Norman Macleod

‘But he hears a far-off musicGuiding all the stately spheres,In his father-heart it echoes,So he claps his hands and cheers.’

The hymn ‘Courage, brothers,’ has a telling ring, though only of rhetoric; and in a song that had the honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his cleverest achievement in rhyme is ‘Captain Frazer’s Nose,’ which we are told was written during violent pain.

Oh, if ye’re at Dumbarton fair,Gang to the castle when ye’re there,And see a sicht baith rich and rare—The nose o’ Captain Frazer.Unless ye’re blin’ or unco glee’t,A mile awa’ ye’re sure to see’t,And nearer han’ a man gauns wi’tThat owns the nose o’ Frazer.It’s great in length, it’s great in girth,It’s great in grief, it’s great in mirth,Tho’ grown wi’ years, ‘twas great at birth—It’s greater far than Frazer!I’ve heard volcanoes loudly roarin’,And Niagara’s waters pourin’;But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin’Frae the nose o’ Captain Frazer!To wauken sleepin’ congregations,Or rouse to battle sleepin’ nations,Gae wa’ wi’ preachin’s and orations,And try the nose o’ Frazer!Gif French invaders try to lan’Upon our glorious British stran’,Fear nocht if ships are no’ at han’,But trust the nose o’ Frazer.Jist crack that cannon ower the shore,Weel rammed wi’ snuff, then let it roarAe Hielan’ sneeze! then never moreThey’ll daur the nose o’ Frazer.If that great Nose is ever deid,To bury it ye dinna need,Nae coffin made o’ wood or leed,Could hand the nose o’ Frazer.But let it stan’ itsel’ alane,Erect, like some big Druid stane,That a’ the warl’ may see its bane,‘In memory o’ Frazer!’

CHAPTER VI

BALMORAL

If the cry for vital being—

‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,More life, and fuller, that I want’—

ever came from Norman Macleod, it was answered only too well; like a certain prayer for rain, which was interrupted by a ridiculous flood. Not only were his activities immense and various, but there was always an expenditure of corresponding emotion; nay, and what in the life of most men would have been simply an event was in his a crisis, what was a fleeting image with others was with him an indelible impression.

He was summoned to the unique ordeal of ministering to the newly-widowed Queen.

About twenty years before, during a visit to the West of Scotland, Her Majesty had for the first time attended a presbyterian service, on which occasion the preacher was Norman Macleod, the high priest of the Highlands and minister of St. Columba’s. His son first appeared at Balmoral in 1854. The invitation of the minister of Crathie he had refused (having in hand a special service at the Barony), but was informed that it had been sent at the instance of Her Majesty. He preached without any notes a sermon never fully written out, which he had delivered fifteen times. The Queen wrote in her Journal: ‘We went to kirk as usual at twelve o’clock. The service was performed by the Rev. Norman M’Leod of Glasgow, son of Dr. M’Leod, and anything finer I never heard. The sermon, entirely extempore, was quite admirable: so simple, and yet so eloquent, and so beautifully argued and put. The text was from the account of the coming of Nicodemus to Christ by night, St. John, chapter iii. Mr. M’Leod showed in the sermon how we all tried to please self, and live for that, and in so doing found no rest. Christ had come not only to die for us, but to show us how we were to live. The second prayer was very touching: his allusions to us were so simple, saying after his mention of us, “Bless their children.” It gave me a lump in my throat, as also when he prayed for “the dying, the wounded, the widow, and the orphans.” Every one came back delighted: and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with such feelings! The servants and the Highlanders—all—were equally delighted.’

In the evening he was sitting on a block of granite within the grounds, when he was aroused by a voice asking whether he was the clergyman who had preached that day, and found himself in the presence of the Queen and the Prince Consort. This was his first meeting with Her Majesty, and it was only for a moment.

On the next occasion, two years later, he dined with the royal family, and afterwards had some conversation with the Queen; referring to which he says, ‘I never spoke my mind more frankly to anyone who was a stranger and not on an equal footing.’ This he did, because he perceived that Her Majesty was anxious to go to the root and reality of things, and abhorred all shams. His sermons had a peculiar fascination for the Queen. Of the recorded estimates of Macleod’s preaching, that of Victoria, if the warmest, is not the least discerning, and will be a telling memorial when the sermons are forgotten.

The Prince Consort died at the close of the year 1861. In the May following, the Queen came to Balmoral. She sent for Norman Macleod. What a moment! How was he to deal with stricken Majesty—

‘Her over all whose realms to their last isleThe shadow of a loss drew like eclipse,Darkening the world’?

