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knowledge, it is constantly losing ground, because the scientific and secular spirit is encroaching on its domain. Therefore in our time, and especially in our country, its most repulsive features are disguised, and it is forced to mask its native ugliness. Among our clergy a habit of grave and decent compromise has taken the place of that bold and fiery war which their predecessors waged against a sensual and benighted world. Their threats have perceptibly diminished. They now allow us a little pleasure, a little luxury, a little happiness. The language of power has departed from them. Here and there we find vestiges of the ancient spirit; but this is only among uneducated men addressing an ignorant audience. The superior clergy who have a character to lose are grown cautious. Still, though much

of this has vanished, enough remains to show what the theological spirit is, and to justify a belief that nothing but the pressure of public opinion prevents it from breaking out into its former extravagance. Many of the clergy persist in attacking the pleasures of the world, forgetting that not only the world, but all which the world contains, is the work of the Almighty, and that the instincts and desires which they stigmatise as unholy are part of His gifts to man. They have yet to learn that our appetites, being as much a portion of ourselves as any other quality we possess, ought to be indulged,

otherwise the whole individual is not developed. Never before was the practice of life so arduous. . . Every addition to our knowledge, every fresh idea, opens up new difficulties, and gives birth to new combinations. Under this accumulated pressure we shall assuredly sink, if we imitate the credulity of our forefathers, who allowed their energies to be cramped and weakened by those pernicious notions which the clergy, partly from ignorance and partly from interest, have in every age palmed on the people, and have thereby diminished the national happiness, and retarded the march of national prosperity."

This is at least plain speaking. Let nobody henceforward suppose that such a tiny spot of earth as Scotland attracts, or can attract, any fire so lofty as the indignation of Mr Buckle. That superstition which in every age has lessened the happiness of humanity, and constituted, by the mere fact of receiving them into its service, a large number of ordinarily virtuous and common

place men into the most bitter foes of the comfort of their race, is the real object of that exalted displeasure. It is Christianity that stands in Mr Buckle's way. Christianity which has the audacity to declare that the love of money, for example, is an evil emotion, instead of being a passion which has done more good to mankind than any other, according to Mr Buckle's knowledge. This fact being clearly recognised, what more can we have to say? Is it worth our while to fight fiercely in behalf of this corner of the vineyard, as the poor preachers would say? Our author does not care for this corner of the vineyard. have only to deliver over our hapless clergy to his tender mercies, and we shall be immediately as good as the best, an eminent and notable people. It is not Scotland versus England, or even versus Buckle; it is Civilisation against Christianity. The issue is, as we have already said, too wide for these present pages. But at all events the real antagonist ought to be acknowledged.

We

To return, however, to our anciMr Buckle supports his theory of ent mother. All the facts on which Scotch national character are derived from the seventeenth century. Following events go directly in his face; and as for the present, he dismisses that with general and broad assertion, as matter which everybody knows.

His starting-point, his battle-ground, is that age which he himself describes as engaged in the fiercest, wildest, and most exhausting contest ever undertaken by a truth, that all Mr Buckle's elaborate nation. We might say, and with compilations from the literature of that age may be matched whenever he pleases from any collection of sermons, and are consequently not individual to Scotland. Mr Spurgeon himself, we don't doubt, could furnish from his own works alone a very satisfactory balance to the literature of the persecution. But that is a point which anybody may take up who chooses. The unhandsome fact in Mr Buckle's argument

is, that he takes a period most plainly and wildly exceptional-a period which he has just described as convulsed with the most terrible struggle, and in which the wonder was how life itself remained, and calmly, with no allusion to the frightful crisis then existing, sets forth the voice of its agony as the intellectual exponent of the age! Mr Buckle is too well informed not to know that the work of that age was resistance; that the epics of that age were writ in blood-not sung, but endured; that the arguments of that age were cold steel and burning fire, and the counter arguments were tortured flesh and afflicted soul, anguish and patience sometimes, oftener a martyr passion, intelligible enough to the human heart, if not to the philosophic eye. The experiments made in that century were made upon flesh and blood, upon life and limb, upon heart and soul how much a human creature, a Christian nation, could endure without annihilation, was the curious problem investigated in these days. Mr Buckle knows the issue of that experiment. He tells us of it calmly, not without lofty commendations, and then goes behind his screen and produces the outcries of that long agony as the best productions of the Scottish intellect, and grand evidence of Scottish character. Such a mode of operation shows a contempt for human suffering wonderfully unworthy of a philosopher.

