seemingly intractable mystery that life had arisen on planet Earth, which geologically had once been a ‘semi-molten mass’ unable to sustain life. Where did life come from? How was it begotten? The existence of life on Earth was, to all intents and purposes, a miracle, and no less so than Christ’s biblical miracles. Then, why, Stevenson asked pointedly, had humanity acquiesced in ‘the deification of one class of laws’, scientific laws, to the exclusion of others which it must be inferred were once in operation. The blinkered respect for one set of scientific laws was ‘the erroneous result of induction from a limited number’ of the possible physical phenomena known to us (Stevenson 1877: 38–9). Notwithstanding the various blows struck at orthodoxy by nineteenth-century scientists, including the anonymous developmentalist work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), eventually revealed as the work of the Scottish publisher and geologist Robert Chambers (1802–71) (Secord 2003), and the theories of evolution advanced by Charles Darwin, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh (Ashworth 1935), the dominant strain in nineteenth-century Scottish theology was accommodationist. Generally speaking, scientific discoveries, if interpreted properly, were seen as apologetic reinforcements for the truths of Scripture. Evangelical Presbyterianism and the natural sciences were not considered antithetical. Indeed, contemporaries did not consider the sciences as they were practised as a threatening monolithic entity. Brewster, for one, was quick to bracket out the genuine achievements of nineteenth-century physics and astronomy from the unwarranted speculations of Darwinian biology which ‘trench upon sacred ground . . . poisoning the fountains of science’ (1862: 3). Nobody did more to forge a positive alliance between Christianity and the sciences (including a refurbished Darwinian biology) than the Free Churchman, Henry Drummond (1851–97). In his influential Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), of which about 120,000 copies were in print by 1900, Drummond constructed an apologetic system which stood proudly independent of any unscientific notion of the ‘supernatural’. Moreover, in The Ascent of Man (1894), another bestseller, Drummond tried to appropriate what he considered the valid core of Darwinism, effecting a reconciliation between Darwinism and Christianity which emphasized ‘love’, altruism, and ethics as central motors of evolution. Although some traditionalists in the Free Church instigated a heresy hunt against Drummond, the process against him was defeated. Nineteenth-century Scottish churchmanship, in all branches of the Presbyterian tradition, was more open and alert to the possibilities of science, and keen to tackle the theological difficulties which flowed from these, than either their modern-day successors or critics among the ranks of scientific atheists might allow. Of course, modern-day observers, believers just as much as unbelievers, might scoff at some of the absurdities of nineteenth-century scientific

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speculation. Nevertheless, given the current state of cosmological speculation, not least the hypothesis in string theory that we inhabit an eleven dimensional universe, cutting-edge science is just as hard to reconcile with common sense as it is with Christian metaphysics. The discussion in nineteenth-century Scottish theology about extra-terrestrial beings and their implications for soteriology had an influential afterlife in twentieth-century literature. The novelist David Lindsay (1876–1945) composed a haunting theological fable set on a distant planet in A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). The novel described the journey of a character called Maskull to the planet of Tormance. This strange planet is a world of delusions and metamorphoses and unmaskings, and at the heart of this metaphysical quest is a search for the true Redeemer, whether Crystalman, who ultimately stands revealed as a satanic figure, the father of lies, or the initially less promising character, Krag (Lindsay 1998; Visiak 1970). Lindsay’s theological science fiction exercised in its turn considerable influence on the prolific Anglo-Irish theological populariser, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), author of Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943), who acknowledged that ‘the real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus’ (Manlove 1994: 153). The soteriological question also found a poignant answer in one of the greatest and most moving poems by the major poet of twentieth-century Scotland, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978). ‘The Innumerable Christ’ carries an epigraph from Professor J. Y. Simpson (1873–1934), the Professor of Natural Science at New College, Edinburgh, and author of Man and the Attainment of Immortality (1922): ‘Other stars may have their Bethlehem and their Calvary too.’ In the poem MacDiarmid asks ‘Wha kens on whatna Bethlehems / Earth twinkles like a star the nicht’? It concludes with the poet foretelling a time long in the future when all life on this cold planet has perished, while ‘On countless stars the Babe maun cry / An’ the Crucified maun bleed’ (1992: 15).

Bibliography Primary Literature Anon. (1826). ‘The Moon and its Inhabitants’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (April–October): 389–90. Anon. (1847). ‘The New Planet’, The Scottish Presbyterian 1: 105–12. Brewster, David (1862). ‘The Facts and Fancies of Mr Darwin’, Good Words 3: 3–9. Brewster, David (1874). More Worlds than One: the creed of the philosopher and the hope of the Christian. Orig. 1854, new edition. London: Chatto & Windus. Chalmers, Thomas (1814). ‘Remarks on Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth’, Edinburgh Christian Instructor 8: 261–74. Chalmers, Thomas (1817). A series of discourses on the Christian revelation viewed in connection with modern astronomy, 7th edition. Edinburgh.

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Dick, Thomas (1838). Celestial scenery: or, the wonders of the planetary system displayed. London: Thomas Ward and Co. Dick, Thomas (1840). The Sidereal Heavens. London: Thomas Ward and Co. Dick, Thomas (1847). The Philosophy of a Future State. Orig. 1829, new edition. Glasgow. Drummond, Henry (1883). Natural Law in the Spiritual World. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Drummond, Henry (1894). The Ascent of Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Duncan, Isabelle (1861). Pre-Adamite Man; or, The Story of our Old Planet and its Inhabitants told by Scripture and Science. Orig. 1860, 3rd edition. London. Forbes, J. D. (1854). ‘The Plurality of Worlds’, Fraser’s Magazine 49: 245–56. Gall, James (1858). The Stars and the Angels; or, the Natural History of the Universe and Its Inhabitants. London: Hamilton, Adams. Lindsay, David (1998 [1920]). A Voyage to Arcturus. Edinburgh: Canongate. MacDiarmid, Hugh (1992). Selected Poetry, ed. A. Riach and M. Grieve. Manchester: Carcanet. Miller, Hugh (1856). Testimony of the Rocks. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. Morison, James (1854). ‘The Plurality of Worlds’, Evangelical Repository 1: 22–8. Olbers, Heinrich (1826). ‘On the Transparency of Space’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 1: 141–50. Paine, Thomas (1989). The Age of Reason (1794), in Paine, Political Writings, ed. B. Kuklick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piazzi Smyth, Charles (1874). Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, new edition. London: Isbister. Simpson, James Young (1868). Is the Great Pyramid of Gizeh a metrological monument? Edinburgh: A and C Black. Stevenson, Thomas (1877). Christianity confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testimony and the Deductions from Physical Science. Edinburgh: D. Douglas. Tait, Peter Guthrie and Balfour Stewart (1875). The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State. London: Macmillan. Thomson, William and Peter Guthrie Tait (1862). ‘Energy’, Good Words: 601–7. Whewell, William (1853). Of the Plurality of Worlds. London: John W. Parker.

Secondary Literature Ashworth, J. H. (1935). ‘Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh, 1825–7’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 55: 97–113. Astore, William J. (2001). Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brooke, John H. (1977). ‘Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster–Whewell Debate’, Annals of Science 34: 221–86.

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Brown, Stewart J. (1982). Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burchfield, Joe D. (1990). Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Crowe, Michael J. (1999). The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900. Mineola, NY: Dover Books. Heimann, P. M. (1972). ‘The “Unseen Universe”: Physics and the Philosophy of Nature in Victorian Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science 6: 73–9. Jenkins, Bill (2015). ‘Evangelicals and the Plurality of Worlds Debate in Scotland, 1810–55’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 35: 189–210. Manlove, Colin (1994). Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey. Edinburgh: Canongate. Secord, James A. (2003). Victorian Sensation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Crosbie (1998). The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. London: Athlone Press. Snobelen, Stephen (2001). ‘Of Stones, Men and Angels: The Competing Myth of Isabelle Duncan’s Pre-Adamite Man (1860)’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32: 59–104. Stanley, Matthew (2012). ‘By Design: James Clerk Maxwell and the Evangelical Unification of Science’, British Journal for the History of Science 45: 57–73. Theerman, Paul (1986). ‘James Clerk Maxwell and Religion’, American Journal of Physics 54: 312–17. Visiak, Edward Harold (1970). ‘Arcturus and the Christian Dogma’, in John Barclay Pick, Colin Wilson, and Edward Harold Visiak (eds.), The Strange Genius of David Lindsay. London: J. Baker, 109–11.

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28 The Reception of Darwin David Fergusson

Introduction In assessing the impact of Darwinism upon Scottish intellectual and ecclesiastical life, we should recognize that it was only one of several issues that preoccupied scholars in the late nineteenth century—nor was it the most controversial. Within the churches there were other hotly contested issues such as biblical criticism, the problems surrounding establishment, liturgical reform, the status of the Westminster Confession, and the emergence of a more progressive politics. Darwinian science was of course part of the mix, but we should not overestimate it in light of today’s culture wars. This chapter shall make the following claims. First, Scottish theologians and philosophers were well positioned before 1859 to respond positively to the leading claims of Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially the evangelical scholars who went out at the Disruption of 1843 to become a part of the Free Church. In particular, their awareness of trends in geology already disposed them to new scientific insights and to revisionist, symbolic readings of the Book of Genesis. Second, despite some early and persistent signs of scepticism, incredulity, and outright hostility, Darwinism was quickly accommodated by the leading theologians of Victorian and Edwardian Scotland, numerous books being written around the subject. The same applies a fortiori to religiously-inclined Scottish philosophers whether they belonged to the older common sense tradition or to newer idealist trends. Third, what we find in all this is a cautious acceptance of some standard evolutionary claims circumscribed within a broader theological framework. The arguments presented here by Scottish writers can also be discerned amongst Anglican scholars at the same time. For the most part, there is little discernible difference in the reception across the UK churches. Indeed, the connections that were made between theology and evolution in the period after 1859 are broadly similar to the standard moves today on the science–religion interface. Several subsidiary claims also emerge from this. These include confirmation of James Moore’s claim that there is no such thing as an essential Darwinism during the late nineteenth century. Instead, we encounter different readings of what constitutes Darwinism and what metaphors best characterize it—Moore himself detects five possible constructions (Moore 1991). This might explain why some believed theology and evolution to be compatible while others, on both sides

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indeed, demurred. A further result of the truce with Darwinism was that the domains of scientific and theological explanation were more sharply distinguished, with a clearer division of labour thereafter. The subsequent integration of science and theology is no longer as close as it was in the early nineteenth-century world-view of Archdeacon William Paley or the Bridgewater Treatises to which Thomas Chalmers contributed. Finally, following the lead of David Livingstone, this chapter shall reflect on the lack of any major public spectacle surrounding Darwinism and what this entailed (Livingstone 2004, 2014). Scottish church life was consumed for much of the 1870s and 1880s by the Robertson Smith controversy. This was primarily concerned with historical criticism of the Bible, rather than the challenge of Darwinian science. But there is an irony here. Robertson Smith’s dismissal from his chair in the Free Church College of Aberdeen enabled him to pursue with greater vigour his pioneering work in social anthropology. In turning from biblical criticism to social science, he contributed with Tyler, Frazer, and Müller to the evolutionary explanation of religion itself. As a natural phenomenon discernible in the earliest human societies, religion (including the Bible) was amenable to description in evolutionary terms. From the late nineteenth century, philosophers and theologians, not least through the platform of the Gifford lectureships—tended to place Christianity at the apex of the evolving religions of the world whether through the language of progression or fulfilment. This generated some major theological challenges which remain unresolved.

From Scepticism towards Acceptance Evolutionary explanations predated Darwin by at least half a century, and not everyone who discerned an evolutionary pattern in nature, society, or history was disposed to explain this in Darwinian terms after the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). But inevitably much of the focus was on Darwin’s account of evolution. This is often represented as a watershed in the history of relations between science and religion. With the explanatory mechanism of natural selection, much that had previously been attributed to the operation of divine design could now be explained by purely natural causes. Almost overnight, God had become otiose. Although not put about by Darwin himself, this view was encouraged by some of his followers, most notably T. H. Huxley, famously dubbed ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Relishing public controversy, Huxley stirred Scottish public opinion in January 1862 with an address in Edinburgh in which he spoke of the shared descent of humans and apes, a view denounced by the Witness as ‘the vilest and beastliest’ of teachings (Livingstone 2014: 29). For Huxley, the teleology favoured by Paley, in which there was an adaptation of means to ends throughout creation, could now be given a natural explanation. Organs had evolved with greater complexity, species had adapted to the

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environment, and changes had taken place in life forms under the pressure of natural selection rather than divine design. According to Huxley, what theology once assigned to providence, science now perceived only as natural order. This fundamental opposition between scientific and religious explanation was asserted by some early voices on the theological side. John Duns, who taught natural science at New College in Edinburgh from 1864, scornfully dismissed the idea that one species could evolve from another. The evidence of geology as well as Genesis, he insisted, pointed to species having existed from the beginning of the world as distinct and separate. ‘The existence of specific character’, he wrote, ‘as something fixed in the creative act, is clearly and most emphatically recognized in the Bible. The Scriptures thus decide the question of the origin of species’ (1866: 205). Others, such as the distinguished scientist and university leader, David Brewster, shared this scepticism. Darwin’s theories, he suggested, were highly speculative and unsettling in their claims about human descent. Lord Kelvin added weight to this incredulity, claiming that the earth was not sufficiently old for Darwin’s narrative to be feasible. Although this early scepticism was largely overcome in each of the main Presbyterian denominations, it persisted as a minority view, particularly in the Free Presbyterian Church after its formation in 1892 (Livingstone 2014: 45). The force of Darwin’s long argument could not be resisted through lampooning or a lazy appeal to a literal interpretation of Scripture. And Scottish theologians, with their long-standing commitment to science, were not disposed to do so. What Darwin had seen by 1859 was that his theory was a high-level ‘consilience of inductions’. Instead of a low-level hypothesis that offers an explanation of one type of phenomena, his theory integrates related assumptions about the age of the earth, changes in the earth’s surface, the formation of rocks, the appearance of sets of fossils in different strata, the physiological variations and similarities across species, and so on. As a consilience of inductions, Origin of Species develops an extended argument across a wide range of phenomena, all of which eventually coinhere in a single unfolding story. In Scotland, where the natural sciences had been promoted and respected by churchmen at least since the Enlightenment, many were soon persuaded of the force of Darwin’s arguments. Proud of their Presbyterian roots, most of the leading Scottish scientists of the nineteenth century believed in the harmony of their faith with their professional pursuits. A culture that nurtured Hutton, Somerville, Brewster, Kelvin, Simpson, Clerk Maxwell, and Tait was unlikely to dismiss Darwin without proper consideration of his work. Prior to 1820, we find many theological writers renouncing the notion of a young universe that had been decisively shaped by a catastrophic event, e.g. the flood. A capacity to interpret Genesis 1–11 in non-literal ways was already apparent. As always, the intellectual causes for a sudden shift in perspective are complex and multiple. A striking example of this is the work of Hugh Miller, a stonemason from Cromarty, and leading figure in the Ten Years’ Controversy that