It was purely as a minister of religion that he had the honour of his sovereign’s command. The truth of God, as he believed it, the same message which a hundred times he had spoken to bereaved wives in the lowliest homes, that, and nothing other, would he carry to the royal widow, whom he should regard only as ‘an immortal being, a sister in humanity.’ Their first meeting was at divine service, and if the occasion was a trying one to the preacher, it was evidently exciting to the Queen. ‘Hurried to be ready,’ so runs the royal Journal, ‘for the service which Dr. Macleod was kindly going to perform. And a little before ten, I went down with Lenchen and Affie (Alice being still in bed unwell) to the dining-room, in which I had not yet been.... And never was service more beautifully, touchingly, simply, and tenderly performed.... The sermon, entirely extempore, was admirable, all upon affliction, God’s love, our Saviour’s sufferings, which God would not spare Him, the blessedness of suffering in bringing us nearer to our eternal home, where we should all be together, and where our dear ones were gone on before us.... The children and I were much affected on coming upstairs.’ After dinner he was summoned to the Queen’s room, and there, after some conversation about the Prince, he told about an old woman in the Barony who had lost her husband and several of her children, and who, on being asked how she had been able to bear her many sorrows, replied, ‘When he was ta’en it made sic a hole in my heart that a’ other sorrows gang lichtly through.’ When Macleod recalled this period, he would express the whole burden of it in the solemn murmur, ‘That May.’ He has written: ‘God enabled me to speak in public and private to the Queen in such a way as seemed to me to be the truth, the truth in God’s sight—that which I believed she needed, though I felt it would be very trying to her spirit to receive it. And what fills me with deepest thanksgiving is that she has received it, and written to me such a kind, tender letter of thanks, which shall be treasured in my heart while I live.’

In the spring of the following year he was for several days a guest at Windsor. ‘I walked,’ he says, ‘with Lady Augusta to the mausoleum to meet the Queen. She had the key and opened it herself, undoing the bolts; and alone we entered, and stood in solemn silence beside Marochetti’s beautiful statue of the Prince.’

With the royal family he was both a social favourite and a trusted counsellor. To Prince Alfred, who seemed to be particularly attached to him, he once gave this advice,—that ‘if he did God’s will, good and able men would rally round him; otherwise flatterers would truckle to him and ruin him, while caring only for themselves.’ Both sons and daughters, when residing on the Continent, had flying visits from this chaplain. One Monday he left Glasgow for Windsor; thence, on royal errands, he proceeded to Bonn and Darmstadt; he was back at Windsor on the Friday: and on the Sunday following, it may be added, he preached three times in the Barony Church.

The Prince of Wales (with whom he sometimes stayed at Abergeldie) once put in a plea for short sermons. Said the Doctor, ‘I am a Thomas à Becket and resent the interference of the State’; and sure enough, at the first opportunity, he preached for three-quarters of an hour, only so well that His Royal Highness wished it had been longer. To show how much he was thought of at Court, it may be mentioned that one day he was at Inverness to meet the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the next (which was a Saturday) at Balmoral, and for half of the following week with Prince Alfred at Holyrood. But here is the crowning instance: ‘The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her, Tam o’ Shanter and A man’s a man for a’ that, her favourite.’

Her Majesty never forgot what Dr. Macleod had been to her in the time of her desolation, but extended her confidence, nor failed to take an interest in his personal cares. Some of the truest and most touching words ever written of Norman Macleod are from the pen of Queen Victoria.

CHAPTER VII

1860-1866

TRAVELS—BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS

No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; but the best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this in Good Words, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’

His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’

In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher of Good Words, Alexander Strahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has no trace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,—there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the Dead Sea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.

In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.

By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again! For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,—the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generation of parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not in doctrine, liberal,—a man singularly forgotten. He took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the Highlands the word went,—’There’s life in the Auld Kirk yet.’

Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were to Macaulay ‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks; but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business, there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he would give, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert Lee was admirable—always just to the intellect, a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected to the Confession of Faith because, by the advance of thought and knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated; he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true, wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral estate summed up in the word Scotch, a significant word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist. I don’t pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church—that enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion—I mean Satan himself.’ Owing to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would not pray extempore, is like a bad novel—no dignity in the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion than to imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has anything to do with Episcopacy.’

Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements; but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very little freedom,’ he sighs.

Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, are accustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men—men who rose at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’ We must not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse themselves in any way,—all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment, whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ.