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BEING crippled for life, the
fireside miscellaneous
newspaper work in which I was chiefly engaged
during the eleven years at Thwaites House suited me well enough. I usually
got plenty of it to do, notwithstanding fluctuations, some of which were due
to two health breakdowns on my own part, and some to outside changes. For
several years I continued to send my monthly budget to the Cape, and
that connection came only to an end with changed
proprietorship. At one time, for a lengthened
period, I was writing leaders and other articles to
three daily papers. On having formed their Club,
the Conservatives of Keighley determined to have likewise a weekly
newspaper. I was its editor for some years, and through its leader columns
gave vigorous expression to moderate men's views, and their fears of the
devious paths into which Mr
Gladstone was leading his party. I happened to
have a right to call myself the godfather, if not the
father, of the Keighley Press, for I was the first
editor of the first newspaper a weekly one
Keighley ever had. This first paper was an offshoot
of the Bradford Observer when, except on the
Liberation Society's policy, it was still of the old
Whig type. The Conservatives of Keighley kept to
the old paths, while the followers of Mr Gladstone
had, in our opinion, strayed away into the path that,
if followed far, would lead them to secular education,
as well as the separation of Church and State, to
interference with parental rights and responsibilities,
and all kinds of rights belonging to and forming the
soul of individual freedom. Among the Keighley
Conservatives were, I think, no more Tories than
could be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.
The rest of us were old Whigs, or moderate Liberals,
who refused to be dragged into the new path that led
to revolutionary perils. I felt strongly, and wrote
strongly, but made no personal enmities. Educational enthusiasts, Liberationists, and Radicals saw
that T wrote as I spoke, and gave me credit for
speaking honestly as I thought on public questions.
When the time for parting came, and after the
Conservative Club had presented me with a valuable
timepiece, bearing a complimentary inscription,
Liberal and Conservative friends joined to give me a
farewell dinner, and to send me off with a well-lined
new purse.
During my twenty years'
absence I took a lively
interest in legislative measures, and all other things
which concerned Scotland. I know that people of
my generation and rearing remained true to Scotland wherever they went and however long away,
and I hope it is so yet, and ever will be. I was
much excited and buoyed up with inflated hopes
of Presbyterian reunion when the Conservative
Government proposed to abolish patronage in the
Church of Scotland. English old Tories, large and
small patrons of all political parties, and pundits of
the English Universities would like to stop short
at an amendment of Lord Aberdeen's Act. Mr
Gladstone, looking with High Church hostility at
a project of liberation which, reason ruling the
divided bodies, might again give Scotland a mighty
Presbyterian Church, tabled a series of adverse
resolutions, from which, however, he fled when the
time for moving them came. The English Liberationists and the Scottish United Presbyterians were
more valorous in their opposition than either Mr
Gladstone or Dr Rainy and his Free Church
followers. I wrote a long letter to Lord Advocate
Gordon, in the opening sentence of which I told
him I did not want him to reply and he did not,
except by sending a copy of the Bill, which was a
perfectly satisfactory reply. In my letter I gave
him my own and other people's experiences of the
mockingly illusive nature of Lord Aberdeen's Act,
with its costly, prolonged procedure, so irritating to
objecting parishioners, and so damaging to objected presentees, whether the frequently inconsistent
decisions were favourable to them or the reverse.
I was afraid not so much of Gladstone and Non-
conformist hostility as of the feeling which was
rather prevalent among English Conservatives that
a mere tinkering of the Aberdeen Act should suffice,
and that to abolish patronage in Scotland would be
the first blow of the axe to patronage in England,
which has a market value it never had north of
the Tweed. In my letter to the Lord Advocate and
in the English newspapers which allowed me free
expression of opinion, I pleaded earnestly for total
abolition, with reasonable compensation to patrons.
The Lord Advocate and the
Government stood to their guns. Hesitating English Conservative members were
reassured, and followed their leaders; and if I remember rightly, some
Liberal peers and commoners, who were well instructed in Scottish history,
past and contemporary, supported the policy of root and branch abolition,
which was carried out. And as soon as the Act was passed, several dukes and
other noblemen of Scotland, who were the chief lay patrons, generously
resolved to forego their claims to compensation, and the extensive Crown
patronage, which in the main had formerly belonged to the bishops, was also
relinquished without compensation. With this relief, and its Revolution and
Treaty of Union guaranteed rights and privileges, the Church of Scotland was
made the freest of all the Churches of Christendom, whether established or
non-established. The Church of Scotland was thus much strengthened, and yet
the ardent friends of Presbyterian reunion had much cause to feel deeply
disappointed. Instead of the reunion, which they believed would have been,
religiously, morally, socially, and economically, in the highest degree
beneficial to Scotland, they saw the hedges of partition trimmed afresh, and armed with the barbed
wire of the separation of Church and State, devised
by English Nonconformists when, losing hold of
their Puritan doctrines, they had stepped into
political dissenterism.
In the later years of the
seventies, while clearly
seeing the trend towards secular education, and the
adoption of hasty devices, pregnant with dangers to
come, in making the splice with the past which
altered circumstances required, there were surprises
impending which I could not have believed if an
angel from heaven had foretold them. Who could
then believe the plunge into the bog of Irish
separation possible? or deem it credible that any
British Ministry would, through unavenged Majuba,
the retrocession of the Transvaal, and the miserable
Conventions, make the Boer war, as soon as the
Boers completed their preparations, as sure as death,
unless our once great country sank so low as to
abandon her loyal children in South Africa, and to
eat her leek of dishonour before envious and mighty
Powers, who wished for opportunities to seize
British colonies and dependencies? In the seventies
I saw, in their initiating stages, movements in
operation which I feared would develop into dangers
to all existing institutions and principles of liberty
and order, on which nations had built up their
somewhat varied forms of Christian civilisation.
