THE OLD SCOTCH MODERATES.

THE Duke of Richmond's Bill for the Abolition of Lay Patronage in the Church of Scotland casts a vivid light on the change which has come over that institution, and recalls an interesting set of Churchmen. Patronage was once the battle-ground of the two great parties into which that, like every other Church, is divided. On the one side was the party which walks by faith, and on the other that which prefers to walk by sight so long as the sun is up. On the one side were clergy fervent in spirit and prone to push earnestness to the length of bigotry, while the clergy on the other were inclined to test all arguments by the edge of the naked reason, to be impatient of heroics, to look with scepticism on the promptings of enthusiasm, and to hew away the portals of the faith until the way should be broad enough to admit even the crowds of the market-place. The old Evangelicals of Scotland were east in much the same mould as the Low Churchmen of England were fifty years ago, and they were not unlike what Mr. Spurgeon's congregation would be to-day, if it were made up of hard logical heads as well as of believing hearts. But it is not so easy to find an English parallel to the old Scotch Moderates. They have a character of their own, which is an insoluble puzzle to those im- patient students who, like Buckle, fancy that they know Scotch Presbyterianism when they have studied a few books of Cameronian divinity ; when they have applied their philosophical measuring- wand to the " godly Mr. Renwick " and to Richard Cameron ; and when, with a happy union of insolence and ignorance, they have de- voted a few pages of rhetorical sneers to a nation which could throw its rare intellectual capacity at the feet of what they are pleased to term a besotted fanaticism. Buckle would scarcely have under- stood the retort that the " fanaticism " even of the Covenanters was never " besotted," and that he himself would have had a slender chance of victory if he bad tried a fall in the field of logic with some of the fanatics on whom he showered the philosophic scorn that he had borrowed from Comte. Mr. Fronde, who does see the real spirit of Scotch Calvinism, treats it with a respect and an admiration which form a happy contrast to the

insolent contempt of the historian who fancied that the world could be healed of its woes by the glad tidings of statistical tables. And the truth is, that the theological extravagances of the Covenanters became a quickening intellectual agent, because they forced the people to think for themselves. By presenting to

the mind of unlettered peasants metaphysical problems which were only theological renderings of the deepest questions of the schools, they gave the thoughts of those wayfaring men such a range, and often such a sublimity, as will never come to any like body of people who draw their inspiration from merely --

secular knowledge. And meanwhile, many of the Scotch clergy and laity fought as stoutly against the fanaticism of the Coven-

anters, and the temper of the whole Evangelical school, as Mr. Buckle himself, although they could not match the rancour of his monkish intellectual bigotry, for the reason that they knew what they were speaking about. Knowledge is the strait-waistcoat which prevents fury from doing mischief to itself.

A " Moderate " minister of the old school was a Calvinistic Broad Churchman, at least as much a lawyer as a theologian, a man of the world rather than a saint, and a human creature who did not disdain the inspiration of conviviality. As his name implied, he aspired to be " moderate " in all things. He preached Cal-

vinism moderately, be moderately told men to be moral, he

preached moderately long sermons, and he rebuked fanaticism with moderate warmth of contempt. In the same spirit did he interpret the command to preach the Gospel to the whole earth.

The divine behest implied, he thought, that the Gospel was a very good thing when taken in moderation, but that it would be rash to push missionaries—especially if they were Evangelicals—into

the placid and happy ignorance of a heathen village. There was only one subject which made him lose his moderation, and that

was fanatical attacks on patronage, for these were attacks on him- self. But for patronage, he would never have had a good stipend and a comfortable manse. No body of worshippers would ever have chosen him, if they had been left to the freedom of their own will, and if their impulses had been governed by that sense of responsibility which comes with liberty. Hugh Miller once drew a striking picture of a divinity student who rose to the ministry by sheer dint of his scholarship and ilk's keen brain, but whose character was open to such suspicions that no 'congregation would

ever give him a "call." His hope lay in the good offices of a

patron ; but the power of Veto which the General Assembly gave to congregations seemed to blast them for ever, and he left the country. Had he remained a few years, be would have found the decree of the General Assembly set aside by the Court of Session and the House of Lords, and his own chances brought back again for a brief space of time. Although painted by the hand of an Evangelical, that picture does not unfairly represent the old race of rural " Moderates." Many of them were clever, and their skill in debate showed that they would have been capital lawyers or politicians. Many of them could write English with

elegance, and they did not allow their style to jolt over the " corderoy road" of Calvinistic logic, but they took the smoother

way of the moral law. Stout Cameronians, " Old Lights," and all the grim zealots of Secession, turned aside with disgust from the "could morality" of the Moderates, saying that it had not an ounce of the Gospel from one year's end to the other, and that it was little better than heathenism. It was precisely the dislike to that " cauld morality" that caused the Disruption. The parishioners of Auchterarder did not pretend that Mr. Young was morally bad, nor did those of Marnoch specify any such blot in the character of Mr. Edwards as could have been seen by a Court of law. Each band of devotees thought merely that the man of the patron's choice had not unction enough to be a fit teacher of the Gospel, and they refused to accept "could morality" in its place. But the Moderate minister was as certain of the laird's or the lord's favour as of the devotees' frown. A deposed minister once pathetically pleaded that be had

been deprived of a manse, a stipend of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and the privilege of periodically dining with his Grace the Duke of Argyll., The Moderates further disdained the fanaticism which fled from whisky, and, when whisky took the etherealised form of toddy, they believed in its virtues much more fervently than they credited the Confession of Faith. Many a deep carouse did they comfort themselves with when they met at Presbytery dinners, or when the business of the Gospel drew half a dozen of them to the same manse. They bore the scars of spirituous battles on their glowing faces. The rich coppery hue of many a reverend countenance had been got only by dint of long and persistent effort,—by nightly touching and retouching, by the laying of tint on tint, by the

determination never to throw away an opportunity of giving mellowness to the alcoholic colouring of years. Some of their faces could not have been tinted for less than five or six hundred pounds, and if they had drunk old port instead of toddy, the operation might have coat them half as many thousands. There were " drunken Presbyteries," filled, of course, with theologians who, even in the last stages of articulation, boasted that they were Moderates. One, which played a great part during the Ten Years' Struggle of the Disruption, consumed as much toddy as would have drowned the General Assembly.