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precipitated the Disruption. In his Testimony of the Rocks (1857) he argued that the facts of geology are such that a revised interpretation of Genesis was needed. The days of creation must represent vast periods of geological time, rather than twenty-four hour intervals. ‘I have been compelled to hold, that the days of creation are not natural, but prophetic, and stretched far back into the bygone eternity’ (Miller 1857: viii). Notwithstanding the tensions, he regarded himself both as an earnest scientific enquirer and a faithful Christian believer. This is not to suggest that Miller was a proto-Darwinian. But it does point to a scientific literacy within the churches, a willingness to revise earlier readings of Scripture in face of new evidence, and the development of accommodationist strategies around the age of the earth. Much of the earlier Moderate confidence in reason persisted. Several of the leading exponents of natural theology in the first half of the nineteenth century were evangelical churchmen. They had studied under some of the most eminent thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and were determined to show that the best learning was consistent with evangelical teaching (Baxter 1993). This group included Thomas Chalmers, the aforementioned David Brewster, and John Fleming. Having abandoned his intention to enter the ministry, Brewster dedicated himself to scientific research and writing. In 1838 he became Principal of the United Colleges in St Andrews and in 1859 of the University of Edinburgh. The inventor of the kaleidoscope and an authority on optics, he was critical of the wave theory of light. Brewster’s writings offered an account of the ethical and religious context of scientific discovery, tending towards the confirmation of strong evangelical convictions. Initially a parish minister, John Fleming was appointed in 1834 to a chair in natural philosophy in Aberdeen. His writings on zoology were highly regarded, and like Miller he argued strongly for uniformitarianism (against catastrophism) in geological enquiry. Although wary of theories that speculated beyond the available evidence, Fleming was persuaded that modern science could confirm a grand scheme of providence. After the Disruption, he was appointed in 1845 to the Chair of Natural Science at New College.¹ As an exponent of natural theology and author of one of the Bridgewater Treatises, Thomas Chalmers also displayed a firm confidence in the power of the design argument to overcome scepticism and to confirm fundamental beliefs in the providential order of the cosmos and the role assigned to human beings. Although more conservative than Miller or Fleming with respect to the interpretation of Genesis, he believed in the essential harmony of science and theology. Despite early and sporadic suspicion of Darwin’s work, mainstream theological opinion seems quickly to have absorbed its insights, even on occasion claiming to

¹ The creation of the Free Church of Scotland, New College was originally intended to function as a multi-disciplinary university and not merely a theological seminary. The establishment of a chair in natural science was itself an indication of evangelical commitment to natural theology (Brown 1996).

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discern its religious potential. At least four elements of an assimilationist strategy can be identified—these will provide us with a set of foci for the Scottish theological reception of On the Origin of Species.

General Providence Vindicated The natural theology that had dominated British theology until the early nineteenth century was epitomized by William Paley. Here the evidence of divine design seemed everywhere manifest, so much so that little credence was given to Hume’s earlier scepticism. Successive contributions to the Bridgewater Treatises, including that of the aforementioned Chalmers in 1833, confirmed this confidence in design (Chalmers 1833). Since so much of the natural world appeared inexplicable without appeal to God, it was assumed that a greater understanding of its workings would only confirm the intuitive impression of design. However, if natural selection could explain what had formerly been assigned to the mechanism of supernatural design then the latter might become redundant. This was undoubtedly a fear in some theological quarters matched by the hopes of Huxley et al. on the secular side. Yet, this placing of God on the unemployment register was much too hasty. Since at least the time of Newton, scientists and theologians, impressed by the explanatory power of scientific law, had seen its rational operation as evidence of the majesty of the Creator. If the laws of nature could explain the formation of rocks, then this merely registered the power of the Creator who had ordained those laws. Similarly, in the case of evolution according to Darwinian principles, the theologian could reasonably interpret these as laws ordained by God. One way of understanding this theological appropriation of natural science is to note in retrospect that what was formerly attributed to the working of special providence was now assigned to a general providence. God was not required occasionally or frequently to intervene in the cosmic process in order to achieve the intended results. Instead, the manner in which the world had been established under the working of natural law was sufficient to realize those creaturely states and entities desired by God. Given the ways in which divine providence has been naturalized since the early modern period with reference to politics, science, and economics, we should not be surprised by the ease with which theologians were able to absorb evolutionary claims. This move was to become the stock response to Darwinian theory. If evolution is how states of greater complexity emerge in the history of the cosmos, then it is open to the theologian to claim that this is how God does it (Brooke 1992). This was teleology at one distance removed and offered a modified account of design from that of Paley. Instead of an Artificer who has to intervene at regular intervals to bring about the intended effects in the production of life forms, we now have a Creator who

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from the very beginning endowed the creation with sufficient natural powers to evolve in fruitful ways. This argument was calmly rehearsed by Robert Rainy in his inaugural address as Principal of New College in 1874, a significant event given his position as a leading public intellectual. According to Rainy, the patterns of an evolving world require to be explained by reference to divine design. All that has changed is our conception of a cosmos that is originally endowed with sufficient fruitfulness to yield these emergent patterns. Rainy notes that there may be some loss ‘of the argumentative benefit of pleading earlier interpositions as analogical instances’ of divine revelation in history (Rainy 1874: 11). A God who regularly intervenes to direct the course of history might be expected to do the same in the natural world. However, this assumption can be yielded, he thinks, in favour of an evolutionary world-view. While expressing some reservations about the details of Darwinism, Rainy seeks to distinguish the approach of the natural scientist from that of the theologian. These different forms of understanding occupy separate domains allowing a relative independence within each, but a complementarity when viewed in conjunction. One upshot of all this is a clearer delineation of the disciplinary boundaries between theology, philosophy, and the sciences than had characterized earlier renditions of natural theology. But Rainy is confident that the doctrines of creation and providence can readily accommodate an evolving world without disturbance to other key tenets of Christian thought. His public message is one of reassurance.

Chance as the Instrument of Design Much theological anxiety can be detected around the role assigned to ‘chance’ or ‘randomness’ by Darwinian science. Even amongst writers in search of an alliance with evolutionary theory, we find attempts to replace the function of chance with a more deterministic mechanism. Of course, for Darwinism ‘chance’ does not refer to the inexplicable or the uncaused. Instead, it is (often) the denial of a single deterministic trajectory in the evolution of life forms. There seem to be two types of process that are characterized by the language of chance. One concerns the minor physiological variations that are evident through the reproduction of species, and the other is in the intersection of unrelated causal systems, e.g. the impact of a sudden change in climate upon the development of species in a hitherto stable ecological niche. The mechanism governing physiological variation was not understood until the later development of genetics, and many informed critics of Darwin in the nineteenth century recognized this lacuna in his theory. Yet it was the seemingly random course of evolution, as described by Darwin, that most offended Charles Hodge in Princeton in his essay What is Darwinism? (1874). He regarded evolution by natural selection as practically atheist, since

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there could be no governing purpose or overriding control exercised over the direction of nature. If God were no longer in control of the course of life on earth, then it could not be perceived as proceeding towards an appointed end. For Hodge, this was at best tantamount to a minimal form of deism. While this outright resistance to Darwinism found support in Belfast (Livingstone 2014: 58–88), Scottish theologians tended to be more sanguine in their response. Evolution, as described by Darwin, could be situated within a context that was broadly perceived to be providentially ordered. For example, natural selection could be regarded as a mechanism by which the universe produced its wondrous variety, beauty, and complexity. Here a somewhat different perspective emerges with an alternative metaphorical cast. An important apologist was Robert Flint (1838–1910), Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh and a leading intellectual figure in the Church of Scotland. A regular contributor to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Flint was well read in several fields, his work grappling with secularization, evolutionary science, the relationship of politics to religion, and the challenge of other faiths. His competence extended even to mathematics— he proof-read the books of his colleague P. G. Tait, holder of the Chair of Natural Philosophy. Flint’s best-known work Theism, the Baird lectures of 1876, was a popular apologetic treatise that ran to several editions (Sell 1987: 39–63). In his reception of Darwinism, he offers a set of responses that have now become standard in theological appropriations of evolutionary science. The development from lower to higher organisms can be explained as a mark of design. The tendency towards improvement and progression requires explanation. The operation of universal laws that facilitate such fruitfulness becomes an argument to design—as with more recent inflections of the arguments, the appeal is to temporal rather than spatial order. Moreover for Flint, evolutionary process can be envisioned as a vast scheme of order and beauty, rather than a grim arena of conflict and waste. This more positive vision of evolutionary complexity was also advanced by the Aberdeen theologian James Iverach, who described nature as a ‘gigantic system of mutual cooperation’ (1894: 126), an idea that was further developed in the ecological work of J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes (1912). Princeton theology also proved capable of a more positive reaction to Darwin than that of Hodge. James McCosh, the erstwhile Free Church minister in Brechin and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Belfast had emigrated in 1868 to become President of Princeton College. An authority on Scottish philosophy, McCosh cautiously welcomed key aspects of Darwinism, especially evolutionary descent, by accommodating it within a wider teleological system. Evolution, he argued, secured order, continuity, adaptation, progression, and our distinctive human faculties. Viewed holistically, this displayed a directionality that was by no means inconsistent with divine superintendence (McCosh 1892). What it represented was the outworking of a vast orderly and regulated system that betokened divine design. The discernment of laws governing the evolutionary process

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together with the apparently inevitable rise of increasing complexity suggested for McCosh that Darwinian science and Christian theology should be reconciled. Similar apologetic moves against Darwinian critics of religion, especially Huxley and Haeckel, can be discerned in Flint, Iverach, and in the writings of the polymath George Campbell (1871), Duke of Argyll. Darwin himself, they noted, had used the language of purpose in his descriptions of how natural selection operated. Although this may have been intended metaphorically, it showed how readily the reconciliation of evolution and theism could be accomplished. For some, a virtue could even be made out of a necessity since the evolutionary process suggested an immanent divine involvement in the cosmos rather than only occasional interpositions; it was thus a function of general providence. Alongside Anglican counterparts including Frederick Temple (1884) and Aubrey Moore (1889), several Scottish writers argued in this vein. According to A. B. Bruce in his Glasgow Gifford Lectures, ‘instead of looking out for open points in the process of world-making at which to bring in the supernatural power of a transcendent Deity, (we should) rather believe in the incessant activity all along, of an immanent Deity’ (1897: 57). The renowned hymn writer George Matheson, minister at Innellan, also argued for the wider benefits of a more immanent conception of God in the natural world (Matheson 1887). A similarly confident appropriation of Darwinian evolution was espoused by Henry Drummond (1883, 1894), Professor of Natural Science at the Free Church College in Glasgow, the most significant evangelical apologist for the reconciliation of science and religion in late nineteenth-century Scotland. Celebrated as a public speaker and popular writer, Drummond assisted with the Moody and Sankey campaign of 1873 and reached a wide international audience with his published work before his early death in 1897 (Cheyne 1999: 185–98). Drawing upon some perceived resemblances between natural and spiritual laws, he viewed the truths of Christianity as a higher instance and outworking of those same principles that governed the natural world. Christian doctrine and practice, including eschatological beliefs surrounding death, resurrection, and eternal life, afforded evidence of spiritual laws that were not merely analogical to but actually identical with the laws discerned by science. The relationship between the seen and unseen world had already been explored by Stewart and Tait (1875). Developing their work, Drummond argued in a rhetorically persuasive fashion for a continuity of natural law in the material and spiritual worlds. The speculative and radical air of these assertions aroused a good deal of scepticism amongst other scholars—he was variously criticized for a bowdlerized science and an attenuated theology—though he survived an attempt by some Highland presbyteries to discipline him at the 1895 Free Church General Assembly. None of this appeared to dampen the sales of his work in several languages. Livingstone’s assessment seems right: ‘[R]egardless of the accuracy of Drummond’s scientific claims or the coherence of his theological proposals,

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there can be no doubting the depth to which the principle of evolution had penetrated into his mind and heart’ (2014: 42).

Suffering and Evil as Instrumental A further recurrent concern in the theological reception of Darwin concerned the problem of evil. This was hardly a new challenge to confront Christian theologians—the Book of Job already reveals a long history of reflection on this in Jewish traditions. And, in any case, the facts of predation, disease, suffering, and death were apparent long before any theory could explain their contribution to the evolutionary story. But what was striking in Darwin’s account was the extent to which suffering, waste, and the competition for survival were the drivers of evolution. These were part of the ‘design’ that enabled the emergence of species, including human beings. Instead of Paley’s notion of creatures living always in a state of equilibrium, their prosperity secured by a single divine blueprint, theologians now faced a bleaker scenario in which earlier species were driven to extinction in a perpetual warfare of life forms. How could this suggest a divine providence in the absence of a historical fall? One type of theodicy that quite confidently took Darwinian explanation on board argued, more or less, that the end justified the means. Since evolution produced fitter and more advanced species, particularly Homo sapiens, we could conclude that the laws of evolution were all part of a wise divine plan. The production of better adapted forms of life could thus be seen as an outworking of an overall teleology. This was the strategy pursued by the Duke of Argyll and Henry Drummond though others, such as George Romanes, were scandalized at this seemingly brutal theodicy (Livingston 2006: 83–5). At the same time, these writers sought again to establish a different set of metaphors to overcome the prevailing sense of waste and random, meaningless suffering. Attention is drawn to the interdependence of species, the unity of the natural world, the long periods of relative equilibrium characterized in large measure by the enjoyment of life, and the beautiful harmony of flowers and insects. Flint viewed suffering as of evolutionary advantage, especially in spiritual beings who can convert it to ends that would not otherwise have been possible. His confidence is striking. ‘[T]he struggle for existence, the sufferings which flow from it, and death itself, must, it would appear, be regarded as means to the formation, improvement and adornment of species and races’ (1877: 250). Iverach (1894: 184) also noted that individuals often sacrifice themselves for the well-being of the species to the extent that something like a virtuous family life emerges naturally. Here patterns of selfsacrifice in nature could be viewed as adumbrating later Christian moral ideals. By the later nineteenth century, this rather confident style of theodicy was being replaced by more reserved approaches to the extent of suffering (Livingston 2006:

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100–5). While a divine plan may be in a process of outworking, its meaning and significance are not yet discernible from a human vantage point. We simply cannot speculate on what purpose long aeons of animal suffering may serve. Again, however, a virtue was made out of a necessity. The theologian has no business reading off the details of divine design from the pages of natural history. The only index to providence is that of faith in Christ—more speculative and comprehensive accounts should be eschewed. At the same time, Darwinism may also helpfully save the theologian from embracing too narrow an anthropocentrism. Given the relatively late emergence of human beings and the extent to which animal life has evolved for much of the time with no reference to ourselves, we cannot assume that God’s purposes are solely directed towards our own species. God must have more in mind than the creation of humankind. Surveying the theological shifts entailed by modern science, Iverach concludes: The earth is a part of the solar system – men once thought it the centre of things; we no longer think of personal spirits as guides and rulers of stars – we think of matter under gravitation. We have been taught that species did not arise through special acts of creation, but were developed one after the other. Well, we bow our heads in reverence, and say that God’s ways are not as our ways, and His thoughts are not as our thoughts; but they are ways and thoughts of God notwithstanding. (1894: 130)