We do not profess to cope with Mr Buckle on the high philosophic ground he has assumed, but we venture to believe that by his own favourite means of reasoning a different conclusion might be arrived at in respect to Scotch charactercertainly on fairer, broader, and less doubtful ground. Let us suppose that stranger who conveniently dropped from the skies or appeared from the wilderness in the eighteenth century, whenever a fresh observer was needed, to descend to our assistance now. Let us show him this much-abused and much

lauded country, with all her defects of climate and soil. Let us show him her busy towns, all noisy with trade and enterprise; let us show him her model fields, where high farming came into being; let us bring him into sight of her inventions and manufactures-her ships upon all waters, her wares in many markets; let us tell him how poor she was once, how lucky and fortunate all the world has pronounced her since. If the stranger is of literary tastes, let us go back a little, and show him Edinburgh half a century since; let us bring him to wit of the greatest novelist ever known in any country, and of the crowd of brilliant critics who have made that modern branch of art. Let us make him acquainted with songs unrivalled at least in the common language of this island, and ballads that have welled for ages spontaneously out of the national heart. If he is musical, let us open to him the tender melodies, and quicken his limbs with the strathspeys that are native to our soil. As his curiosity rises let us take him back, by indubitable paths of history, through Mr Buckle's own book, if Mr Buckle pleases, to the eighteenth century, with its crowd of illustrious thinkers -illustrious all, though so far influenced by national theological habit as to be deductive philosophers. What does anybody suppose our starry visitant would conclude from this broad Baconian bottom of facts and visible realities? That Scotland was the creation of a fanatic clergy, afraid to call her soul her own, bound in sevenfold bonds of superstition, abject terror, and blind bigotry? Such celestial visitants, so far as our memory goes, are not given to laughter, but the gravity of the spheres could scarcely resist such a question. Bright vignettes of social life stretching back would tempt us further: here is Lady Anne Lindsay with her delightful lantern throwing a sunshine into the gloom. There is Carlyle of Inveresk (a priest too, save the mark! and necessarily, according to

Mr Buckle, a bitter foe to human happiness), disclosing that rubicund and jolly society which certainly showed little tendency to asceticism. Further back is Allan Ramsay, with his society, not morose, to speak of. Furthest back of all, immersed in the very deepest gloom of the seventeenth century, that chosen starting-point of our philosopher's inductions, the darkness clears around the sweet footsteps of Grizel Baillie, noble, cheerful, courageous gentlewoman. Ah, dear visitor from the stars, do not you see it all as clear as daylight is not the influence of a horrible creed and hideous theology apparent everywhere? could anything but the tyranny of the kirk - session have stimulated the Scotch imagination into those songs which palpitate over the bosom of the land, and which certainly have no popular parallel in merry England ? Is it not certain that this must be the morosest of nations, which thrills even your celestial limbs into dancing measures with the "snap" of its characteristic music? Previous observers have been disposed to take such evidences of popular life as testimony quite as good, perhaps more valuable, than sermons; and Bacon himself could not desire a fuller body of evidence. The question is, then, which shall we choose as the best ground upon which to judge Scotland-the sermons and kirksession records of an age of wild and furious persecution, or the popular human life of a less exceptional existence? The latter is certainly more intelligible to the ordinary understanding, and can be got at with less laborious research. Mr Buckle's picture is drawn from the words of men whom persecution had done its best to drive mad: ours, which, but for the necessary limits of space, we could enlarge almost to any extent of detail, is from facts apparent in the open sunshine. Due time and space permitting, we are ready to enter into any amount of probation which our author may condescend to require.