Even the leaders of the Moderate party did not disdain the spirituous comforts of this life. " Jupiter Carlyle," as the stately and convivial minister of Inveresk was called, sends up a steam of toddy from his wonderful diary, when he does not soak it in claret. Indeed, he and the rest of the intellectual Moderates drank as bard as the lawyers of their time ; and it would not be easy to find a more vigorous comparison. That they were also a band of clever and cultivated men, it is needless to say, when they included Robertson, Blair, Hill, and other writers or preachers of only one degree less mark. These men deliberately set themselves to the task of stripping Scotch Preabyterism free from provincialism, and so triumphant were they that most of their sermons might have been preached in a Catholic church or in a heathen temple as fitly as in St. Giles's. They taught the moral law with polite- ness; they made philosophy the handmaid of Christianity with well-bred moderation ; and they so handled the grimmer tenets of Calvin as to hurt no susceptibilities. They were masters of theological deportment, and they would have been Fathers of the Church, if the Church had been a school of manners. Hence, their supreme effort was to write a good style. They aspired to rank with the men of letters who were making Paris and London the New Jerusalems of Literature. Robertson polished his sentences as laboriously as an old Covenanter would have tried to smooth the way unto eternal life, and we fear that he rather disdained the jerky rhetoric of St. Paul. He treasured the com- pliment of Horace. Walpole that his style was fine, as fondly as a Cameronian might have nursed the remembrance of the day when he was hunted to the hills by the dragoons of Claverhouse, or when he smote those messengers of Satan hip and thigh at Drumclog. Blair was even more careful to smooth his rhetoric until it should satisfy the imperative decorum of the Schools, and he has had his reward in the fact that his sermons, if they do not yield inspiration to the theologian, are valued in grammar-classes for the Pharisaic cleanness of their style. The leaders of the Moderates were men of the world, as well as writers and theologians. They could play whist with a skill worthy of an Episcopalian training ; they went to the theatre as freely as if the Covenanters had never lifted up a testimony against unhallowed amusements; they were on excellent terms with David Hume ; and they did their best to prove the justice of his glowing compliment that their Church was more favourable to Deism th'an any other in Christendom.

The storm of the Disruption blew away the old Moderates from their place of power. Their ability and culture had been sensibly declining before that revolution ; the wave of earnest- ness which brought the change having also lifted the most powerful and original minds of the Church into a region of aggressive Calvinism which stunted the growth of philosophic indifference to dogma, or of such a style as would have satisfied Dr. Blair. Cook, Bryce, and Robertson of Ellon, the leaders of the Moderate party, were all able men ; but they were far more than outmatched, both in the pulpit and in debate, by Chalmers, Cunningham, Candlish, Welsh, Guthrie, Begg, and the other leaders of the Non-Intrusionists. The Disruption carried the flower of the clergy to the Free Church. But before many years had passed, it began to be seen that they were to have no successors. The very zeal of the Free Church had gene- rated an impatience of independent thought and a demand for the rigorous Calvinism of the Covenant which were strangely out of harmony with the growing Liberalism of the age. Young men of real power did not find such fetters congenial, and the Free Church is paying the penalty which always awaits those institu- tions that abut themselves into an iron shroud of dogma. The leaders whom it followed into the Wilderness of Voluntaryism are all dead, with the exception of Dr. Buchanan, a respectable debater, and Dr. Begg, who had the moat earthy mind of them all, and who is indeed •a vigorous political agitator rather than a theologian ; a debater who would have become the equal of any man in the House of Commons in the power of sheer hard hitting, if he had been caught young enough ; a born pugilist, an incar- nate denial of the precept " Blessed are the meek," but not a Father of the Church. The only worthy successor of the vigorous band is Dr. Rainy, and he stands alone. Bold minds, like Mr. Knight, of Dundee, can find no resting-place in the Free Church, and hence it is undergoing a process of intellectual starvation. The traditions of the Establishment, on the other hand, have been so much more favourable to individual freedom, that it affords a better field of work to the men who do not choose to forget that this is the nineteenth century, and that the theological point of view cannot be the same to-day as it was two centuries ago. Hence the Established Church has been gaining com- mand of mental power as fast as the Free Church has been losing that regulating fly-wheel of influence. It has found room for a Broad-Church party, led by such men as Principal Tulloch and Dr. Wallace. Those men represent the old Moderates, but they are as different from them as this age is from the last. Intellectual prudence has ceased to be their chief distinction, and in truth it has given place to an intellectual boldness which Knox and Melville would have smitten with anathema. They represent as faithfully as Dean Stanley himself that rationalistic influence which is shaping the dogmas of traditional Christianity to suit the subtle intellectual and moral demands of an essentially scientific age. They further differ from Robertson and the old chiefs of Moderatism in the indifference or the hostility with which they look at patronage, the sheet-anchor of their school a hundred years ago ; and the Duke of Richmond's Bill is a confession that the old Moderates of the Scottish Church have passed away.