The Uniqueness of Being Human This last point brings us to another widely debated topic emerging from Darwinism, namely the significance of human beings in creation. Much of the fear surrounding evolutionary theory arose from the threat it seemed to pose to our most fundamental convictions regarding the intellectual, moral, and spiritual distinctiveness of being human. This is evident in the early scepticism of John Duns. If human beings emerged from other mammals over millions of years of evolution, is their uniqueness thereby erased? Again a religious accommodation with Darwinism was proposed by successive writers, while also maintaining a traditional commitment to human distinctiveness. Rainy argued again for a complementarity of explanations. It was open to the scientist to point to the ways in which human beings had emerged from other primates while also displaying significant similarities to other species. Yet the theologian could also advert to consciousness, our moral capacities, and spiritual discernment that required different forms of understanding from those of the natural sciences. For example, Rainy insists that the evolution of consciousness and morality require the postulation of an origin that itself is a self-conscious mind instantiating moral perfections (1874: 26). Our distinctively rational and spiritual capacities

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require to be explained upwards, by reference to the supernatural, rather than downwards, by reference to material processes (Calderwood 1893: 257–342). Much of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature was dominated by discussion of the faculty of conscience which seemed to demand a nonnatural, transcendent explanation. Given the influence of Kant in Scotland, this is hardly surprising. In this context, a careful distinction needs again to be made between competitive and complementary forms of understanding. It is too tempting for the theologian to seek out a major lacuna in scientific explanation for the sake of postulating God. If we cannot explain the evolution of consciousness, then God must be invoked. If we cannot discern obvious analogues of conscience in animal life, then there must be a transcendent cause. Yet these types of argument evidently give hostages to fortune. As science advances and fills in the gaps, then religious explanation becomes squeezed to the margins. A better strategy insists upon complementarity. Even after science has done all its work, there will be ways of understanding and describing the phenomena that draw upon different conceptual resources and principles of explanation. There are questions, commitments, and insights that by their nature require description in terms not reducible to the methods of the natural sciences and which afford space for the descriptions of theology. This was the strategy that seemed to be favoured by Flint, McCosh, Calderwood, and Iverach. No single discipline has an exhaustive or totalizing role to play. The sciences must be given their place freely to investigate and hypothesize according to their methods and findings. A clearer delineation of the differences with theology will result in a recognition of complementarity rather than a misplaced anxiety about the directions in which science might lead us. In this context, James Orr’s 1903 Stone Lectures appear now as a belated rearguard action. Defending the doctrines of the imago Dei and a historical fall as essential to the fabric of the Christian faith, Orr felt compelled to resist Darwinian accounts of evolutionary descent. While insisting upon the facts of evolution, he demurs from the principle of natural selection as an explanation for the emergence of new forms of species. Evolution, moreover, is not a steady process of small incremental changes; it is governed by sudden shifts and introductions of new forms of life. These saltations in life forms are better explained, it seems, by distinctive creative acts of God which shape the course of evolution. This applies a fortiori in the case of human beings, male and female, whose physical appearances and moral constitution can only be explained by a ‘direct creative act’ which is singularly in harmony with the biblical account (Orr 1905: 153). At this juncture Orr risks the ‘God of the gaps’ charge. The lacunae in the science of his day provide the space to defend a theological scheme which vindicates the traditional view of a series of special creative actions. Yet this inevitably gives hostage to further scientific developments that explain features such as physiological variation and punctuated equilibrium. Though Orr’s command of science is impressive, his restatement of the traditional position was purchased at too high a cost.

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Yet Orr’s scruples notwithstanding, it is clear that even by the 1880s, theologians and philosophers in Scotland were using evolutionary concepts with a good deal of freedom and confidence. There were few signs of anything apologetic, defensive, or nervous in their treatises. Two philosophical examples will suffice. Henry Calderwood, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh and United Presbyterian minister, produced a detailed study of the significance of evolution. While showing himself to be well-informed scientifically, his ruminations on evolution also reveal the absence of any religious or metaphysical anxieties around this theme. The order of nature can be explained along Darwinian lines, but the human person also inhabits a spiritual order which requires a different set of explanatory principles, irreducible to those material principles discerned by Darwin (Calderwood 1893: 338–9). Around the same time, Edward Caird, the distinguished Glasgow idealist, who later moved to Oxford, delivered a series of Gifford Lectures in 1890–2 in St Andrews on the evolution of religion. Although he had relatively little to say about Darwin, Caird is again quite comfortable with evolutionary concepts; these are pressed into the service of an idealism in which the infinite gradually comes to a consciousness of itself in and through evolving spiritual and religious concepts. In his gradation of religions, the Christian belief in incarnation appears as the high point with its perceived union of the divine with the human (Caird 1893).

Religion as Evolved This leads to our final point. Nineteenth-century evolutionary theories, whether or not Darwinian in hue, impacted upon the study of religion more than the standard accounts acknowledge. The attempt to view religion itself as developing along evolutionary lines was a hallmark of much historical and social scientific study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneer figures such as Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Tyler sought to locate all religion in terms of a single evolutionary stream of development that could be discerned from the earliest available evidence. This was to prove at least as important a development for Christian theology with its claims for divine revelation in history and its account of scriptural authority. Having reached a relatively swift accommodation with Darwinism, Victorian Presbyterian Scotland was shaken by the trials of Robertson Smith in the courts of the Free Church of Scotland. These ended in 1880 when he was removed from his chair in Aberdeen. David Livingstone (2004: 45–57) has pointed to the seeming disparity between the swift acceptance of Darwin within the Free Church and its simultaneous resistance to the kind of historical and anthropological work that Smith advocated. This is illustrated by the public controversy that Smith unwittingly created—there was nothing comparable with respect to Darwinism (Schaper 2008). History rather than nature became the battleground.

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An evolutionary approach to historical phenomena seeks to understand each event with reference to what comes before and what arises after. The meaning of the event then resides in the place it occupies within a total series, rather than in any radically new and decisive character that is intrinsic to it. Within such a framework, the figure of Jesus and the tenets of the Christian religion could at most be an improvement by several degrees upon what came before. But this was hardly sufficient for the kind of claims made by Reformed theology. And recent trends in the cognitive study of religion continue to pose important Darwinian challenges for theology that were scarcely recognized in the nineteenth century, but which ironically can be traced to the kind of work that Robertson Smith and others pioneered. Somewhat ironically, therefore, it turned out that reconciling the evolution of species over millions of years with the Christian doctrine of creation was easy compared with the challenges posed for theologies of revelation by evolutionary accounts of religion. James Denney (1885) and P. T. Forsyth (1905)—both theologians of the cross—saw the problem and attempted to affirm evolution while setting apart historical revelation as a novum that could not be adequately registered in terms of development or progression from earlier forms of religion. The sacrificial pattern of nature in which the weak serve the strong is reversed by Christ; there are no analogies in the physical world to the forgiveness of sins and the atonement (Denney 1885: 43, 65; Gordon 2006: 91–8). The writ of evolution does not run everywhere—Christ is a product not so much of the past as of a future that is promised by God (Forsyth 1905: 238). Following the dialectical theologies of the 1920s, Scottish theologians increasingly turned away from evolutionary accounts of the incarnation or ‘fulfilment approaches’ to the world religions. But this has only generated a further set of questions for the increasingly comparative setting in which we now find ourselves. Within this context, the work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century continues to repay our attention.

Bibliography Primary Literature Bruce, A. B. (1897). The Providential Order of the World. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Caird, Edward (1893). The Evolution of Religion, 2 vols. Glasgow: MacLehose. Calderwood, Henry (1893). Evolution and Man’s Place in Nature. London: Macmillan. Campbell, George (1871). The Reign of Law. Edinburgh: Strahan. Chalmers, Thomas (1833). On the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, 2 vols. London. Denney, James (1885). On ‘Natural Law in the Spiritual World’. Paisley: Alexander Gardner.

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Drummond, Henry (1883). Natural Law in the Spiritual World. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Drummond, Henry (1894). The Ascent of Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Duns, John (1866). Science and Christian Thought. London: Religious Tract Society. Flint, Robert (1877). Theism. Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons. Forsyth, Peter Taylor (1905). ‘Some Christian Aspects of Evolution’, London Quarterly Review 54: 209–39. Iverach, James (1894). Evolution and Christianity. London: Hodder & Stoughton. McCosh, James (1892). The Religious Aspect of Evolution. London: Nisbet. Matheson, George (1887). ‘Evolution in Relation to Miracle’, in James Iverach (ed.), Christianity and Evolution. London: James Nisbet, 1–26. Miller, Hugh (1857). The Testimony of the Rocks or Geology in its Bearing upon the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Edinburgh: Shepherd and Elliot. Moore, Aubrey (1889). ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi. London: John Murray, 47–90. Orr, James (1905). God’s Image in Man and Its Defacement in the Light of Modern Denials. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Rainy, Robert (1874). Evolution and Theology. Edinburgh. Stewart, Balfour and Peter G. Tait (1875). The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State. London: Macmillan. Temple, Frederick (1884). Religion and Science. London: Macmillan. Thomson, J. Arthur and Patrick Geddes (1912). Evolution. London: Williams & Norgate.

Secondary Literature Baxter, Paul (1993). ‘Deism and Development: Disruptive Forces in Scottish Natural Theology’, in Stewart J. Brown and Michael Fry (eds.), Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 98–112. Brooke, John Hedley (1992). ‘Natural Law in the Natural Sciences: The Origins of Modern Atheism?’, Science and Christian Belief 4/2: 83–103. Brown, Stewart J. (1996). ‘The Disruption and the Dream: The Making of New College 1843–1861’, in David F. Wright and Gary D. Badcock (eds.), Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity 1846–1996. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 29–50. Cheyne, A. C. (1999). Studies in Scottish Church History. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Gordon, James (2006). James Denney: An Intellectual and Contextual Biography (1856–1917). Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. Livingston, James C. (2006). Religious Thought in the Victorian Age. London: T&T Clark. Livingstone, David N. (2004). ‘Public Spectacle and Scientific Theory: William Robertson Smith and the Reading of Evolution in Victorian Scotland’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35: 1–29.

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Livingstone, David N. (2014). Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Moore, James (1991). ‘Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s’, Journal of the History of Biology 24: 353–408. Schaper, Joachim (2008). ‘William Robertson Smith’s Early Work on Prophecy and the Beginnings of Social Anthropology’, Journal of Scottish Thought 1/2: 13–24. Sell, Alan P. F. (1987). Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples. Milton Keynes: Paternoster.

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29 Liberal, Broad Church, and Reforming Influences in the Late Nineteenth Century Finlay A. J. Macdonald

A Divided Church In the second half of the nineteenth century what we know today as the Church of Scotland was split three ways: (1) the Established Church, also known as the Auld Kirk, (2) the Free Church which broke away at the 1843 Disruption, and (3) the United Presbyterian Church, formed in 1847 by a union of eighteenth-century secession bodies. There were, of course, other denominations but the scope of this chapter focuses largely on this fragmented presbyterian family. The Established Church was funded largely through ‘teinds’ (tenths), by means of which landowners consecrated one-tenth of the produce of their lands to maintain a Christian ministry. There was, however, a quid pro quo. Known as ‘patronage’ this gave landowners the right to present the man of their choice to be minister of the parish. Some welcomed this as ensuring a cultured and educated ministry. Others, however, were implacably opposed and this led to major secessions in 1733 and 1761. As those who withdrew from the Established Church could no longer rely on the teinds they had to finance their own denominations and from this emerged the principle of voluntaryism. By 1847, when various Seceder bodies came together to form the United Presbyterian Church, this was viewed not as a necessity, but as a virtue. These tensions were very much in play at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The Church of Scotland adhered to the principle of establishment and judged it entirely appropriate to accept the financial benefit of endowment. Meanwhile the United Presbyterians rejected both establishment and endowment, believing that a Church should be entirely independent of the State. The Free Church position was rather more nuanced. Prior to the Disruption the General Assembly had proposed a compromise which would allow a majority of male heads of families to veto the patron’s nominee. Simultaneously the Church sought the resolution of another grievance. This was a time of new church building as people moved from the country into the towns. However, ministers of these new ‘chapels of ease’ did not qualify for seats in the Church courts. In due course the General Assembly passed legislation to address both issues, only to find

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this struck down by the civil courts as ultra vires. When, in 1843, Parliament refused an official investigation into matters which were disturbing the peace of the Scottish Church, the Disruption became inevitable. In practice those who left became voluntaryist and had to fund stipends, churches, manses, and divinity colleges from their own resources. Faced with this unwelcome reality Thomas Chalmers, effective leader of the Disruption, was unbending in his opinion that the Free Church was not voluntaryist in principle. They had simply left a corrupt Establishment with a view, one day, to returning to a pure one and, until then, they would provide a parallel structure to the Auld Kirk.

The Establishment Question Essentially the establishment principle saw Church and State as two sides of a coin—civil and spiritual. On this basis Chalmers had expected the civil powers to support Church policies aimed at strengthening its mission and service to the people. Meanwhile the United Presbyterians, while affirming their independence, recognize an obligation to seek Christian unity, provided that unity upheld the principle of spiritual independence. It was this caveat which resulted in the failure of union conversations between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches in the 1860s and 1870s. Many within the Free Church were in favour, including the Church’s effective leader, Robert Rainy. In 1862 Rainy had been appointed Professor of Church History in the Free Church’s New College, becoming Principal twelve years later. However, ranged against him were others, prominent amongst whom was James Begg, a founding member of the Scottish Reformation Society of 1850. These men were fiercely opposed to a union with ‘voluntaries’ which would frustrate any prospect of a return to ‘a pure establishment’. Having failed to deliver a first step towards presbyterian reunion the Free and United Presbyterian Churches joined forces to campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. In 1870 the Church of Ireland had been disestablished and, south of the border, similar questions had been raised with regard to the Church of England. The Church of Scotland strongly resisted these moves with Principal John Tulloch of St Mary’s College, St Andrews, emerging as a strong defender of the status quo. Tulloch argued that religion was a public and not simply a private matter. Coining the term ‘prosperous dissent’, he observed that voluntaryist denominations tended to locate their churches in areas where people were more inclined to attend church and better able to offer financial support (Tulloch, St Giles’ Lecture on National Religion in Theory and Fact, 1886, quoted in Cheyne 1999: 157). This left the Established Church to minister to those in less salubrious communities and to be a Church for the whole nation. Fresh energy was given to the disestablishmentarians when, in 1874, Parliament finally acceded to the Church of Scotland’s long-standing request to abolish patronage. Now

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congregations had the double benefit of both choosing their ministers and having their stipends met from endowed funds. The debate continued, moving into the political sphere, until, in 1886, a parliamentary bill to disestablish the Church of Scotland was defeated in the House of Commons. Had the decision gone the other way then, presumably, steps would have been taken to end the funding of stipend through endowments and have ministers paid through the offerings of the people. This, in effect, happened prior to the 1929 reunion of all three denominations. Disestablishment might also have made it easier for the Church of Scotland to review its relationship with the Westminster Confession of Faith.

