SCOTTISH DIVINES OF THE FAST AND THE FUTURE.* WE confess

to being a little disappointed with the volume of lectures bearing the title of the Scottish Divines. The subjects are very interesting, including the names of the most eminent figures in the religious and ecclesiastical life of Scotland, from John Knox and Andrew Melville, to Robert Lee and Norman

• Scottish Divines, 1505-1872. Bt. Giles's Lectures. Third Serie& Edinburgh: Macuiven and Wallace. 1883.

The Life-Education and Wider Culture of the Christian Ministry : its Sources, Methods, and Aims. By James Stewart Wilson, lIA, Minister of New Abbey. London and Edinburgh : William Blackwood and Bons. 1882.

Macleod. Among the lecturers are some of the best known of the clergy and theological Professors of Scotland at the present time, such as Principal Tulloch, of St. Andrews, Professor Flint, of Edinburgh, Dr. Herbert Story, the biographer of " Cardinal " Carstires, and Dr. Cameron Lees, whose metropolitan cathedral of St. Giles has given this series of lectures its title. Yet very few of the lectures are, what all lectures having men for their subjects should be, striking por- traits. So practised a writer as Principal Tulloch could, of course, hardly fail to do justice to a theologian of tone and temper so congenial to his own as Archbishop Leighton. Seldom, we might, perhaps, even say never, has that tragic combination of genius and eccentricity, Edward Irving, been treated with such discriminating justice and good sense as by Dr. Story ; while Dr. Lees appreciates, without becoming maudlin over, the saintliness and subtle spirituality of Bishop Ewing, the friend of Erskine of Linlathen. Principal Robert- son, the historian " Moderate " leader, and friend of David Hume and " Jupiter " Carlyle, is well sketched by a namesake of his own, a Glasgow clergyman, who should not, however, have written such slipshod English as this :—" He executed an admirable translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, on author who must have engaged his sympathy, and helped to fashion his character, a book, which now more than ever, powerfully attracts men of thought and cul- ture." But the bulk of the men whose stories are given in these lectures — Knox, Melville, Ebenezer Erskine, Samuel Rutherford, in particular—are shadows, or at the best but partisans giving and taking "mashing blows ;" of their personal qualities, of their private life, we learn next to nothing. If it be said in excuse for the lecturers on these divines that little is known of them apart from the controversies and struggles in which they were engaged, this cannot be said by way of justifica- tion for Dr. Donald Macleod, whose account of Chalmers is a disappointing piece of patch-work, although the abiding charm of Chalmers's personality is its essential oneness. Nor are we quite satisfied with Professor Flint's lecture on Norman Macleod. It is enthusiastic enough, but it is also laboured, and it "goes round the subject," instead of gripping it firmly. We under- stand what Mr. Flint means when, referring to Afacleod's college days, he says :—" He was the companion of some of the best and brightest youths at the University. He held close converse with Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth." But this association of raw Glasgow lads in their teens with the masters of our literature is, to say the least, clumsy in its abruptness. Most of the lectures reproduced in this volume are commendably free from controversial bitterness. It is to be regretted that Dr. Cunningham, of Crieff, should have imported a good deal of acridity into his, in many respects, careful account of the struggle in the Church of Scotland that raged round the person and " practices " of Dr. Robert Lee. Such an expression as "the old ladies of Edinburgh were beginning to be greatly alarmed" might be excusable in a Scotch pamphlet or newspaper, a quarter of a century ago. Now, it has the musty and unpleasant odour of stale invective.

Lectures on the Scottish Divines who have flourished between 1507 and 1872, necessarily embrace between them a history of ecclesiastical life North of the Tweed from the Reformation almost to the present day. This history must be allowed to be one of controversies, dissensions, and the growth of Presbyterian sects, and it is not remarkable that some of the lecturers should have become positively impatient in their grief over the years spent in dismal broils and heartburnings over trifles. Dr. Cunningham breaks out almost hysterically :—" Alas for our poor country, because of its religious divisions ! What would we not do, or dare, or sacrifice, for union,—union, with almost any Church or sect. What brain-waste! What money-waste ! What loss of temper, of charity, of every] good thing; three men everywhere doing the work of one, and not doing it so well as the one would,—heathenism and vandalism rising up in the cities, and none to help ! Oh! the sin and the shame of it !" Even Dr. Tulloch, although the leading Scotch apostle of sweet reasonableness, and although he tells us rather hopefully that "mere logical ingenuity on barren questions, once supposed a mark of ability and erudition, is now rated at its true value, as the mark of a mean rather than a large understanding," indulges occasionally in a jeremiad

"Of all the miserable histories in the world, that of Scottish eocle- Inas. tical and theological polemics is probably the most futile and

miserable '(low long, 0 Lord !' may we say, but the cry is hardly heard, amid the clamour of faction, now as well as then ; and

the last thing that is thought of is the bnilding of a national temple in which men like Leighton, and men yet very different from him, might yet find a spiritual home, and the healing fruits of Christian science and piety flourish, rather than the bitter herbs of zealotry and party."