At the same time, doubtless, the Scottish character, approached from this point of view, would not have been nearly so serviceable to Mr Buckle. Let us not overlook that important part of the subject. Far be it from us to oppose ourselves to the legitimate necessities of literature. We, too, are well aware of the exigencies of the trade, and remember, feelingly, how one must ruin one's heroine's father, or disinherit one's hero, sadly though it goes against one's feelings, if one would ever hope to reach a third volume. On this familiar ground, heaven forbid that we should hinder Mr Buckle of his will. If Scotland is necessary to the completeness of the general argument and the manufacture of the volume, make, as she herself would say, “a kirk and a mill" of her, dear brother author! May she help you out of your difficulties; but it is hard, on the whole, to put up with the assertion that it is all in the interests of truth and science, and never a word of the Book!

Mr Buckle will perhaps permit us also to point out to him a few errors in detail into which he has fallen. We will not venture to suggest that the clergy of the Scotch Church have never taken upon themselves the character of priests, but indeed have always protested against that sacerdotal assumption to a degree which modern refinement cannot approve of; but our historian must permit us to explain certain features in the constitution of the Scotch Church on which his extensive researches do not seem to have enlightened him. "According to the Presbyterian polity, which reached its height in the seventeenth century, the clergyman of the parish selected a number of laymen on whom he could depend, and who, under the name of elders, were his councillors, or rather the ministers of his authority. They, when assembled together, formed what was called the KirkSession, and this little court, which enforced the decisions uttered in

the pulpit, was so supported by the superstitious reverence of the people that it was far more powerful than any lay tribunal. By its aid the minister became supreme." Were this stated in a different way, it might be made to appear the finest nucleus of domestic representative government, and it has been often admiringly dwelt upon as the grand element of strength in Presbyterian order. However, it is not at the minister's choice to select his own tools for this office; and he knows little of human nature who can suppose that a dozen or half-adozen pragmatical Scotch peasants, or Scotchmen of any condition of life, are likely to give in so entirely to the dictates of the one clerical member of their little court as to make the minister supreme. Would that Mr Buckle had but a year, a month, of that trial! Would that he could but appreciate the trying position of the hapless priest under the preponderating influence of his session! "The people of Scotland," says a Scotch clergyman, with rueful humour, "are not a priest-ridden but a priest-riding community." The difference is great and significant. In the little circle of a Scotch parish, the minister, always there to be criticised and talked of, is fortunate if he is not sat upon by his whole district, who take charge of the soundness of his theology, and the propriety of his life, with a frankness of comment and distinctness of utterance which would probably let Mr Buckle into some secrets of Scotch character undisclosed by his researches in the British Museum, could the philosophic ear tolerate such teachings. The election of elders throughout all Scotland, and at all times, has been an affair jointly conducted by clergy and people, the common custom being either that the members of the kirk choose their rulers from a list furnished them by the parish priest, or that the priest selects those who please him best from the leet offered to him by the parish. In either

case it is well known, and Mr Buckle might with great ease verify this fact without danger to his life or person-and indeed, we do not doubt, with some good dinners by the way-that the elders of the parish invariably include some of the most secularly influential men in it, and that, especially in earlier times, ordinary morality and Church membership, combined with a certain social position, made the Presbyterian laird an inevitable elder, and gave the spiritual rulership into the hands of all others least likely to debase it into an instrument of clerical oppression.