The Westminster Confession of Faith The Westminster Confession of Faith was adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1647 and approved by the Scottish Parliament in 1649. By the late nineteenth century it still held sway within all three Presbyterian denominations, though that is not to suggest that its status went unchallenged. In 1831 John McLeod Campbell’s preaching of ‘universal pardon’ and assurance being of the essence of faith was found to be at odds with the Confession’s doctrine of limited atonement. His plea that his case be judged by Scripture rather than the Confession was firmly rejected. The Confession’s writ ran not only within the Church. A controversy arose in the 1840s when John Stuart Blackie, the nominee for the Chair of Humanity at Aberdeen University, declined to subscribe. When the case eventually came to court the judge observed that it was impossible for anyone to read a page of the Confession, ‘without perceiving that there is much in it that most men are not qualified to judge of ’. In 1853 legislation was enacted relieving university teachers from subscribing other than members of the Faculties of Divinity. Such cases encouraged those of a liberal mind-set and rallied defenders of the status quo. In 1866 the Moderator of the General Assembly declared: ‘Our Confession . . . was accepted as the truth of God and the Church was . . . not free at any time to modify, alter or depart from it, nor to hold the truth of any of its doctrines as open questions’. This provoked Professor Tulloch and seventy members of that Assembly to protest that ‘the old relation of our Church to the Confession cannot continue’. To claim infallibility for the Confession, he asserted, ‘was the worst kind of Popery’ (Cheyne 1999: 146). Three contributing factors lay behind this unease over the Confession—(1) the rise of biblical criticism, (2) the development of foreign missions which brought the churches into contact with people of other faiths, and (3) the whole issue of Church–State relations. The fact that the Confession had been approved by the Scottish Parliament, and subsequently embedded in the legislation uniting the Scottish and English Parliaments, rather tied the hands of the Established Church.

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Likewise, the Free Church, with its hankering for a ‘pure establishment’, had to tread carefully. This explains why the first real steps towards confessional reform were taken within the United Presbyterian Church. In 1871 the Reverend Fergus Ferguson was arraigned before the United Presbyterian Presbytery of Dalkeith to explain a sermon on 1 Peter 3:18–20, in which he was alleged to have held out the promise of salvation beyond the grave. In defending himself Ferguson made a passionate plea for liberty to investigate fully and freely everything in God’s revelation, whether consistent or not with the socalled ‘Standards of the Faith’. At the end of the day the Presbytery took no action. In 1876 Ferguson moved to a new congregation at Queen’s Park, Glasgow and the following year presented an Overture to the Glasgow presbytery, calling for a radical revision of the Confession. Eventually, this led to the tabling of a new complaint. In his defence Ferguson maintained that his teaching was in accordance with Scripture but not necessarily with the Confession, which he once colourfully described as ‘no exhibition of the divine order of the universe, but an exhibition, at least in part, of the disorder of the human intellect’ (Leckie 1925: 109). In response the examining committee convener appeared to introduce a new standard by arguing that the crucial test was ‘the harmony of his (Ferguson’s) views with the system of doctrine contained in our Confession and Catechisms’. Ferguson’s biographer considered this far too vague, observing: ‘as well define the contour of a hill by comparing it with the outline of a shifting mass of cloud, as seek to determine the soundness of any teaching by appeal to a vague dogmatic entity which presented a varying aspect to varying minds’ (Leckie 1925: 129). Leckie’s analogy perfectly captures the theological instability created by the rise of biblical criticism and dissatisfaction with the Westminster Confession. A solution was proposed by Dr John Cairns, effective leader of the United Presbyterians. This was to prepare a Declaratory Act setting out the sense in which the Church understood the more disputed statements in the Confession. In light of references to instability in the preceding paragraph, it is interesting to note an analogy used by Cairns. Recalling a rough crossing from Hamburg to Newcastle due to the ship being too light in the water, he observed that what was needed in such circumstances was ‘solid cargo’. In the same way, he maintained, ‘it is the doctrine of grace, common to us with all evangelical Churches that alone will float us’ (MacEwen 1895: 670–1). A draft Act was duly prepared, approved by the Synod of 1879 and continues today as one the leading documents of the Church of Scotland in the area of doctrine. The Act starts from the premise that ‘these Standards, being of human composition, are necessarily imperfect’. With regard to the doctrine of the divine decrees, including election to eternal life, this is to be ‘held in connection and harmony with the truth that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, and that he has provided a salvation sufficient for all, adapted to all and offered to all in the Gospel; and also with the responsibility of

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every man for his dealing with the free and unrestricted offer of eternal life’. This might sound somewhat at variance with the assertion in Chapter 3 of the Confession that ‘By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained to everlasting death.’ Conservative critics could and did argue that the Act took clarification to the point of undermining the Confession, thereby creating a highly unstable position for the Church theologically. With regard to the teaching that ‘none are saved except through the mediation of Christ’, the Act states that ‘in accepting the (Westminster) Standards it is not required to be held that any who die in infancy are lost, or that God may not extend his grace to any without the pale of ordinary means as it may seem good in His sight’. The Declaratory Act goes on to ‘disapprove of all compulsory or persecuting and intolerant principles in religion’ and concludes with a reference to the interpretation of Scripture, stating that ‘liberty of opinion is allowed on such points in the Standards, not entering into the substance of the faith, as the interpretation of the “six days” in the Mosaic account of creation’. Essentially Cairns argued that on certain subjects the teaching of the Confession was not adequate. These included the love of God for all mankind, predestination, total depravity, the destiny of the heathen and of infants, the Headship of Christ, the obligation of Christians to maintain Christian ordinances by freewill offerings, and the literal interpretation of Scripture on points not entering into the substance of the faith (MacEwen 1895: 672–3). By the passing of the Declaratory Act the United Presbyterian Church became the first to qualify its adherence to the Confession, allowing liberty of opinion in matters not entering into the substance of the faith. It should be noted, however, that no attempt was made to define exhaustively the ‘substance of the faith’ and this remains the position in the Church of Scotland today. The Act was an important first step, but it fell a long way short of replacing the Confession with a new Statement of Faith and the Confession continued to be regarded as an important standard of faith and doctrine. In part this was out of respect for the views of conservatives within the United Presbyterian Church, but there was also a concern not to take unilateral steps which might impede a reunion of the three Presbyterian denominations. Cairns’ likening of the Confession to ‘solid cargo’ on a storm-tossed ship would thus have offered some comfort to his conservative brethren. In 1892 the Free Church adopted its own Declaratory Act, clarifying and modifying its relationship to the Confession. In this case, however, diversity of opinion resulted in a secession which constituted the Free Presbyterian Church. In 1894 the Free Church Assembly, in an exercise in damage limitation, approved a further Declaratory Act modifying the scope of the original Act. This new measure explained that the 1892 qualifications of the Westminster Standards were not ‘imposed upon any of the Church’s office-bearers as part of the Standards of the Church; but that those who are licensed or ordained to office in the Church, in

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answering the questions and subscribing the Formula, are entitled to do so in view of the said Declaratory Act’. However, this was not enough to attract back to the fold those who had joined the Free Presbyterian Church. Within the Church of Scotland, the debate took a different course. The prevailing view was that, being established, the Kirk’s freedom of movement was restricted by the fact that the Confession had been adopted by the Scottish Parliament in 1649 and was incorporated into the 1707 Acts of Union. Accordingly, rather than following the Declaratory Act route, the General Assembly of 1888 agreed to adjust the formula of subscription by means of which ordinands declared their adherence to the Confession. The formula used since 1711 had required assent ‘to the whole doctrine of the Confession . . . as the truths of God contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments’ (General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 1889, Act XVII; see also Lyall 1980: 63). This was replaced by an earlier formula of 1693 which sought a simple acknowledgement that the doctrine contained in the Confession was the true doctrine. Divided opinion was evident, with a majority of only five votes in favour of the change. However, a reference to presbyteries under the Barrier Act yielded a sufficient majority to allow the 1889 Assembly to implement the change.

Biblical Criticism Simultaneously with the proceedings just narrated there emerged what for many was a far bigger challenge, namely to Scripture itself through the rise of biblical criticism. Strong links between Scottish and German theologians had ensured that this was taken up in the Divinity Colleges, but now it was entering a more public domain thanks largely to the teaching of William Robertson Smith, Professor of Old Testament at the Free Church College in Aberdeen. Smith’s work was undeniably a major reforming influence in the late nineteenth century and, in this regard, the reader’s attention is drawn to the detailed discussion by William Johnstone in Chapter 24 of this volume.

Scotch Sermons Edited by William Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews University, the Scotch Sermons contained twenty-three sermons from thirteen contributors. These were substantial discourses which read more like academic lectures, suggesting that late nineteenth-century congregations certainly had stamina in impressive quantities. The volume had a laudable aim, namely, ‘to illustrate the direction in which thought was moving’. The editorial preface continued: ‘It is the work of those whose hope for the future lies, not in alterations of ecclesiastical

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organisation, but in a profounder apprehension of the essential ideas of Christianity; and especially in the growth, within the Church, of such a method of presenting them, as shall show that they are equally adapted to the needs of humanity, and in harmony with the results of critical and scientific research’ (Knight 1880: v). Trouble lay ahead for one of the contributors, William Leckie McFarlan of Lenzie, over a sermon entitled ‘The Things which Cannot be Shaken’. McFarlan announced his theme thus: ‘That the old theologies are being shaken by the new sciences is a fact which is patent to the most superficial observation’ (Knight 1880: 219). He then proceeded to assess which elements of Christian faith could honestly be asserted as unshakeable, ultimately identifying three: (1) ‘that righteousness is blessedness’; (2) ‘that there is a Divine being who is seeking to make men sharers in his blessedness by making them sharers in his righteousness’; and (3) ‘that in the cravings of the human soul for communion with that power which is the source of its being and the ground of its moral life, there is the pledge of immortality’ (Knight 1880: 242). Recognizing the radical nature of this conclusion McFarlan justified his position by asserting that, painful though scientific attacks may be upon ‘the dogmatic theology of the past, to many devout Christians, they must ultimately be beneficial to the religion of Christ’ (Knight 1880: 243). In effect, he maintained, dogmatic theology has ‘concealed Christ’s simple Gospel’ and, once cleared away the doctrine of Christ ‘will reappear before the eyes of men in all its stately simplicity’ (Knight 1880: 243). The first sermon in the volume was contributed by John Caird, Principal and, formerly, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University. His sermon, entitled ‘Corporate Immortality’, was based on Hebrews 11:39–40: ‘These all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect’. Caird proceeded to acknowledge ‘the small contribution which the best of us can make to the advancement of the world in knowledge and goodness’ (Knight 1880: 13). He then argued that ‘if the work we do is real and noble work, it is never lost; it is taken up into and becomes an integral moment of that immortal life to which all the good and great of the past . . . have contributed . . . ’ (Knight 1880: 13). He then contrasts the largeness of human desires with the brevity of human life and affirms ‘a universal and undying life’, lived not for self but for the good of others. He avers that ‘the eternal world is not a world beyond time and the grave. It embraces time; it is ready to realise itself under all forms of temporal things . . . And so’, he concludes, ‘the supreme aim of Christian endeavour is not to look away to an inconceivable heaven beyond the skies and to spend our life in preparing for it, but it is to realise that latent heaven, those possibilities of spiritual good, that undeveloped kingdom of righteousness and love and truth, which human nature and human society contain’ (Knight 1880: 16). Other distinguished contributors to the volume included Robert Herbert Story of Rosneath (subsequently Professor of Church History and Principal of Glasgow

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University) and the editor, Knight, himself. These were prominent men in church and society, with the laudable intention of illustrating the direction in which thought was moving and seeking to convey the Gospel’s relevance in a world of new ideas. Much church reaction, though, was critical as many sensed a setting aside of biblical teaching and a commending of pantheism and universalism. Given the level of concern it is curious that only one of the thirteen was called to account, namely William Leckie McFarlan. Perhaps the high profile of other contributors rendered him an easy target. The matter came before the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly of 1881, the same year as the Free Church finally lost patience with Robertson Smith. There was no great mood for a parallel heresy hunt within the Auld Kirk, but neither could the matter be ignored. In the Assembly a fellow contributor, Cunningham, acknowledged that McFarlan’s sermon was liable to create alarm in many minds and proposed that the Assembly issue a warning that he be more careful in the future. This, however, was not acceptable to Robert Flint, Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University, who judged McFarlan to have stated views clearly contrary to the fundamentals of the Faith. In particular he noted the failure to include amongst the things that could not be shaken the divinity and mediatorship of Christ. He successfully proposed, therefore, that McFarlan be required to reassure the Assembly on these points. Interviewed the following day, McFarlan explained that his purpose had simply been to raise awareness of contemporary trends in theology and point out their inconsistency with Church standards. He, personally, had not championed such views. This was accepted and McFarlan was let off with a warning. The sentiments of Scotch Sermons certainly reflect a world far removed from the theology of the Westminster Confession, and one can see why many found them to be unsettling. Essentially what was happening involved a shift from dogmatics towards apologetics, focused on the person of Jesus and maintaining the reasonableness of Christian belief in an age of invention and discovery. In this brave new world the sermons called for a Christian focus less on preparing for another world, and more on living in this world, embracing its challenges and opportunities and trusting in progress.

Revival in the Established Church Parliamentary returns from 1878 show the Church of Scotland with a membership greater than the combined membership of the Free and United Presbyterian Churches.¹ However, revival was not simply a matter of numbers, but also of leadership. This chapter concludes with some brief biographical notes on ¹ Church of Scotland 555,000; Free Church 254,000; United Presbyterian Church 178,000. Tulloch, Address to the People of Scotland, 1885, quoted in Cheyne (1999: 163).

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five leading lights in this process, some of whom have already featured in this narrative.

John Caird (1820–98) Born in Greenock the son of a foundry-master, and initially intended for a career in industry, the young John Caird decided to enter the ministry of the Church of Scotland. From the start Caird established a reputation as a preacher; indeed, a sermon on ‘Religion and Common Life’, preached before Queen Victoria at Crathie in 1855, created something of a sensation, appearing in print and selling many thousands of copies in Britain and in North America. Caird had been appointed Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University in 1862 and in due course, in a sign of changing times, successfully proposed John McLeod Campbell for the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. In his laureation address Caird wryly observed that the heretic had converted the Church. Also, with a view to raising standards, he revived the BD degree and, in a significant ecumenical move, opened it up to Arts graduates from the Free and United Presbyterian Church colleges. In 1873 he was appointed Principal of the University, in which role his reforms included opening university access to women. Caird’s theological approach could not have been more different from that reflected in the Westminster Standards. For him Christian faith was essentially reasonable, with a focus on the person of Jesus Christ and a call to live by Christ’s teaching. Alongside this and reflecting the creative energy and new discoveries of the Victorian age, Caird also affirmed a faith in progress. He expounded these themes in scholarly writings, such as The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity and his Croall and Gifford Lectures; but also in sermons, lectures, and devotional talks. At the same time, reflecting his early experience of industry, he drew attention to social problems faced by working people, calling for a deeper conception of the rights and duties of property and a ‘modification of the conditions that affect the distribution of wealth and the relations of capital and labour’ (Cheyne 1999: 179.) He was a strong supporter of trades unions with a particular concern for the vulnerability of non-unionized women workers.