As yet indeed Holyoake, the argumentative thinker,
and Bradlaugh, the blustering orator of infidelity,
had not a numerous army of followers, and the
all-plundering and all-levelling theory of Socialism
had got only a slight grip of the maddest of
trade-unionists in strikes and wars with capitalist
employers and companies. Higher criticism, archaeology, and the unproved theory of evolution were
working together to undermine the old reliance on
the plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible
which had so long been common, with variations of
interpretation to all the Churches of Christendom,
but as yet neither the attacks on the Bible nor the
evolution theory, which went far beyond them, had
much visibly weakened the faith or changed the
habits of nine hundred in the thousand of the
British people.
From early youth I was
conscious of the great
revolution that was being irresistibly worked out
by new mechanical inventions, steam power, rail-
ways, and steamships, and looked with apprehension
upon the growth of cities and towns, and the
dispersion, by healthy emigration to colonies or
unhealthy migrations to centres of crowded urban
industries at home, of the rural population that
had ever been in all times of trial the backbone of
national strength. But in I860, when I left Scot-
land, children were brought up in the old way,
which had given Scotsmen for centuries a high
ranking among the nations of the world. The
three parties into which Presbyterians had divided
themselves, while bitterly wrangling over minor
matters, were zealously working on the old principles in worship and education. They had by their
divisions lost the moral policing power of the grand
parochial system, which had been in rural districts
the marvel-working agency for religious and civil
advancement before the Disruption. Professing the
same creed, and having the same form of Church
government, and looking fully in the face the war
with infidelity which was already waxing hot, it
was reasonable to expect that a reunion of the
Presbyterians of Scotland would take place when
patronage, the chief cause of disunion, had been
abolished root and branch, and when, in electing
their ministers, Church of Scotland congregations
had got a voting equality between the rich and the
poor members, which is very rarely found among
Dissenters, because those who are the greater givers
of money are of more account than poor and
perchance more pious members.
In the seventies I was fully
conscious of the fact
that the white-race nations were doomed to go
through the ordeal of a transition period which
involved far more than wild outbursts like the
French Revolution or wars of conquest. It seemed
to me then, and it seems to me so yet, that
Christianity alone can be relied upon as a break-
water against raging floods of materialistic degradation and suicidal revolutionarism,
and that with readjustment of creeds, broadening of views, and co-operative
efforts, Romanists, Greeks, and Protestants should form solidly into battle line to
defend faith in God and life beyond the grave
against those to whom the present life is the be-all
and end-all, and also against the predominating
pretences of science to transgress beyond the realm
of matter, its proper sphere, wherein it works
wonders, while of the soul-side it knows nothing.
While looking forward to the greater muster of the
forces of Christianity, I was in the seventies grievously disappointed because the three sections of
Scottish Presbyterians did not at once seize upon a
great opportunity for closing up their ranks.
I was not so much surprised
at the hardened Liberation Society sectarianism of the United Presbyterians as at the renegading recalcitrancy of the
ruling majority of the Free Church. The old sects
of Seceders in 1847 formed their Union by burying
the "Testimonies" of their founders, and erecting on
the tomb an obelisk inscribed, "Voluntaryism." I
had no idea that during my absence from Scotland
the new rulers of the Free Church had '43 men
not yet having disappeared or changed been
quietly burying Disruption principles, and making
ready an obelisk of their own, which as yet had no
clear inscription. The political element was already
making sad inroads on the spiritual life of Dissenting
Churches. Reactionary Ritualists were alienating
or provoking Church of England Protestants, but
there was still so much religious vitality a thing
which has not so much connection as many people
suppose with flourishing finances and grandiose
places of worship in all our Churches of the
Reformation that one had a right to expect a
general rally of all denominations in support of
Christian ethics, and the laws, customs, and institutions which had been founded on them. Full of
the hope that there would be such a rally as soon
as the Christian laity understood how faith and
morals were endangered by the streams of revolutionary and utterly subversive ideas which were
flowing in from various and widely separate sources,
I wrote a series of articles, expressive of my mingled
hopes and fears, which appeared in the Glasgow
News, and it was in consequence of these articles
that, to my surprise, I was called back to Scotland.
One fine day in September or
October, 1880, I
received a note intimating that Mr Charles Innes,
solicitor, Inverness, and Sheriff-Clerk of Ross-shire,
who was in search of an editor for a weekly
Conservative newspaper about to be started at
Inverness, was coming to see me, and hoped to find
me at home. As we were living in the country,
this note only reached me a few hours before Mr Innes arrived. We talked the matter over freely and frankly. I was a cripple
for life, and subject to breakdowns, which did not disable me for writing
but kept me tied to the home, sometimes for a few days, and sometimes for a
week at a stretch. I was in my fifty-third year, and felt it a serious
matter to pull up stakes. That night we came to no settlement, but he called
me again to meet him and dine with him at Leeds, and there and then I was
persuaded to make the venture. I trusted in Mr Innes,
who was to be managing director. That trust at
first sight was more than justified by our friendly and
mutually co-operative relations for a long period of
years, till Mr Innes, who was ten years my junior,
died. |