Far, indeed, be it from us to minimise the evil effects of sectarianism in Scotland, or anywhere else, or to refrain from hoping, with Principal Tulloch, that the traditional theology North of the Border is being superseded by a more genial and comprehensive view of the divine economy.

But it should be remembered that Scotch sectarianism means, even at its worst, intensity and sincerity—men who spend their time, their money, and their vital force in splitting hairs must believe in these hairs—and intensity and sincerity count for more in character than apathy or torpor. There may be what Mr. Arnold calls " hideousness " in Scotch Dissent, but there never has been "immense ennui." Writers on Scotch ecclesiastical controversies, especially clergymen, seem to be driven to their wits' end to account for the bitterness which has always marked them. Has not poverty—the poverty both of clergy and laity—had a good deal to do with it ? The Reformation was not an unmixed blessing to the people of Scotland. The nobles who acted with Knox seized the lands of the Church they helped to overthrow, and Knox, to his great mortification, found himself unable to prevent spoliation. Once, as soon as the nobles had, by means of the Calvinists, attained their ends, the absolute selfishness of which is admitted by the most moderate of the historians of Scotland, they went over to Episcopacy, and became the keenest and most unscrupulous of the persecutors of Episcopacy. Speculation on the causes and courses of Scotch sectarianism consists of so many "if's " and "might have beens " and one can at least wonder what might have been if the successors of Knox in the leadership of the Commons of Scotland had successfully led their followers against the robbers of the Church, and com- pelled them to part with that property which the Church had, although, no doubt, in a scandalously perfunctory way, ad- ministered on behalf of the poor ? Might there not, by a redis- tribution of the Church's revenues have been secured for the occupants, both of the pulpits and the pews of Scotland, that modest competence, "neither poverty nor riches," which helps, at all events, to lead to the peaceful frame of mind least con- ducive to bitterness and fanaticism.

Life-Education of the Christian Ministry consists of a series of lectures delivered by scholarly and cultured clergymen of the

Church of Scotland, to the theological students attending the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews, supplemented by a sermon, bearing the suggestive, not to say ominous, title of "A Plea for a Learned Ministry." Mr. Wilson's purpose is, in fact, to indicate some of the educational processes which will turn out good Scotch divines in the future, and among the " influences " which he suggests that students should submit themselves to, are what he styles the profane past, the sacred past, the home present, the foreign present, and the future. His lectures amount to a series of advices to his hearers and readers to be above all things catholic in their sympathies and their knowledge, if they are to keep themselves and their Church abreast of the times which they are apparently to find them- selves confronting. These advices are almost uniformly good, and Mr. Wilson's own sympathies are all in the right direction. But his style, with its elaborate rhetorical embroidery, looks half-a-century old, at the least. Thus he tells Scotch students to look beyond their own country for moral inspiration, and support, and types of human, in this Johnsonian fashion :—

" Certainly, whatever may be our wealth in illustrious types of excellence and glorious instances of virtue, culled and gathered from our own native fields ; yet this great picture-gallery and treasury must for us be indefinitely increased, both in richness and variety, when we transfer to its walls and chambers the portraits of the greatest men, and specimens of the noblest deeds of all lands and nations. It cannot but excite a most salutary pressure, and prove a most liberalising education, for those who have to cultivate a delicate moral perception and sustain a keen moral enthusiasm, to dwell in such august and awful presences, to look on such exalted and in- spiring exemplars, and to feed their souls with such priceless spiritual influences?'

The sermon, "A Plea for a Learned Ministry," which Mr. Wilson publishes along with his "Lectures," is bolder in thought than they are, and in style is freer and more vigorous. Certainly, Mr. Wilson's Church needs "a learned ministry," if this account of its condition be correct :—

"I think it is too evident to require any proof that, partly from the popular constitution of our Church, partly from the poverty of our ecclesiastical endowments, partly from the exigencies of a rapidly increasing population, and in great measure from the pressure of that spirit of this practical age which clamours loudly for practical, visible, tangible results, and measures everything by those material fruits that can be tabulated and enumerated and go to swell statistics and fill reports, there is a growing propensity to cultivate and foster the one element of the Church life and strength at the expense of the other. Preaching, evangelising, visiting, organising, money-raising, and the construction and superintendence of ecclesiastical parochial machinery, are rising in popularity and demand every day, at such a rate that they threaten, in this wild rush and flow of all the vital blood to the heart, to induce emotional asphyxia or intellectual atrophy. Every day, doing,' in the more crude sense of that word, is more and more idealised and insisted upon, until thinking' almost threatens to become a lost art and 'learning' a secret, sus- pected practice, or obsolete tradition."

But will there be any room for a "learned ministry" in such a Church ? In any case, its authorities ought to have their atten- tion drawn to the very serious danger which, if Mr. Wilson is correct, is -now threatening its intellectual, if not also its spiritual, supremacy in Scotland.