John Tulloch (1823–86) John Tulloch was born a son of the manse in Dron, Perthshire and studied Arts and Divinity at St Andrews University. In 1864, following short ministries in Dundee and Angus, he was appointed Principal of St Mary’s College and Professor of Theology in his alma mater. Over subsequent years he was to expound Broad Church principles and, indeed, in his Introductory Lecture he expressed unease at

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dogmatic reactions, as distinct from reasoned responses, to the growing spirit of theological enquiry. He maintained that ‘there is no higher task for Christian reason . . . than to vindicate the eternal basis of Christianity as a truth for the reason no less than for the conscience and the heart’ (Cheyne 1983: 81). In 1878 Tulloch was elected Moderator of the General Assembly and, as previously noted, emerged as an effective leader in efforts, both ecclesiastical and political, to defend the establishment of religion as reflected in the Church of Scotland. At the same time he acknowledged the rights of people to join another denomination. What he would not countenance was the right of such individuals to destroy the parish church as a national institution.

Norman Macleod (1812–72) Macleod had studied under Thomas Chalmers at Edinburgh University but in 1843, by then minister of Louden, Ayrshire and a firm believer in an established Church, he chose not to follow his former teacher into the Free Church. In 1851 he was called to Glasgow’s Barony Church where he remained until his death in 1872. Macleod worked tirelessly for the spiritual and material good of his parish with a particular care for working people. They responded, attending services in large numbers and honouring him with the designation ‘our Norman’. At the other end of the social spectrum, he was a favourite chaplain to Queen Victoria. Macleod also maintained a notable ministry through his editorship of the monthly journal Good Words. He initiated this in 1860 and the magazine quickly established itself north and south of the border. With an ecumenical breadth in both contributors and readers, Good Words soon led to a more liberal form of evangelicalism. He also served as chairman of the Kirk’s foreign missions committee, undertaking a notable visit to India and the Holy Land. In his biography John Wellwood tells of a chance meeting when Macleod, on his way home from his travels, arrived at an Athens Hotel in which Tulloch was already installed and the two men spent much of the night in animated conversation (Wellwood 1897: 112). It’s a vignette which neatly encapsulates the mind-broadening influence of travel upon nineteenth-century churchmen. In 1865 the Presbytery of Glasgow issued a pastoral letter calling for the defence of the Sabbath in face of Sunday running of trains and the opening of parks. Macleod duly read the letter from the pulpit, but then proceeded to shred its arguments. Were working men, who rose at five in the morning and toiled all week, to be condemned for walking in public parks on a Sunday? Was it really to be contended that a man who took a train on a Sunday could have nothing of the love of Christ within him? Called before the Presbytery to explain himself, Macleod defended his stance in a speech lasting an extraordinary four hours. He argued that as for Christians the Passover had been replaced by

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the Lord’s Supper and circumcision by baptism, so the Jewish Sabbath had been replaced by the Lord’s Day. It could have been foreseen that Sabbath access to recreational facilities would involve staffing these facilities, with one person’s re-creative Sabbath involving Sabbath labour for others. However, there is little doubt that Macleod’s primary focus was to achieve a reasonable balance between productive work and recreative leisure. At the end of the day, the Presbytery limited its response to an admonition, the controversy subsided and relations began to heal. In 1869 all was forgiven when Macleod was elected Moderator of the General Assembly.

Robert Flint (1838–1910) Flint was born at Applegarth, Dumfriesshire and, following schooling in Moffat, entered Glasgow University in 1852. At the Disruption his father joined the Free Church while his mother remained loyal to the Auld Kirk. Faced with this choice, young Robert worshipped with his father. At the age of seventeen, having commenced his theological studies, he transferred to the Church of Scotland where ‘he believed a more liberal spirit prevailed’ and ‘he would find himself in more congenial theological surroundings’ (Macmillan 1914: 60). In 1858 he was appointed assistant to Norman Macleod at the Barony where he immersed himself in the social problems of this vast urban parish. A year later he became minister of the East Church, Aberdeen, thereafter at Kilconquhar in Fife. In 1864 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews moving, in 1876, to the Chair of Divinity at Edinburgh. Reference has been made to Flint’s firmness in the Assembly of 1881 when the previous year’s Scotch Sermons had come in for criticism. 1881 was also the year in which the Free Church removed Robertson Smith from his Aberdeen Chair and in that connection Flint observed: ‘The Church of Scotland has no right to tolerate sceptical teaching and fundamental heresy, but neither has she a right to repress variety of opinion, or to act in any inquisitorial spirit, or to violate constitutional procedure, or to treat all errors as heresies, or to be over-rigid with any man’ (Macmillan 1914: 379). That same year, in a lecture entitled ‘Progress in Theology’, Flint challenged the notion that theologians ‘ought to teach nothing but what is contained in the doctrinal statements and creeds of the Church’. On the contrary, he maintained, ‘the theologian’s business is less to follow than to lead the thought of the Church’. He continued: ‘I understand my relationship as a theologian to the Confession to be analogous to that of a professor of mathematics to the elements of Euclid. He is content not to contradict the doctrine therein contained, but would by no means be content to be confined to it and prevented from going on to the higher mathematics’ (Macmillan 1914: 364).

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Like Caird, Flint was a believer in human progress and a recurring theme in his teaching was the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. Flint argued for a joint enterprise between agencies of Church and State in relieving poverty and improving living conditions. In Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth he firmly rejected any suggestion that the Church was the Kingdom of God on earth and maintained that ‘since the arts, literature and science, and indeed the state itself, have separated themselves from the Church, they have been able independently to contribute towards the Kingdom of God’ (McKay 2012: 31).

Archibald Charteris (1835–1908) Born in Wamphray, Dumfriesshire Charteris studied at the University of Edinburgh. Following ministries in Galloway and Glasgow he was appointed Professor of Biblical Criticism at the University of Edinburgh in 1868, holding the Chair until his retirement thirty years later. He was a conservative scholar, later identified as the author of an anonymous review of Robertson Smith’s article on the Bible in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which led directly to Smith’s heresy trial in the Free Church. However, while cautious as a scholar, Charteris was innovative as a churchman, being the driving force behind the setting up in 1871 of a Church of Scotland Committee on Christian Life and Work. From this emerged a raft of new initiatives, including the introduction of the Diaconate, the monthly magazine Life and Work which continues to this day, and the Woman’s Guild, led by his wife, Catherine. At a time when church ministry and leadership was entirely in the hands of men, the Guild and the Diaconate gave both a voice and a role to women, with the latter also enabling women to exercise a diaconal ministry alongside male ministers. In 1888 Lady Grisell Baillie became the first deaconess in the Church of Scotland. Another eighty years would elapse before the General Assembly of 1968 approved the ordination of women to the ministry of word and sacrament.

Bibliography Burleigh, John H. S. (1960). A Church History of Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Cheyne, A. C. (1999). Studies in Scottish Church History. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Drummond, Andrew L. and James Bulloch (1978). The Church in Late Victorian Scotland. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press. Knight, William (ed). (1880). Scotch Sermons. London: Macmillan & Co.

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Leckie, J. H. (1925). Fergus Ferguson: His Theology and Heresy Trial. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Lyall, Francis (1980). Of Presbyters and Kings: Church and State in the Law of Scotland. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. MacEwen, A. R. (1895). Life and Letters of John Cairns. London: Hodder & Stoughton. McKay, Johnston R. (2012). The Kirk and the Kingdom. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Macmillan, Donald (1914). Life of Professor Flint. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Wellwood, John (1897). Norman Macleod. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier.

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Index of Names Adair, Patrick 289 Adam, Stephen 338 Adams, John 117 Adams, Nicholas 253 Adamson, Steven C. 243, 245 Adamson, William 384, 385 Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 124, 177 Ahnert, Thomas 44, 46, 57, 59n, 60, 62, 63, 64, 70, 113, 173 Alexander, Archibald 124, 177 Allen, Robert 289 Anderson, Carol 220 Anderson, Christopher 137 Anderson, George 59, 60–1 Anderson, James 330 Anderson, John 302 Anderson, William James 159, 162 Andrews, Robert M. 272 Anne, Queen 266 Anselm of Canterbury 2 Anson, Peter F. 156 Aquinas, Thomas 144 Arbuthnott, Benedict 149 Armstrong, Brian G. 6 Ashworth, J. H. 400 Astore, William J. 393 Augustine, St 2, 6, 119, 124, 157, 180, 293 Ayer, A. J. 302 Babington, Thomas 192 Baillie, Donald 309 Baillie, Grisell, Lady 430 Baillie, John 309 Baker, Timothy C. 221n, 222, 224–5 Balfour, Thomas 189 Ballentine, James 337–8 Bannerman, Douglas 335 Bannerman, James 256, 335 Bannerman, Patrick 94 Barbour, George F. 249 Barclay, John 134–5 Barclay, Robert 146–7 Baring-Gould, Sabine 326 Barkley, J. M. 295 Barth, Karl 11, 135, 232, 234, 309 Baur, F. C. 252, 255, 348, 353

Baxter, Paul 407 Baxter, Richard 87, 178, 233 Beaton, James 141, 142, 145, 146 Beattie, James 157, 176, 189–90, 191, 305, 310 Bebbington, David 33, 275 Beeke, Joel R. 248 Begadon, Cormac 161 Begg, James 335, 337, 420 Bell, M. Charles 10 Bellarmine, Robert 157, 166 Bellesheim, Alphons 148 Benedict XIV, Pope 151, 161, 162, 165 Berman, David 56 Beutel, Harald 258 Beza, Theodore 2 a Bharra, Bean see Campbell, Ann Black, Aileen 362, 363 Black, J. S. 345, 353 Blackburn, Simon 302 Blackie, John Stuart 371, 421 Blackwell, Thomas 14, 15–17, 25 Blaikie, William 335 Blair, David of Brechin 94 Blair, Hugh 9, 57, 62, 63, 64, 69, 71–5, 77, 78, 116, 304, 305, 306, 307, 310 Blessinghame, J. W. 195 Boece, Hector 141, 164 Bonar, John of Cockpen 59–60 Bonar, Andrew 5 Bonar, Horatius 5, 317 Bonar, John of Perth 94 Booth, Gordon 352 Borthwick, Jane Laurie 314–27 Boston, Thomas 4, 5, 21, 84–5, 88, 92–3, 100 Botterill, George 56 Bourignon, Antoinette 15, 268 Boyd, A. K. H. 336, 339 Brewster, David 371, 394–5, 397, 400, 406, 407 Briody, Michael 162 Broadie, Alexander 42n, 70, 113, 343 Brooke, John Hedley 394, 408 Brown, Callum 138 Brown, Daniel Gunn 288–9 Brown, David 5, 346 Brown, George Douglas 201 Brown, George Mackay 210–11

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Brown, James 347 Brown, John III or tertius 2, 132, 383, 385, 387 Brown, John of Haddington 88, 129, 138, 383 Brown, M. P. 187, 188 Brown, Stewart J. 71, 175, 176, 221–2, 243, 361, 392, 407n Bruce, Alexander Balmain 252, 254, 255–6, 291, 293, 335, 411 Bruce, Archibald 129 Bruce, Robert 2 Brunton, Alexander 330 Bryce, James 74 Bucer, Martin 3, 233 Buchan, John 201, 204 Buchanan, George 141, 150 Buchanan, James 84, 250, 251, 350 Buckle, Stephen 56 Bulloch, James 8, 11, 247, 292, 316, 344, 345, 349 Bultmann, Christoph 343 Burchfield, Joe D. 398 Burns, Robert (minister of Paisley) 87 Burns, Robert (poet) 92, 162, 201, 203, 204, 208, 211, 213, 214–18, 219, 221, 223 Butler, Joseph 176, 179 Caird, Edward 415 Caird, John 240, 425, 427, 430 Cairns, John 176, 364, 369, 377, 380–3, 385n, 386–7, 422–3 Cairns, William 287 Calderwood, Henry 310, 334, 377, 378–80, 383, 387, 414–15 Calderwood, W. L. 334 Caldwell, Robert W. 31 Calvin, John or Jean 3, 6, 10, 92, 99, 100, 147, 173, 174–5, 248, 249, 250, 258, 293, 345, 350, 366 Cameron, John 2 Cameron, Nigel M. de S. 88 Campbell, Ann 102–3 Campbell, Archibald 42, 43, 44, 46, 47–53 Campbell, David E. 123 Campbell, George (18th-century minister) 8–9, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 79, 307 Campbell, George (Duke of Argyll) 411 Campbell, George (secretary of the Church Service Society) 332 Campbell, Ian 213, 361 Campbell, Willielma, Viscountess Glenorchy 316 Candlish, James S. 254 Candlish, Robert Smith 194, 195, 243, 245–7, 258, 291, 293 Cardell-Oliver, John 276

Carey, Daniel, 285 Carlyle, Alexander 9, 69, 71, 78, 305 Carlyle, Thomas 208–9, 211, 218 Carpenter, J. Estlin 342 Carruthers, Annette 338 Carruthers, Gerard 342 Carstairs, Andrew 330 Carswell, John 99 Chadwick, Owen 162, 345 Chalmers, Thomas 1, 9, 38, 80–1, 96, 118–19, 131, 175–82, 193, 194–5, 221–2, 225, 243–5, 247, 249–50, 251, 256, 258, 259, 284, 288–9, 290, 291, 293, 294, 307, 308, 315, 371, 392–3, 394, 397, 405, 407, 408, 420, 428 Chapman, Mark 280 Charteris, Archibald H. 348, 349, 430 Charters, Samuel 75, 81 Cheyne, Alec 252, 292, 411, 420, 421, 426n, 427, 428 Cheyne, Patrick 275–9 Chisholm, William 142 Clark, Erskine 193 Clark, Ian D. L. 77, 89n, 90, 172 Clarke, Tristram 266 Clement VIII, Pope 142 Clement XI, Pope 147, 148 Clement XIV, Pope 161 Clephane, Elizabeth 318, 324, 326 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 344 Comper, John 276, 278 Cook, Finlay 96 Cook, George 96, 170, 307 Cooper, James 339 Cormack, Peter 337 Cornwall, Robert D. 267, 271 Cottier, Daniel 338 Cox, J. T. 377 Craigie, Thomas 286 Crawford, Robert 215, 217, 367 Crawford, Thomas J. 246–7 Croskery, Thomas 292–4 Crouter, Richard 369 Crowe, Michael J. 390, 393 Cullen, Paul, Cardinal 161 Cuming, Patrick 69, 75, 79 Cumming, John 330 Cunningham, William 1, 6, 7, 21, 87, 194, 243, 245, 246, 247–9, 250, 256, 258, 291, 293, 294, 308 Dale, David 134 Dalrymple, David 187 Dalzel, Archibald 187 Darlow, Thomas H. 352

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   Darwin, Charles 122–3, 353, 379, 398, 400, 404–16 Davey, J. E. 296 Davidson Kennedy, Thomas 51 Davidson, Andrew Bruce 252, 253–4, 295, 296, 346, 348, 350 Davie, George Elder 380, 381, 385 Davie, J. 385 Davies, John Reuben 281 Davis, David Brion 192, 196 Day, John 351, 352 Dellheim, Charles 338 Denison, George Anthony, Archdeacon 275–6 Dennett, Daniel 302 Denney, James 295, 416 Descartes, René 14 Devine, T. M. 186, 360, 372 Dewar, Daniel 330 Dick, John 1, 131, 136, 138, 382 Dick, Robert 6, 76, 79–80, 91 Dick, Thomas 393–4 Dickson, David 2, 4 Dickson, Neil T. R. 137 Dixon, William 177 Doddridge, Philip 129, 130, 131 Dods, Marcus 252, 254–5, 291, 294, 352 Donnelly, Michael 337 Van Doodewaard, W. E. 89 Douglas, Brian 268, 270, 271, 281 Douglas, Niel 137 Douglass, Frederick 193, 194 Dowden, John 268, 280–1 Doyle, John A. 219, 224n Drennan, William 285–6 Drummond, Andrew L. 8, 11, 247, 292, 316, 344, 345, 349 Drummond, Henry 138, 291, 294, 400, 411, 412 Drysdale, John 69, 72, 75, 76, 77, 79 Duff, Thomas 150 Dun, John of Auchinleck 91 Duncan, Henry 192, 396 Duncan, Isabelle 396–7 Duncan, John ‘Rabbi’ 19, 195, 250, 253 Duncan, Mary Lundle 317–18, 324, 325, 326 Dundas, Henry, Second Viscount Melville 170 Dundas, Robert, Lord 170 Duns, John 406, 413 Durden, Susan 28 Eadie, John 346, 347, 382n Edgerton, David 360 Edwards, Brian 367 Edwards, Jonathan 27–39, 87, 93, 95, 96, 177, 180, 181

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Eichhorn, J. G. 172, 342, 344 Emerson, Roger 170, 173 Erskine, Charles of Kellie, Cardinal 152 Erskine, Thomas of Linlathen 9, 228–32, 249 Erskine, Ebenezer 4, 6, 84, 87–8, 128, 129 Erskine, Henry 171 Erskine, John 8, 28, 32–9, 84, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94–6, 189 Erskine, Ralph 88 Ewald, Heinrich 253 Ewing, Greville 136–7, 138 Fairbairn, Patrick 291 Falconer, William, Bishop 268 Farrell, Allan P. 143, 144 Faulkner, J. A. 296 Fawcett, Arthur 28 Fawcett, F. 338 de Feller, François-Xavier 157 Fenelon, Francois, Archbishop 268 Ferguson, Fergus 422 Ferguson, James 187 Ferguson, John C. A. 87 Fergusson, David 304 Fergusson, Robert 215 Ferrie, John 287 Ferrier, James Frederick 381 Ferrier, Robert 134, 135 Ferrier, Susan 218–21, 223, 224 Findlater, Sarah Borthwick 314–27 Finlay, Richard J. 214n Finney, Charles G. Fisher, Edward 23 Fisher, James 5, 88–9, 129 Fisher, William 214 Fisk, Philip J. 31 Flegg, Columba 138 Fleming, John R. 359, 407 Flint, Robert 307–8, 351, 410, 411, 412, 414, 426, 429–30 Forbes of Corse, John 268 Forbes, Alexander (Bishop) 276–81 Forbes, Alexander (Lord Pitsligo) 269 Forbes, George Hay 281 Forbes, J. D. 396, 398 Forbes, John Hay 278 Forbes, Robert, Bishop 267–8 Ford, Lacy K. 193 Forsyth, Neil 289 Forsyth, P. T. 416 Franklin, Foster 331 Fraser, James of Brea 2, 88, 129 Frazer, J. G. 352, 405, 415 Freud, Sigmund 352

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Fry, Michael 175 Fuller, Reginald C. 151, 162 Gall, James 396 Galt, John 199–200 Garden, George 268 Garden, James 268 Gaskin, J. C. A. 56, 65, 303 Gauvreau, Michael 286 Geddes, Alexander 151, 342–6 Geddes, John 145, 155, 161–7 Geddes, Patrick 359, 361, 370–1, 373, 410 Geike, Sir Archibald 337 Gerard, Alexander 69, 74, 76, 79 Gerhardt, Paul 314, 319 German, Kieran 268 Gerrard, Alexander 308 Ghriogarach, Mairearad 101, 105–6 Gib, Adam 8, 88, 129 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 202–3, 207 Gibbs, James 152 Gibson, William 288 Giddens, Anthony 360, 361, 366, 368, 373 Gilfillan, George 362 Gill, Robin 359, 361 Gillespie, Thomas 28, 30–1, 32, 130 Gillies, John 92–3 Given, J. J. 292 Glas, John 22, 37, 127, 132–3, 134, 135, 136, 138 Gleig, George, Bishop 165, 270–1, 272–3, 307 Goldie, Mark 155, 161, 162 Gordon, Andreas 149, 150–1, 152 Gordon, James 147 Gordon, Marianus 151 Gorham, George 275 Gorman, James L. 137 Graham, Billy 386 Graham, Gordon 125 Graham, William 383 Gray, Thomas 215 Greenshields, James 265 Gregory XIII, Pope 142 Grub, George 274 Guelzo, Allen C. 31 Gundlach, Bradley J. 122n Gunkel, Hermann 344 Gunn, Neil 201 Gunton, Colin 234 Guthrie, Arthur 333–4 Guthrie, John 138 Guyon, Madam 268–9 Haldane, Elizabeth 381 Haldane, James 136, 137, 138

Haldane, Robert 127, 136, 137, 138 Hall, Archibald 129 Halloran, Brian M. 147, 156 Halyburton, Thomas 14, 17–21, 25, 58, 86–7, 173 Hamilton, Elizabeth 218 Hamilton, Gavin 214–15 Hamilton, Ian 378, 384 Hamilton, Sir William (professor at the University of Edinburgh) 118, 344, 378, 379 Hamilton, William (editor of Thomas Reid’s Works) 25, 52, 118 Hanna, William 176, 178, 288 Hanson, George 293 Hardy, Thomas 75 Harford-Battersby, George 342 Harris, James 57, 61, 303, 304, 305, 311 Harris, Raymond 190 Hatfield, Gary 164 Hay, George 156–61, 162, 163 Hay, George Macdougall 201 Hazlett, Ian 52 Heimann, P. M. 399 Helm, Paul 17n Henderson, G. D. 176, 269 Henderson, John 187 Henderson, William 278 Herbert of Cherbury 18 Herschel, Sir William 391 Hervey, James 21–2, 24, 114, 133 Hill, George 9, 69, 74, 78–9, 131, 170–4, 176, 178, 180, 307 Hill, Octavius 371 Hilton, Boyd 177 Hodge, A. A. 12, 251 Hodge, Charles 6, 122–3, 293–4, 409–10 Hoefel, Johann 314 Hoeveler, J. David 118, 119, 120, 122, 291 Hogg, James 8, 204–5, 206–7, 208–9, 211, 218 Holloway, Ernest R. III 3 Holmes, Andrew R. 217n, 286, 287, 289, 291, 295, 297 Home, Henry see Kames, Henry Home, Lord Home, John 9 Honeycutt, Michael W. 249 Horrocks, Don 232 Hort, F. J. A. 346 Houston, Joseph 311 Howe, William Walsham 326 Hume, David 24, 51, 56–9, 61–3, 65, 69, 72, 75, 80, 88, 92, 113, 115, 116, 156, 170, 174, 179, 301–12, 380, 408

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   Hutcheson, Francis 44n, 52, 57, 72, 73, 74, 115, 177, 217, 285–6, 287 Hutchinson, John 271–3 Hutchison, Matthew 127, 128, 129 Hutchison, Patrick 130 Hutton, James 397, 406 Hutton, Sarah 44n Huxley, T. H. 405–6, 408 Innes, David 141 Irving, Edward 5, 10–11, 137, 222, 228–9, 232–4, 249 Israel, Jonathan 66n, 301n, 304 Iverach, James 410, 411, 412, 413, 414 Jaffray, John 335, 336 James VII, King of Scotland, and II, King of England 266 James VI, King of Scotland, and I, King of England 141–2 Jansen, Otto 147–8 Jay, Elisabeth 223 Jenkins, Bill 176, 390 Johns, Christopher M. S. 155, 160 Johnson, John 271, 281 Johnston, Orrock 335 Johnstone, William 162, 242n, 352, 354, 424 Jolly, Alexander, Bishop 271, 272, 274 Jones, Robert Alun 352 Jordan, Will R. 304 Kaf ker, Frank A. 162, 165 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 56, 59–60, 62, 63–4, 65, 69 Kant, Immanuel 14, 302, 306, 309, 343, 353, 365, 379, 414 Keble, John 278 Kedward, Rod 360 Kelman, James 211 Kelman, John 371 Kennedy, A. R. S. 352 Kennedy, James 360, 370, 372 Ker, John 364 Kerr, Cecil 156 Kerr, John 332 Kidd, Colin 53, 70, 254, 255, 256 Kilburn, Matthew 163 Kinnear, Malcolm Andrew 250 Kirkpatrick, James 289 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn 219 Knight, Joseph 187–8 Knight, William 292, 424–6 Knox, John 2, 58, 99, 114, 150, 208, 288, 289, 291, 293, 330

437

Kornahrens, Wallace D. 281 Kuenen, Abraham 348, 350, 352 Lachman, David C. 21 Laidlaw, John 6, 335 Lange, J. P. 314, 319 Lapsley, James 189 Lawson, George 131 Leckie, J. H. 422 Lee, John 170 Lee, Robert 329, 330, 331, 337, 338, 339 Lee, Thomas Alexander 314 Leechman, William 43, 50–2, 57, 61–2, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 95 Lees, Cameron 332 Lehner, Ulrich L. 155 Leibniz, G. W. 149, 181 Leighton, Robert 4 Leitch, Matthew 295 Leslie, John 141, 142, 150 Lewis, C. S. 401 Lindsay, David 401 Liston, Wiliam 330 Livingston, James C. 412 Livingstone, David (of Blantyre) 195 Livingstone, David N. 293, 406, 410, 411, 415 Locke, John 17–18, 19–20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 77, 86–7, 94, 95, 96, 133, 156, 177 Lockhart, John Gibson 200 Logan, John 62, 63, 74, 317 Logie, William 330 Louis XIV, King 145, 146 Love, John 91, 96 Loveland, Jeff 162, 165 Loyola, Ignatius 143, 160 Luther, Martin 144 Lyall, Francis 113, 424 Macaulay, Zachary 192–3 McBride, I. R. 285, 286 MacColla, Fionn 201 McCosh, James 112–13, 118–25, 286–8, 291, 306, 307n, 410–11, 414 McCrie, Charles G. 245 McCrie, Thomas 289 McCulloch, William 27, 28–9, 30, 38 McDermott, Gerald R. 27 MacDiarmid, Hugh 401 Macdonald, Hugh 148 MacDonald, Murdo 371–2 MacEwen, Alexander McEwen, William 89 McFadzean, Ronald 363 McFarlan, William Leckie of Lenzie 292, 425–6

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438

  

McGavin, Hames 134 McGill, William 9 McGinty, J. Walter 217n McIlvanney, Liam 213, 216, 217 McIlvanney, William 201 McInally, Tom 143, 146, 150, 152 McIntosh, John R. 36, 89, 93, 94 McIntyre, John 311 McKerrow, John 129, 131 Mackie, J. L. 302 McKim, Donald K. 256 McKimmon, Eric G. 377 McKinstry, Sam 363, 364, 369, 374 Mackintosh, H. R. 234, 237, 238, 309 McLaren, Duncan 363 Maclaurin, John 28, 31–2, 34, 37, 38, 84, 87, 90, 91–2, 93, 94–5, 96 McLean, Archibald 135–6, 137 MacLean, Donald 100 Macleod, Donald 6, 21, 242n, 244, 248, 249, 258, 386 MacLeod, James Lachlan 257 Macleod, John 245, 258 McLeod Campbell, John 9, 228–9, 232, 234–40, 249, 384n, 421, 427 Macleon, Norman 326, 399, 428–9 McCluskey, Raymond 142 McClymond, Michael J. 27 Macmillan, Donald 429 McMillan, James F. 161 Macmillan, John (Snr.) 127 Macmillan, John (Jnr.) 128 Macmillan, John (III) 128 Macpherson, John 6, 128 MacPherson, Mary (Bean Torra Dhamh) 101, 103–5 Macqueen, Daniel 92, 94 Macrae, David 382 Maier, Bernhard 252, 259, 346, 353 Mailer, Gideon 114, 116, 117 Mair, John 162 Manlove, Colin 401 a Marck, Johannes see Marckius, Johannes Marckius, Johannes 45, 129, 173–4 Margaret, St 163–4 Marsden, George 31, 123 Martin, Hugh 87, 256–7 Mary II, Queen 266 Matheson, George 411 Matheson, Jessy J. 136 Mathieson, Anne 71 Maurer, Christian 48 Maxwell, James Clerk 397, 398, 399, 406 Maxwell, Stephen 361n

Mechie, Stewart 84 Mede, Joseph 271 Meek, Donald E. 257 Meldrum, Patricia 275 Melville, Andrew 2, 3, 289, 291 Menzies, Allan 353–4 Menzies, Thomas 150, 152 Michaelis, Johann David 173, 180 Mill, J. S. 302 Miller, Hugh 245, 371, 397, 406–7 Milligan, William 339, 346, 347 Mills, Robin J. W. 48n, 63 Milne, J. W. D. 382n Minkema, Kenneth P. 35 Mitchell, Christopher Wayne 33, 89 Moffatt, James 314 le Moine, Abraham 156 Montgomery, Jamie 186–7, 188 à Moor, Bernardinus 14 Moore, Aubrey 411 Moore, James 52, 404 Morison, James 132, 138, 377, 383–6, 387, 395–6 Morris, R. J. 360 Morris, William 337, 338 Morrison, Jeffry H. 116, 117n Morton, Graham 360 Mossner, Ernest C. 301, 303, 305, 306, 307 Muir, Edwin 209–10 Müller, Max 405 Muller, Richard A. 15n, 16, 17 Myers, Stephen G. 89 Needham, Nicholas R. 1, 253 Neill, Stephen, 348 Newman, John Henry 279, 280, 346 Newth, Samuel 346 Newton, Sir Isaac 176, 271–2, 392, 408 Nic a’ Phearsain, Màiri 100, 110 NicAoidh, Catrìona see Thangaidh, Catrìona NicDhòmhnaill, Catrìona 109 NicDhòmhnaill, Màiri 106 NicFhearghais, Anna 107–8 Noden, Shelagh 160 Noll, Mark A. 33, 38, 177, 293 O’Connell, Daniel 289 Olbers, Heinrich 390 Oldfield, J. R. 196 Oliphant, Margaret 179–80, 218–19, 222–3 nan Òran, Màiri Mhòr 110 Orr, James 308–9, 310, 377, 386–7, 414–15 Osterhammel, Jürgen 258 Outram, Dorinda 155

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   Outram, William 180 Owen, John 34, 87, 88, 95, 133, 180 Paine, Tom 391 Paley, William 176, 398, 405, 408, 412 Paterson, Lindsay 380n Patrick, Millar 333, 335 Peirce, C. S. 124 Pennie, Gibb N. 277 Perkins, William 3 Pickard, Willis 363 Pictet, Bénédict 45, 130 Pierson, Christopher 360 Pike, Samuel 133, 134 Pius VI, Pope 161 Pius IX, Pope 279, 280 de la Place, Joshua 6 Plenderleith, Jane 363, 364, 369 Poiret, Pierre 268 Porteous, Bielby, Bishop 190 Pringle-Pattison, A. S. 309, 310, 379, 380 Pusey, Edward 180, 277, 278, 279, 280 Putnam, Robert D. 123 Quine, W. V. O. 302 Raffe, Alasdair 266 Rainy, Robert 254, 255, 387n, 409, 413, 420 Ramsay, James 190 Rattray, Thomas, Bishop 267, 280, 281 Reid, James Seaton 289–90 Reid, Thomas 22, 113, 116, 118, 157, 174, 179, 286, 287, 306, 307, 365 Renan, Ernest 252, 292 Reynolds, Joshua 305 Riccaltoun, Robert 14, 21–4, 25 Rice, C. Duncan 186, 192, 195 Rice, Daniel F. 177, 179, 180, 243, 244 Riddell, Aileen M. 220–1 Riordan, Michael B. 269 Ritschl, Albrecht 252, 302, 309 Rivers, Isabel 44n Robe, James 28, 29–30, 38 Roberts, Alexander 346, 347, 348 Robertson, Andrew 132 Robertson, James 201, 204, 206, 207 Robertson, Ritchie 155 Robertson, William 8, 9, 62–3, 69, 71, 76, 78, 162, 170, 172, 173, 186, 196 Robertson, William Bruce 333–4 Rogers, Jack B. 256 Rogerson, John W. 246, 343 Rollock, Robert 2 Römmelt, Stefan 151

439

Roxborogh, W. John 243 Roxburgh, Kenneth B. 30 Russel, John 84, 85, 91, 92 Russell, Bertrand 302 Russell, Paul 56–7 Rutherford, Samuel 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 43 Sage, John 266 Sandeman, Robert 21–2, 24, 37, 133–5, 136 Sankey, Ira D. 318, 337, 378, 411 Savile, David 91 Schaper, Joachim 415 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. 182, 230, 292, 302, 309, 363, 364, 369 Schroeder, Henry J. 143 Schwarzbach, Bertram Eugene 342 Scorgie, Glen G. 386 Scott, James 294 Scott, Sir Gilbert 368 Scott, Sir Walter 199, 200, 201, 204, 209, 211–12, 218 Scougall, Henry 4, 268 Secord, James A. 400 Sell, Alan P. F. 386, 410 Sempill, Hugh 145 Sempill, William 145 Shaffer, Elinor S. 344 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of 44n, 59, 115 Sheddan, Robert 186–7, 188 Shepperson, G. A. 194 Sher, Richard B. 44, 56, 62, 70, 71 Shillaker, Robert Mark 251, 252 Shyllon, Folarin 190 Simonson, Harold P. 28 Simpson, Sir James Young 397, 401 Simson, John 9, 25, 42–3, 45–6, 47, 48–50, 52, 53n Sinclair, Catherine 218, 221–2, 224–5 Skinner, John, Jnr. 272, 273, 274 Skinner, John, Snr. 272 Skoczylas, Anne 42n, 45–6 Sloan, Douglas 116 Smeaton, George 243, 245, 247, 249–52, 258 Smeaton, Oliphant 384, 385 Smith, Adam 113, 286, 304 Smith, Crosbie 177, 398, 399 Smith, David 296 Smith, Donald C. 372–3 Smith, George Adam 253, 353 Smith, Iain Crichton 201, 207–8 Smith, James (architect) 152 Smith, James (Church of Scotland minister) 134–5

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440

  

Smith, John Howard 37 Smith, Joseph 380 Smith, Norman Kemp 301, 310, 311 Smith, Samuel Stanhope 124 Smith, Walter C. 335 Smith, William Robertson 252, 253–4, 259, 294–6, 342, 345, 346, 347–54, 371, 405, 415, 416, 424, 426, 429, 430 Smitten, Jeffrey 70 Smyth, Charles Piazzi 397 Smyth, Thomas 193, 194, 195 Snobelen, Stephen 396 Somerville, Thomas 69, 71, 73, 76, 80 Sorkin, David 66 Spencer, Mark G. 286 Spener, Philipp Jakob 316, 319 Spens, David 187 Spinoza, Baruch 14 Spitta, K. J. P. 314, 319, 324, 325 Sprott, G. W. 330, 332, 338 Spurgeon, C. H. 294, 382 Stamp, Gavin 359, 362, 363, 365, 366, 368, 369, 370 Stephen, James 190, 192 Stevenson, John 71 Stevenson, Robert Louis 203–4, 400 Stevenson, Thomas 400 Stewart, Balfour 398–9 Stewart, Dugald 176, 179, 181, 286, 287, 307, 310 Stewart, M. A. 56, 70, 308 Story, Robert Herbert 222, 332, 425 Strabo 63 Strachan, George 152 Strahan, James 296, 351 Strain, J. M. 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 Strauss, David Friedrich 252, 292, 353, 364 Strong, Rowan 267, 268, 269, 272, 274, 278, 279, 281 Struthers, Gavin 130 Stuart, Bernard 149 Stuart, Prince Charles Edward 273–4 Stuart, Prince Henry 273 Suderman, Jeffrey 71, 307 Tait, L. Gordon 116, 117 Tait, Peter Guthrie 348, 398–9, 410, 411 Taylor, A. E. 305 Taylor, John 35, 217 Temple, Frederick 411 Thangaidh, Catrìona (Catrìona NicAoidh) 109–10 Theerman, Paul 398 Thomson, Alexander ‘Greek’ 359, 361–71, 373

Thomson, Andrew 191–3 Thomson, J. Arthur 410 Thomson, William, Lord Kelvin 397–9, 406 Thornwell, James Henley 193 Tillotson, John 71, 157 Tindal, Matthew 58 Topham, Jonathan R. 244 Torra Dhamh, Bean see MacPherson, Mary Torrance, Thomas F. 84, 86, 232 Tournély, Honoré 157, 158 Toussaint, Benjamine 220n Trumper, Tim J. R. 247 Tulloch, John 222, 344, 354, 420, 421, 426n, 427–8 Turnbull, Michael T. R. B. 162 Turretin, Francis 6, 174, 248, 293 Tuttle, George M. 10 Urquhart, Gordon R. 347 Vater, Johann Severin 343 Venema, Herman 35 Vermigli, Peter Martyr 3 Victoria, Queen 196, 427, 428 Visiak, Edward Harold 401 Voges, F. 179, 180, 181 Voltaire 304–5 Walker, Anne 114 Walker, James 22, 274 Walker, Robert 86, 91 Walker, Thomas 295 Walker, William 271, 272, 273, 274 Wallace, Valerie 254, 255, 256 Warburton, William 34, 303, 304 Wardlaw, Ralph 137, 195 Warfield, B. B. 293 Waterland, Daniel 270 Watts, John 162 Watts, Robert 293–5 Webb, Phillip 338 Webster, Alexander 28, 32, 33, 91, 92, 94 Webster, James 45–6 Wedderburn, Sir John 187 Weiss, Bernhard 255, 354 Wellhausen, Julius 252, 253, 352, 353 Wellwood, John 428 Wemyss, Lord 278 Wesley, John 137, 316, 323 Westcott, B. F. 346 Whelan, Fredrick G. 304 Whewell, William 394, 395, 396 Whitefield, George 27–8, 32, 316

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   Whyte, Alexander 249, 371 Whyte, Iain 193, 194 Whyteford, Charles 147 Wigham, Eliza 194, 196 Wilberforce, William 178, 192, 193 William III, King 266 Williamson, Elizabeth 338 Williamson, H. M. 295 Willison, John 28, 84, 85, 86, 93 Wilson, Charles Haeth 338 Wilson, David 177 Wilson, Samuel Law 295 Wilson, William 89 Winegar, Reed 302 Winzet, Ninian 150 Wise, M. Norton 177

Wiseman, Nicholas, Cardinal 161 Wishart, William 91 Witherow, Thomas 293 Witherspoon, John 8, 60–1, 90, 91, 92, 94, 112–19, 122, 123–5, 188, 306 Wodrow, Patrick 217 Wolff, Christian 149 Woodside, David 334, 365, 378, 379, 387n Wotherspoon, H. J. 339 Wright, Tom 348 Yeager, Jonathan 32, 34, 38 Youngson, Andrew 150–1 von Zinzendorf, Nikolaus 319, 323

441

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Index of Subjects A Man’s a Man for a’ that 214 abolitionism see slavery Adam (biblical) 5–6, 99, 107–8, 251 adoption, doctrine of 239, 246–7 American Presbyterian Church 12 American Revolution 63n, 117 Amyraldianism 383 see also hypothetical universalism anarchy 370–1 Anglo-Catholicism 271, 278, 279–80 anti-Calvinism 273–4 anti-Confessionalism 11 Antiburghers 129–31 see also Burghers antinomianism 5, 16, 24, 45, 46, 115, 205 apologetics 89, 156, 179, 243, 310–11, 343, 351, 377, 381, 390, 392, 398, 400, 410, 411, 415, 426 architecture 329, 338, 359, 361, 362, 364–70 Arianism 9, 15, 286, 287 Arminianism 15, 34, 44, 45, 46, 49, 132, 138, 174, 175, 249, 258, 316, 323, 326, 385 assurance 9–10, 17, 23, 30, 37, 133, 135, 235, 249, 252, 321–3, 384, 421 astro-soteriology 391 astronomy 176, 390–4 atonement, doctrine of the 70, 85, 90, 92–4, 136, 137, 174, 180, 228, 230, 232, 234–9, 243, 244, 248, 250, 252, 258, 275, 296, 377, 381, 383, 384–5, 396, 416 see also limited atonement; universal atonement Baptists 16, 106, 127, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 195, 346 Barrier Act (1697) 43, 172, 424 Bereans 127, 134–5, 138 Bible see also Scripture: King James Version (Authorized Version) 205, 208, 209, 211 Revised Version 345 Burghers 129, 131 see also Antiburghers Calvinism 2, 5, 9, 24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 45, 48n, 57, 58–61, 65, 69, 88, 89, 93, 95, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137, 141, 147, 150, 151, 173, 174–5, 213–15, 218, 225, 229, 235,

248, 257, 273, 275, 279, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 293, 295, 296, 316, 321, 323, 324, 345, 362, 371, 376–87 see also hyper-Calvinism Calvinist paradox 213–25 canonization 164, 165–6 Catholic Apostolic Church 137, 232, 333 Catholic Enlightenment see Enlightenment, Catholic Chalcedon, Council of 2, 4 chance 7, 64, 105, 409 charismatic experience 27, 29, 228–9 Christianity, as revealed religion 15–18, 87, 89–90, 176, 179–82, 248 Christology 2, 4, 88, 180, 232, 234, 236, 238 see also Jesus Christ Church of Scotland: Evangelical party in 8, 38, 69, 89, 112, 188, 217, 243, 290, 316 see also evangelicalism General Assembly 2, 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 71, 89, 119, 128, 134, 171, 172, 189, 195, 196, 217, 235, 243, 245, 247, 255, 256, 257, 265, 292, 303, 316, 329, 330, 331, 387n, 419, 421, 424, 426, 428, 429, 430 Moderate party in 8–9, 43, 52, 53, 56, 57–8, 61–6, 69–80, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 112, 113, 114–15, 116, 119, 120, 162, 172, 181, 188, 216, 217, 235, 243, 285, 286, 290, 301, 302, 304, 305, 311, 316, 407 polity 112–13, 123, 138, 171, 291 see also Scottish Episcopal Church, polity church: invisible 35–6, 133 possibility of salvation outside of the 158–9 civil magistrates, power of 11, 130–2 clearances see Highland clearances Common Sense Realism see Scottish Common Sense Realism Congregationalism 122, 136–7, 195, 275, 346, 364 conscience 44, 72–4, 76, 80, 92, 115, 116, 120, 130, 135, 181, 218, 231–2, 244, 376, 383, 414, 428 contingency 3, 7 conversion 27, 28, 29, 30–1, 32, 34, 37, 38, 93, 100, 105, 107, 178, 180, 269, 270, 275, 316, 319, 384

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   Covenant of Grace 2, 4, 5, 21, 23, 85, 87, 88, 93, 94, 102 Covenant of Redemption 2, 4, 88 Covenant of Works 2, 4, 85, 102 covenant theology 25, 88n see also federal theology covenant, Mosaic 35, 102 Covenanters 113, 127, 132, 216, 265, 289, 384 Darwinism 123, 400, 404–16 see also evolution (natural selection) death 18, 73–4, 166, 213, 223, 233, 318, 324, 325, 412 deism 15, 17–19, 44, 47, 48, 86, 115, 135, 156, 178, 272, 301n, 303, 391–2, 393, 410 determinism 7, 33, 409 disestablishmentarianism 362, 372, 420, 421 see also establishment Disruption (1843) 101, 119, 171, 175, 201, 218, 219, 242–59, 284, 315, 316, 317, 345, 360, 371, 380, 394, 404, 407, 419–20, 429 dissent 43, 53, 127–38, 171, 195, 221, 257, 285, 359–62, 369, 370, 372, 373, 394, 420 divine right episcopacy see Episcopalianism domestic life 78, 101, 102, 105, 196, 215, 224 duelling 162–3 Ecclesiastical Characteristics 114–15 election 4, 5, 9, 34, 35, 77, 80, 132, 181, 205, 234, 235, 274, 285, 322, 377, 385–6, 422 see also atonement Enlightenment 14, 17, 18, 20, 24, 42–53, 58, 66n, 70, 75, 80, 89, 94, 95, 112, 113–14, 116, 118, 124, 127, 129, 130, 134, 138, 148, 149, 151, 170, 171, 173, 186, 188, 191, 269, 284, 285, 286, 301, 304, 310, 342, 343, 406 Catholic 155, 163, 164 enthusiasm 15, 17, 20, 31, 44, 47, 69, 71, 76, 173, 221, 301, 304 episcopacy 4, 266, 267 see also Episcopalianism Episcopalian evangelicals 275 Episcopalianism 127, 129, 155, 165, 229, 265–81, 307, 398 see also liturgy, Episcopalian establishment (ecclesiastical) 268, 404, 419, 420–1, 422, 428 see also disestablismentarianism Eucharist 7, 150, 151, 267–8, 270–1, 275–7, 278, 279, 281, 339 see also Lord’s Supper Evangelical Alliance (1846) 195 Evangelical Union (1843) 127, 138, 377, 385, 396 evangelicalism 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 34, 36, 38, 69, 70, 80, 84–96, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 130, 133, 135, 175, 176, 180, 181,