We pause, with remorseful pen, before we enter upon another blunder, the utterly ludicrous aspect of which must already, doubtless, have come to the knowledge of our historian. It is the elaborate and detailed account of that project for a national fast, entertained by the Presbytery of Edinburgh at the time when the approach of the cholera was dreaded on all hands. Mr Buckle enters upon this with all the gusto of a man who has kept his strong point in reserve till the last; and, bringing to his aid the jaunty Premier himself, all ironical in contemptuous wisdom, exposes, with a lofty burst of ridicule and self-complacency, the folly of those priestly fanatics

which sits like an incubus upon them, "Moved by that dire superstition they adopted a course which, if it had been carried into full operation, would have aggravated the calamity to a frightful extent. It is well known that whenever an epidemic is raging, physical exhaustion and mental depression make the human frame more liable to it, and are therefore especially to be guarded against. But though this is a matter of common notoriety, the Scotch clergy, backed, sad to say, by the general voice of the Scotch people, wished the public authorities to take a step which was certain to cause physical exhaustion and to encourage mental depression. In the abused and perverted to the detriment name of religion, whose offices they thus of man, instead of employing them for his benefit, they insisted on the propriety of ordering a national fast, which,

in so superstitious a country, was sure to be rigidly kept, and, being rigidly kept, was equally sure to enfeeble thousands of delicate persons, and, before twentyfour hours were passed, prepare them to receive that deadly poison which was already lurking round them, and which hitherto they had just strength enough to resist. On the same occasion the preachers were to thunder from their pulpits, and proclaim aloud the sins of the land, while the poor benighted people, panic-struck, were to sit in awe, were to remain the whole day without proper nourishment, and retire to their beds weeping and starved."-(Chap. vii. p. 591.)

We quote chapter and page, lest the entire absurdity of this extract, with its amusing moral indignation, should incline the Scotch reader to doubt our good faith, and the fact of any man in his senses having committed himself in actual print to such utter and ridiculous nonsense. Everybody who knows anything of Scotland knows that the institution of fasting has long been totally extinct in this superstitious country-being popularly known and stigmatised as a relic of Popish superstition, to be scorned and testified against. So entirely, indeed, is the habit unknown, that the word fast-day, a word in common use, suggests to the common Scotch imagination anything in the world rather than abstinence. The Communion is never dispensed in Scotland without being preceded by a fast-day, on which occasion the churches and the railway trains are equally filled, and nobody has the remotest idea that it is expected of him to do without his dinner. It is impossible to use words strong enough to express the entire obliteration of any such idea as that of religious fasting from the Scottish mind. Even the moderate restraints of an English Lent would be scouted by the Presbyterian understanding; the ministers would entertain great doubts of its lawfulness, and the voice of the populace would hoot at it as superstition. This, we repeat, every Scotsman, every man in the least acquainted with Scotland,

knows perfectly. We almost feel ourselves drawn into a share in the absurdity of the statement by taking the pains to contradict it soberly. It has been received with one unanimous shout of laughter throughout Scotland, and has no doubt done much towards lessening popular indignation, which might have been expected to rise against Mr Buckle. This little climax, so skilfully made up, and evidently expected to tell so bitterly, converts the whole argument into an excellent joke, and rounds the volume off with applauses of cordial laughter. It is simply astonishing how a man of Mr Buckle's powers could have permitted himself to be drawn into such a solemn absurdity. The wisest of philosophers may be humbugged by a crafty witness, or taken in by a well-constructed fable; but few men venture to make a special point, without taking some precautions against blundering. A writer so totally uninformed on a simple matter of fact, and so confident in his false conception, can expect little confidence from his readers in respect to matters more recondite and less easily ascertained.

But from Wisdom seated high upon her throne, though, misled by false evidence, she may by times deliver a solemnly foolish sentence, to Folly flying low in circles of unprovoked and purposeless absurdity, the distance is great. It suits Mr Buckle's purpose, and his work, to exhibit Scotland, however lamely, as a study of national superstition ; but what object any living creature could have in the vulgar tomfoolery lately exhibited at Stirling, is beyond the reach of an ordinary imagination. Scotland has sustained no special injury, either in name or person, that we are aware of, or endured any insult calculated to rouse to the boiling pitch that odd patriotism, which has to go back seven centuries before it can find a hero. Wallace Wight stands in need of no eulogium of ours; that rugged, distant, half-mythological hero would doubtless have gazed

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