443

187, 191, 192, 196, 222, 228, 230, 243, 258, 269, 274–5, 279, 284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 293, 294, 296, 297, 315, 316, 317, 318, 321, 323, 327, 365, 377, 380, 382, 383, 386, 394, 398, 400, 404, 407, 411, 422 see also Church of Scotland, Evangelical Party in; Episcopalian evangelicals; liberal evangelicalism evil, problem of 120–1, 303, 305, 311, 412–13 evolution (natural selection) 121, 122, 123, 293, 368, 377, 380, 387, 398, 400, 404–5, 408, 409–10, 411–15 see also Darwinism evolution (of religion) 311, 415–16 exclusive Psalmody 246 extra-terrestrials 390–401 faith: nature of 86, 87, 89, 92–4, 96, 133–4, 135 relationship to reason 15, 16–17, 36, 44–5, 46, 47–8, 56, 57, 58, 93, 95, 135, 173, 177, 427 saving 10, 24, 31, 34, 36, 95–6, 133, 134, 135 see also assurance family worship 208, 330 federal theology 2, 4, 5, 9, 46, 88, 96, 129, 250, 251, 316, 321, 376, 381 fideism 18, 24, 44, 56, 57, 58–61, 135 see also faith, relationship to reason First World War 203, 326, 359, 373 Fisher’s Catechism 5, 129 Formula Consensus Helvetica 3, 6 Formula of Subscription 3, 6, 8, 9, 424 Free Church of Scotland 5, 11, 12, 96, 100, 118–19, 127, 138, 219, 222, 247, 290, 292, 293–7, 315, 323, 329, 335, 336, 337, 345, 346, 348, 353, 359, 370, 371, 372, 377, 386, 387n, 396, 397, 400, 404, 405, 407n, 415, 419, 420, 422, 423, 426, 428, 429, 430 and American slavery 193–6 “believing critics” in the 252–7 Disruption theologians 242–52 Irish support 289–91 and women’s hymnody see hymnody Free Presbyterian Church 12, 257, 406, 423, 424 freemasonry 217, 365 French Revolution 145, 152, 161, 166 Gaelic congregations 257 Gaelic language 100 see also Gaelic women’s poetry and song Gaelic women’s poetry and song 99–111 Glasgow, city of 365–70 Glorious Revolution 63n, 113, 265 God: his attributes 49, 59, 90–2, 386, 393

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444

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God: (cont.) his decrees 7, 121, 381, 387, 422 see also election (im-)passibility of 6–7 his love 5, 85, 88, 91–2, 94, 228, 229–34, 236–8, 250, 268–9, 377, 385, 387, 423 his sovereignty 5, 34, 80, 174, 273, 324, 386 as Trinity 2, 85, 109, 116, 181–2, 234, 239, 273 good works 48, 74, 160, 175, 275 grace 8, 15, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 44–5, 48, 51, 70, 84, 85, 108, 109, 147, 174–5, 180, 182, 208, 229, 230, 233, 234, 239, 295, 422, 423 irresistible 33, 77 means of 37 sacramental 269, 276 higher criticism 100, 249, 253, 293, 294, 342, 347–54 Highland clearances 104, 106 Holy Spirit 11, 18, 20, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 93, 94, 95, 121, 131, 179, 232, 234, 239, 248, 250, 251–2, 267, 270, 271, 281, 339 see also God; charismatic experience Holy Willie’s Prayer 201, 214–16 Human Nature in its Fourfold State 92–3, 100 human uniqueness 413–15 hymnody 246n, 314–27, 329, 331, 333, 335, 336–7 hyper-Calvinism 16, 84 hypothetical universalism 2, 45 see also Amyraldianism idealism, philosophical 116, 124, 291, 293, 306, 308, 404, 415 imago Dei see human uniqueness immediatism (policy on slavery) 191–3 Independency 16, 22, 127, 129, 130–8 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin) 173–4 Ireland, Scottish theology in 284–97 Jacobitism 8, 78, 102, 114, 148, 149, 150, 170, 265, 266, 268, 273, 274 Jansenism 147–8, 151 Jesuits 46, 142–8, 150–1, 190, 225 Jesus Christ see also Christology: as bridegroom 108–9 as mediator 21, 23, 51, 94, 103, 235–6, 238, 426 as second Adam 230, 251 as surety 4, 23 death of 7, 9, 73, 87, 89, 132, 160, 239, 250, 384 see also atonement his divine Sonship 4, 135, 235–6, 384 his divinity 104, 181, 285

his humanity 104 his incarnation 233–4 in popular song 103–4 justification 8, 35, 61, 85, 86, 87, 113, 114, 135, 205, 230, 232, 246, 247, 249, 270, 275 King’s College, Aberdeen 268, 278 liberal evangelicalism 365, 376, 428 Liberal Party see Young Scots Society liberalism (theological) 136, 280, 284, 370–3 Life and Work 430 limited atonement 9–10, 11, 77, 80, 102, 128, 387, 421 see also atonement, doctrine of the; universal atonement literature 199–212, 213–25, 295, 391, 401 as theological educator 224 liturgy: Episcopalian 267–8, 270, 271, 275, 278 in the Catholic Apostolic Church 138, 333 Presbyterian 329–39, 369, 404 Lord’s Supper 2, 133, 195, 249, 270, 331, 335–6, 339, 429 see also Eucharist lower criticism see textual criticism Marischal College, Aberdeen 8, 14, 15, 71, 171, 189, 270, 307, 330, 342, 351 marriage 78, 325 Marrow controversy 5, 9, 14, 21, 23, 24, 25, 46, 85, 88, 89, 129, 133, 178, 316 means of grace see grace, means of Millennialism 5, 275 miracles 9, 19, 20, 151, 156, 157, 161, 210, 301n, 303, 305, 307, 308, 311, 348, 399, 400 missionaries in Scotland 107 overseas 189, 324, 377 Roman Catholic in Scotland 147–9 Moderatism see Church of Scotland, Moderate party in Moravianism 314, 323 see also pietism Mosaic covenant see covenant, Mosaic music, in worship 246n, 329, 331, 333, 336, 337, 339, 366, 378 see also hymnody mysticism 268, 269, 292–3 natural law 22, 400, 408, 411 natural religion 87 natural science 44, 48, 117, 121, 122–3, 259, 293, 295, 390, 398, 400–1, 405–11, 413–14 neonomianism 5, 16 New College, Edinburgh 9, 84, 195, 243, 245, 247, 250, 253, 255, 257, 294, 295, 348, 350, 352, 401, 406, 407, 409, 420

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   New England 27, 30, 31, 137 New Light Presbyterianism 131, 216–17, 284–6 see also Church of Scotland, Moderate party in Nicaea, Council of 2, 4 novels see literature Old Light Presbyterianism 217, 285, 286 see also Church of Scotland, Evangelical party in On the Origin of Species 246, 404–6, 408 see also Darwinism organ 329, 335, 337 see also music, in worship papal infallibility 158, 165 see also ultramontanism passions 72–4 patronage 39, 42, 43, 45, 69, 85, 87, 89, 128, 130, 175, 216–17, 220, 243, 315, 363, 419, 420 see also Patronage Act (1711–12) Patronage Act (1711–12) 113, 216–17 Pelagianism 2, 45 perfectionism 323–5 philosophy 42, 49, 56–66, 115, 124, 143, 144, 149, 157, 163, 166, 173, 175, 176, 196, 217, 233, 244, 252, 272, 284, 286–9, 291, 292, 293, 294, 302, 303, 305, 306–11, 348, 364, 368, 377, 379, 380, 386, 390, 409 see also Scottish Common Sense Realism Pietism 15, 314, 316, 319, 320, 323–5, 377 piety 75, 79, 89, 94–5, 160, 230, 233, 259, 279, 315, 318, 327 literate 112–25 plurality of worlds 390–5 poetry: devotional 99, 100, 150, 315, 317, 323 secular 213, 216, 217n, 218 Popular party see Church of Scotland, Evangelical party in pre-Adamite man 396–7 preaching 16, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 34, 37, 43, 45–6, 51, 69–81, 86–7, 88, 93, 101, 102, 119, 130, 136, 181, 200, 205, 208, 210, 211, 221, 233, 235, 243, 244, 333, 353, 364, 373, 421 see also sermons predestination 7, 15, 151, 181, 270, 423 double 151, 214, 215, 303 Princeton (University, Seminary) 37, 90, 112, 116, 117, 121–4, 177, 287, 296, 409 Princeton(ian) theology 293–5, 410 providence 77, 101, 177–8 Quakerism 132, 137, 146, 187, 194, 195 Queen’s College, Belfast 199, 287

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rationalism 15, 16, 19, 25, 124, 279, 292 realism: philosophical see Scottish Common Sense Realism theological (eucharistic) 270–1 reason, natural 47–9, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65 Reformed Orthodoxy 6 Reformed Presbyterian Church 138–9 regeneration 85, 87, 114–15 baptismal 270, 274, 275 Relief Church (1761) 127, 130, 132, 138, 336, 362, 376 revival: archaeological 338, 367–8 liturgical 329 spiritual 27–33, 37–9, 88, 95, 115, 118, 127, 133, 137, 138, 269, 286, 316, 380, 426–30 Roman Catholicism 4, 15, 22, 45, 103, 137, 141–52, 155–67, 171, 173, 174, 177, 209, 210, 213, 215, 222, 224–5, 249, 268, 269, 273, 277, 279, 280, 297, 303, 339, 342, 343, 346, 380 Romanticism 228, 314, 338, 364 sanctification 35, 88, 94, 95, 113, 232, 270, 323 scepticism 24, 61–6, 69, 176, 210, 279, 290, 301, 302–3, 304, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310, 312, 391, 393 scholasticism 3, 22, 23–4, 49, 52, 128, 144, 148, 151, 162, 228, 378 Scotch Sermons 292, 424–6, 429 Scots Colleges in Europe: Douai 142–6, 148, 150, 152 Paris 141–2, 145–52 Spain (Madrid and Valladolid) 143–6, 148, 150, 152, 162 St Andrew, Rome 141–3, 145, 146–50, 152, 156, 161 Scots Confession 5 Scottish Common Sense Realism 123–4, 166, 176, 196, 217, 244, 284, 286, 287, 291, 293, 295, 306–7, 365, 404 Scottish Episcopal Church, polity 175, 265–6 Scripture: authority of 17, 18, 19, 25, 30, 100, 114, 136, 250, 254, 258, 295, 349, 350, 382 criticism of see higher criticism; textual criticism illumination of (by the Holy Spirit) 18–19, 20 infallibility of 1, 248, 254, 258, 350 inspiration of 1, 20, 76, 131, 136, 172, 248, 254, 256, 258, 275, 288, 294, 349, 382n moderate teaching on 73–6 providential preservation of 172, 348

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Secession (1733) 47, 85, 128, 130 see also United Secession Church; United Presbyterian Church Second World War 210 secularization 150, 243, 257, 410 sermons 2, 33–4, 37, 38, 50, 51, 62, 63, 64, 70–81, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 95, 100, 101, 102, 109, 117–18, 119, 128, 171, 186, 191, 195, 200, 201, 211, 220, 228, 232, 233, 244, 254, 275, 276, 277, 292, 330, 331, 359, 369, 422, 424–7, 429 see also preaching sin, imputation of 5–6, 46 slavery: abolition of 80, 171, 191–3 and baptism 186–8 and the Free Church of Scotland 193–6 theological argument about 188–96, 378 social care 175 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) 63, 64, 71, 78 Socinianism 9, 15, 44, 45, 46, 49, 249, 292 songs 99–111, 160, 194, 318, 336 see also hymnody speaking in tongues 11, 232 see also charismatic experience St Mary’s College, St Andrews 170, 174, 176, 189, 427 stained glass 329, 337, 338 suffering see evil, problem of Sum of Saving Knowledge 4 supralapsarianism 2 teinds 419 see also patronage Test Act 171 textual criticism 1, 172–3, 180, 255 The Method of Divine Government 119–21 theodicy see evil, problem of theology, experiential 229, 243, 245, 314–27 Thirty-nine Articles of Religion 2, 6, 173, 274, 279 toleration 42, 43, 50, 69, 80, 130, 131, 138, 151, 274, 387 tongues see speaking in tongues Tractarians 279, 281 Trafalgar, Battle of 190 transubstantiation 157, 271, 276 see also eucharist; Lord’s Supper

Trial and Triumph of Faith 2 Tübingen school 252, 348, 353 ultramontanism 160–1, 166, 279, 280 unanimity 3 see also toleration Unitarianism 122, 137, 272, 346 United Free Church 308, 336, 359, 365, 370, 372, 373, 376, 387n United Presbyterian Church 12, 132, 209, 257, 308, 329, 333, 334, 336, 359, 361–5, 368, 370, 376–80, 383, 386, 419, 422, 423, 426, 427 United Secession Church 131, 336, 362, 376, 377, 381, 382n, 383, 384 universal atonement 9–10, 45, 102, 132, 179–80, 384–5, 392, 395, 421 see also atonement, doctrine of the; limited atonement Usages Controversy (1717) 267, 271 vicarious penitence 237–8 see also atonement, doctrine of the virtualism 270–1, 276 see also eucharist Voluntaryism 130, 132, 363, 419 war 105–6, 184 War of American Independence 105, 117, 285 Westminster Assembly 2, 6, 246 Westminster Catechisms (Shorter and Longer) 1, 14, 89, 100, 103, 104, 108, 129, 138, 383, 385, 422 Westminster Confession of Faith 1–12, 22, 24, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 69, 74, 77, 89, 100, 103, 112, 113, 115, 130, 131, 132, 138, 158, 173, 235, 246, 249, 252, 255, 256–7, 258, 259, 285, 286, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 344, 348, 354n, 376–7, 383, 385, 404, 421–4, 426, 429 subscription to 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 42, 44, 46, 52, 131, 258, 285, 286, 292, 376–7, 383, 424 Woman’s Guild 430 women: in the abolitionist movement 196 ordination of 430 suffrage 360, 378 their domestic role 219 theological influence of 99–111, 314–27 university access 427 Young Scots Society (YSS) 359, 361, 370–3